I’ll be answering questions posed in the comments section of the Writing Prompts. This one is from January’s theme, Making Stories of Our Shame. These newsletters are for paid subscribers—thank you.
Please keep your questions coming! I LOVE to give advice.
Question: I’m finding writing about shame really helpful, but I’m hesitant to share what I’ve written. How do you share such personal things about which you still feel ashamed?
This is such a good question. It’s one thing to write about what we feel ashamed about and another thing entirely to share it with other people—strangers and maybe even more difficult, our loved ones. And the truth is, your loved ones might not want to hear it. But if you think about the reasons why we keep secrets, they are usually in order to pretend that things are a certain way when they aren’t, which means we are lying to the world and maybe even more damaging, we are lying to ourselves. Those secrets and lies we are expected to keep are often a form of oppression.
I told “secrets” in my last book about my abusive grandparents, stories my mother had told me. When my cousin read the book, she was furious. At first, she accused me of lying. I told her that these were my mother’s stories and she should go ahead and ask her mother; then, she said it didn’t matter I was telling the truth (I was) because I had to no right to these stories (my own mother’s memories).