Slaying My Shame

"Loving your shame doesn't mean you love what happened to you. It means you love you."

-Terri St.Cloud

The Fabric of Her Dancing Shoes

Trigger Warning: Self-Harm

I don't fully understand the meaning of this quote, but it rang somewhere deep within me when I read it this evening. It felt like it applied to me, like I can somehow relate.

Perhaps it's because my shame has surfaced in so many ways during the last few months...and I'm so tired of seeing it, of feeling it. In fact, I've mastered the art of slaying my shame. Lately, I've been cutting it down with a virtual blade.

Every time I feel it rise and spill over like burning lava emerging from the core of my anger, I trample it with my images. I vividly visualize scenes of cutting. The painful pangs are replaced with flashing pictures of my blade...of my wrists. The more the shame, the more the pictures...the blade cutting across the skin...the red and angry cuts staring back at me, asking for more...because it's never enough.

The last time I called him from the low and lonely floor, my therapist asked me who I was so pissed off at that I felt I had to take it out on myself as such. I replied that I would have to figure it out, but he said not over Christmas.

Well, it's not Christmas anymore. January is here like the piper wanting to get paid. I have to face the bare branches now. The answers are hanging in the cold gray air...but I'm afraid to look.