No 1 – A Story of Shame – How vulnerability became my ultimate secret weapon on the path to freedom

Shame and vulnerability are at the heart of this story – and the first words on my path to freedom.

“You don’t like talking about yourself, do you?” you said.

My beloved friend,

out of all the things we spoke about this summer in the south of France, this one stuck. A single question that keeps echoing louder than the rest.

And I see how you’ve come to say that. When in public, I usually take the backseat. I listen and ask questions. I join the conversation, I have opinions, advice, little snippets of personal reference… but I never just start sharing. I seem to always need an invitation, a gentle question, a safe space, an honest interest. If invited on stage, I step onto it without hesitation. But I never built the stage myself. And I guess part of that is just me being an introvert. Nothing wrong with that, except…

…sometimes I want to share, but I just don’t know how to create space for myself, how to step forward and just start talking. And that might, in part, be an occupational hazard. I listen to people’s stories for a living, I ask questions, I encourage, I hold a safe space for them to bloom. And I genuinely love that. It is such a joy to see others open up, take up space, be vulnerable.

This weekly newsletter, which is above all a love letter to my best friends, and a sort of written replacement for the sharings we usually hold on FaceTime every Monday at 8:15 pm, is also my personal commitment to grow into the practice of sharing.

This is going to be my safe space, a stage of my own making, a step into the spotlight to feel the thrill—and the excruciating anxiety—of visibility. Because there is another component to why I don’t like talking about myself: shame.

Like a muddy thread, shame is woven into the stories of my life, hidden in the seams of the cloak of my identity. It makes the fabric feel heavy and itchy, yet so familiar I hardly notice it—until I try to step into the light, and the cloak scratches against my skin. This newsletter is my attempt to tug at that thread, to loosen it, to see what happens when the fabric shifts.

Shame goes back to the very beginning of all creation. It is rooted in the feeling of separation and disconnectedness. With separation came comparison—you versus I—a stabbing pain of lack and scarcity, a feeling of smallness. And the thought “I am not good enough” entered the stage.

It was quickly shared by everyone who bought into this narrow-minded version of identity, and these countless individual versions of “I am not good enough” created a narrative of separation and pain: a cloak of stories, densely woven from shame’s muddy thread, that hid our eyes from the universal truth of our connectedness.

Being ashamed of our smallness, of our distance from each other, we feel the wrongness of it all in our very bones and yet…the story has a tight grip, and we buy into it, strengthen it even, with every layer we add.It is as much a communal as it is an individual effort to rip off this cloak of shame, stitched together from stories—some ours, some passed down through generations.

Beloved reader,

you might have noticed that I have been putting up a poetic veil, smoothing the edges of my own shame. Because as much as the feeling of shame is, in its essence, a shared vibration… the stories are deeply personal. So here goes one of mine:

Writing this, I feel almost like I have to throw up. Stage fright, even though the stage is a social media platform and I am sitting at my desk, still in my pyjamas. I feel like I am committing to a national weekly news show, publicly declaring my own fallibility. Which is quite ridiculous, considering that I have maybe ten readers, all of whom I know and love.

But as I sit and think about all the things I’m going to share, I am inviting shame to the table, to sit with me in the open. It is not my favourite guest by far, and I feel its presence in the pit of my stomach, in the tension of my muscles, in the alertness of my senses, protecting me from ridicule and judgment. Its grip feels both protective and suffocating. Its presence is quite exhausting.

But I stay put and I sit with it—with the stomach pain, the alertness, the tension, the exhaustion, the tightness. And I can feel the stories rushing in, called by shame. Stories that start with “I could have,” “I should have,” “If only I…,” “I should do this or that.” Stories of being a less-than-perfect mother, daughter, friend, entrepreneur.

Stories which, despite their many facets and variations, can all be boiled down to: “I am not good enough.” And “I am not a good enough writer, why would anyone care?” takes on a prominent seat.

But this time I don’t run. I rip away the poetic veil and just look at it. A staring contest of sorts. And as I sit, look, and breathe, I can feel the stories whirling around me slowly settling, their fabric turning smoother, softer, less itchy and suffocating with each breath I take, with each word I write.

Have you ever dared to invite shame and vulnerability to the table and sit with it?

Where does it show in your body?

What stories start rushing into your mind about „Shame and vulnerability“?

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