I had a breakthrough while on a walk a few weeks ago. I was back in Toronto for a few days, feeling over-stimulated on Queen East after my move to small town Ontario four months earlier, and my mind was distracting itself by passively processing my ever present anxiety (the usual). My breakthrough didn’t come with the usual relief that I get from naming an emotion, that neat dopamine hit of inner recognition. It was much more sad than that: I finally understood why for weeks, or months, I’ve been frustratingly stuck in a loop of dissociation and inaction, and it was because I was (and continue to be) ping-ponging between two intense feelings. On the one hand, I have lots of pride at personally being alive in the world right now. Past Nat took fairly radical steps to make that happen. On the other hand, I hold staggering disappointment and overwhelming shame at my limits - old and new. Past Nat had ideas of quick burnout recovery and unprecedentedly renewed energy for Pursuing Activism and Hobbies. Past Nat didn’t realize how disabled they were and what recovery would need to look like.

The good and the bad (and the ugly)

In my burnout recovery, which includes a process of re-building my life to include accommodations for my aspirationally-post-corporate, autistic, queer, Ukrainian immigrant self, the awe is profound. I did a lot to surprise and impress myself. I left 3 jobs in just over a year, each time having no backup employment; moved to a small town for the first time in my life; began to live with one of my partners whose transformation path aligns with mine; began medical gender transition; stopped second guessing my autism. I even stopped using my old name - not even for gender reasons, simply to never be mistaken for a russian again. I am well and truly awed at how at home I feel in my life right now. The awe melts into gratitude. I have layers of privilege and good fortune, a community that supports me, and an option to take a breather. I don’t know how to stress enough that we all deserve these things, and I don’t know how to explain how inaccessible they are to most of us.

In many ways am happy. I imagined that this place of rest and reconstruction would lead me to a place with less friction, more recovery, more growth, and more opportunities to be of use to my communities in ways that are aligned with who I am. And perhaps because of all this, the contrast of the shame is so immense, that it is immobilizing.

I inquire of myself - what accommodations and what grace do I need in this period of rebuilding? - and I’m shocked at the audacity of my body as it decides my limits for me. It takes me out of my community building: I frequently forget new-to-me faces (I’ve learned I have at least some prosopagnosia), I’ve lost my confident public speaking voice (which feels both disempowering and dysphoric), I am slow to reply to texts from loved ones, I struggle to articulate the depth of my feelings to my support network, I decline compelling invitations from people around me (the event is too big/too soon/at a new venue/on a day when I’ll be recovering from a different event), and I am ashamed. It takes me out of creative work: I think slowly, I forget words daily, I worry about this new ineloquent version of me that new acquaintances know, I sit at empty pages and don’t know where to start (most days I don’t make it to the empty page at all), and I am ashamed. It takes me out of being present: I sleep ten hours a day after a mandatory ramp down of several more, I am so slow in the mornings that I never commit to anything before noon, I dissociate on my phone daily, consuming nothing, I notice my intrusive thoughts and dreams have become wilder and less coherent, and I am ashamed. It takes me out of the work that has become most urgent and irreplaceable to me as a progressive Ukrainian: witnessing and sense-making and contextualizing and storytelling through the horrors of genocide (our own, and others - especially as I witness the immense ongoing destruction of Palestine). I am not able to digest the news, seek out appropriate sources, articulate my thoughts, point out patterns that encourage solidarity and understanding, I am unable to emotionally react to any events at all - and I am ashamed.

The layers of self-burial

The shame is insidious. It’s easy to leave it unprocessed, to dissociate from it. It’s easy to feel ashamed about it - layers upon layers of unceremonial burial of the self. And without realizing it, I am stuck in freeze response, at a time when freezing sends me further into a shame spiral.

A second breakthrough about this came to me during my latest therapy session. I showed up unable to articulate the heaviness that I’ve been holding, peeled it away to reveal mountains of shame about existing in a burn out state at a time of acute crisis, and arrived at this: the pit of shame isn’t mine. It’s been gifted to me by the currents we are all drowning in - late capitalist, neoliberal, individualist, Western-hegemonic world.

We are sold the narrative that the only worthy narrative (or at least the best one) is the Hero Story. Go forth, and you will prevail. Under capitalism we are rewarded by pushing our limits, accomplishing individual goals, and out-performing our peers. We take breaks (weekends) for the purpose of returning to “work” (“Mondays, am I right”). We are rewarded with padded resumes and increasing prominence within our industries (which we then take as a substitute for communities). These values permeate our pre-work lives (I know a twelve year old who participated in a business case competition a few months ago), our post-work lives (why do we have identity crises and become “bored” after retirement?), and our alongside-work lives (raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to monetize a hobby to make it feel like an accomplishment).

This is not new information. I am borderline bored writing this. Are you still with me? I’m grateful if you are and I don’t blame you if you’re not. But maybe it’s worth writing, because maybe you find yourself in a similar boat as me: the theory and the facts are so well understood by your competent brain, you’ve got a grasp on the “why” of it all, maybe you even have some good ideas on how we move forward out of this capitalist individualistic hellhole. And yet, when you listen to your body, you hear it tell you about shame similar to mine: I know the cards are stacked against me, but still, I’m not managing all this as well as I’d like to. 

Legs heavy, spine curved, leaning forward, breaths shallow, vision blurred. That stone in your belly and your throat. The wish to lie down and sink into the earth.

Where do I go from here

Whether the source of the shame is mine or not, yours or not, it’s disabling. We can theorize on where it comes from, rationalize experiencing it, and try to strong-arm it into smallness. I’ve realized that not only am I tired of doing all this, but that it’s also simply not working. As I’ve pushed back against the various “should”s of my prior life and gave myself permission to leave behind ways of being that don’t work, my shame grew and spiralled and popped out at me like some sort of unwanted, demonic jack-in-a-box. It doesn’t care that I understand it. It’s simply here.

And I think that for now, I’m just going to let it be. Fine: I’ll feel ashamed. I’m not the activist I wanted to be this winter, I’ve made my community building smaller than I had the opportunity to, and even though I haven’t sat at a desk with a work-related spreadsheet in front of me in over six months now, I’m not magically re-resourced enough to have figured out my long-term sustainable employment options.

I can list things I’ve done on every front of my life that have felt successful; micro-decisions I’ve made that brought me closer to people, conversations I’ve had behind closed doors that shifted the needle towards empathy and progress, the few readings and the seminars I’ve attended to expand my own learning. I can listen to loved ones tell me they’re proud of what I’m doing with my life right now, and I can really hear them and believe them. I can also remind myself that I am not a big deal, in the most wonderful sense: zero people have thought, “wow, I wish Nat did more over the last few months, what ever happened to them.” (And if anyone has, I actually don’t care much.)

And still - after doing all of this, the naked truth is: I am still ashamed. I should have done more. I should be doing more. I should be done processing this.

So, fine. I’ll feel the shame. I’ll let it be uncontainable and disabling. I’ll keep doing what I can, in the limited ways that I can. My shame tells me (as I type this) that what I actually need to do is rise above it and do more - for the world is well and truly on fire. (It’s right about that last part.) But I’ve tried, and that’s actually led me to do less. I try to rise above the capacity my body dictates; I can’t punch above my weight; I shut down and do nothing.

I think instead, I’ll feel the shame, and let my movements be subtle instead. I’ll pursue more of those micro-conversations, micro-reach outs, micro-art, micro-resource shares, micro-in person actions, micro-journal essays. I’ll keep doing them. They’re bait for my shame - it’ll show up rearing its head. But when it does, I’ll just make an extra cup of coffee and invite it to sit with me as I do the too-small thing.

Appendix: Feeling Seen

Devon Price has a book coming out on the topic of Shame - bound to be really relevant to my many feelings on this topic. I can’t wait to get my hands on it after devouring both Unmasking Autism and Laziness Does Not Exist.

Yumi Sakugawa has written about having tea with your demons, a really resonant idea.

I’ve felt at home with the words of Kai Cheng Thom and Naomi Klein, writers in very different spheres who both have the exceptional skill of holding nuance - of the heart and of the mind, respectively. They help me release the idea that I need to be “good” to move forward in my life.

In activism, spaces that have felt least draining to me are ones created by non-Western communities, as they tend to hold a more global level of nuance. In particular, I’ve been drawn to leftist spaces centering the experience of folks in Central Asia, SWANA, and Eastern Europe. Some notable ones: The Fire These Times podcast, Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity Campaign, Spilne/Commons.

I’ve spent some time learning about Pluto’s shift into Aquarius this year (on the first day of Aquarius season!) and what resonated with me is the shift of disruptive power into the hands of the proverbial collective. Destroying old systems is not on the shoulders of one of us, but on the shoulders of all of us. What I take from this is that we don’t have to be individually perfect to make a contribution.