On Writing and Shame

Today’s post is by Jennie Case.

When my essay, A Political Pregnancy, came out in The Rumpus, I was so frozen I spent most of the day stiff in a chair, the room swirling. It took a good week for me to unthaw, and nearly a year for me to share the piece publicly on social media. To be sure: I was proud of the essay, which explored my painful, conflicted responses to an unintended pregnancy during the 2016 election. I was also confident that the piece rang true. Yet the thought of people I knew (especially my mother and Catholic family) reading it and judging me, or knowing how complicated that period of my life had been, was a psychological whirlwind I could not easily travel through.

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I gear up to publish We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood, a collection of essays that includes that Rumpus piece. Amongst the book’s broader exploration of feminism and evolutionary biology, it addresses unplanned pregnancies, reproductive justice, maternal mental health, and my own complicated reactions to early motherhood. I am proud of these essays, and I hope they help shift the conversation on reproductive justice or offer insight and comfort to readers. Yet part of me is also terrified: that there is some flaw in the manuscript—or flaw in me—that the book will reveal, and that at some point I’m not going to look at it with pride, but with embarrassment and shame.

Shame, evolutionary biologists tell us, has a purpose. When we act in a manner that threatens our relationships with others, shame pressures us to apologize and repair the connection. Despite our current culture’s valorization of individualism and hyper-independence, human survival has long depended on community cooperation. Expulsion from a family or group thus threatens survival, so human emotions that prevent expulsion have a critical purpose.

Yet, there is also something such as “toxic” or “chronic” shame—the kind that often starts at a young age and becomes so ingrained that the person believes they, themselves, are bad. Such a child will grow up to minimize and silence themselves—to hide themselves from the world in order to protect familial connections. This, I can sometimes recognize in myself, as well as in the creative writing students I teach. Although I give my students free rein to write about whatever they’d like, many choose to explore fraught family relationships or moments when their lives came in conflict with social norms. The drafts they turn in are beautiful, moving, and fruitful, yet it isn’t uncommon for me to receive a panicked email right before class workshop, as the student quakes from vulnerability and suddenly questions their subject matter (much as I quake before my book’s launch). When we make ourselves visible or push against social dictates—especially when we come from rigid family backgrounds where certain stories aren’t allowed—there can be an eviscerating psychological toll.

Lately, I’ve become interested in how writers navigate such shame—and grateful for the writers who’ve spoken openly. Stephanie Clare Smith, author of the beautiful memoir on childhood neglect, Everywhere the Undrowned, has acknowledged that the publication process was at times excruciating. “Most [press and readers] just expected me to be overjoyed, healed, and ‘feeling the love,’” she said. In reality, the lead-up to her launch pained her “on an intense cellular level,” requiring her to better care for and reassure her younger self.

Novelist and writing coach Sarah Stone has described the phenomena in a similar way, and her words resonate with me. “When we publish our books, we go out naked into the world,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons that [supportive writing groups are] so important. Who else understands just how vulnerable we are, how all kinds of childhood selves emerge just at the moment when we need to be more grown-up than ever? But overall, it can be very nurturing, and the hard parts illuminating. With every book, when we stay open, we make wonderful new friends. I think that’s the best part, no matter what does or doesn’t happen in a worldly way.”

I am no expert—on human emotions or psychology—but I find comfort in Smith’s and Stone’s words, and their insistence that pre- and post-publication shame doesn’t mean our work is actually shameful—or that the emergence of childhood selves means we shouldn’t have published it. On the contrary, publication can help us soften and grow.

I also find comfort witnessing the practices of my students. When I see my students working on their essays—trying to find meaning and art in complex realities—what I see is beauty. Their essays don’t have to be fully processed for me to admire them. Their conclusions don’t have to be perfect. It is the act of writing, and the act of reaching for understanding that appeals to me most, both in the students I teach and the published works I read.

This is what I will try to remember this fall, during those inevitable moments when a poor review or critical response (or no response at all) triggers my own childhood shame, and I begin to think it would have been better for me to stay silent and small. Art has meaning, I will remind myself. What we do is meaningful. When it comes to our humanity, there is nothing to be ashamed of.