Shame

by Annie Ernaux

it takes less than three hundred metres to switch from wealth to poverty, from city life to country life, from space to confinement. To switch from protected people, of whom we know nothing, to people of whom we know everything – the welfare benefits they receive, what they eat and drink, what time they go to bed.

The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.

Shame became a new way of living for me. I don’t think I was even aware of it, it had become part of my own body.