Essay About Shame

All people, regardless of race, gender, or profession, feel shame in their lives. Shame is defined as humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour. Shame researcher Brené Brown in a Ted Talk defined guilt as “I’m sorry for this mistake” whereas shame is “I am a mistake.” She also stated that vulnerability is not weakness, and shame teaches creativity, emotional risk, courage, and innovation. Shame for not satisfying society’s standard of perfection leads people of different races and genders to hate themselves, to hide their flaws, and not to take the opportunities they want, when in reality making mistakes is human. Brown concludes that shame is an epidemic in our culture, and empathy is the antidote. In American society,

O’Brien uses hyperbole during his period of greatest indecision on the Rainy River, a lake between Canada and Minnesota. He describes his inner conflict: “All those eyes on me – the town, the universe – and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment. It was as if there was an audience to my life...” (O’Brien 186). Nobody besides his companion on the fishing boat and O’Brien himself is judging O’Brien at that very moment, but his townspeople would judge him if he, rather than going to war like an American hero, turned back home to stay alive. Feeling like there were people watching O’Brien at his most vulnerable made him feel weak and go to war to avoid humiliation, something he feels even more guilty about. In “Mirrorings” Grealy uses a metaphor for her love of Halloween masks: “I was a pauper walking for a short while in the clothes of the prince, and when the day ended I gave up my disguise with dismay” (Grealy 3). Hiding her deformed face under another freed Grealy until it had to be taken off, and she had to face her face, the source of her shame. In “Beauty” Walker brings up personification that her doctor told her: “Eyes are sympathetic” (Walker 57). Walker’s brothers shot and blinded her right eye, and the doctor told her that it was likely that her left would lose sight as well. Not only does her deformed eye make her the target of bullies, but she also could develop blindness at any point in her life. Walker’s eyes may be

In “On the Rainy River” O’Brien writes graphically about his experience in a meatpacking plant. Isolated in a bloody, fetid factory, he felt sorry for himself and seriously considers escaping to Canada. [quote (O’Brien 174)]. In “Mirrorings” adults told Grealy she was a “‘a brave girl’ for not crying, ‘good girl’ for not complaining...” during the chemotherapy she underwent when she was nine years old (Grealy 1). Silence equaled strength in her mind, but when Grealy began crying during treatment, she no longer saw herself as strong. Her vulnerability made her feel ashamed and want to hide her pain from her parents and nurses who thought she was overreacting. Exposing her flaws to the world is a symbol of Grealy’s strength and self-acceptance, not weakness like she was told as a child. In “Beauty” Walker remembers that a beautiful journalist told her to look “glamorous or whatever,” but Walker is distraught over the “whatever” in her instruction (Walker 59). She worries that her eye will not be straight in the photograph, but remembers that she had made peace with it. Including the anecdote clarifies that although Walker thought she had accepted her eye, she was truthfully still ashamed. In “Letter to My Son” Coates recounts that in a theater a white woman pushed his young son, so he reprimanded her and other bystanders spoke up in her defense and threatened to arrest Coates. Seeing his son on the sidelines reminds