Letting Go of Shame--Blame it On Mercury

A very wise friend and healer mentioned to me that right now, Mercury is in retrograde, which means that the past tends to reassert itself and we have the opportunity to re-examine it and move forward. I don’t know if I entirely buy the astrological approach, but it certainly seemed like an apt description for why, lately, it feels as if my life has folded upon itself and the present is somehow very close to the past.

I have (and I suspect I’m not alone) elements of my past that I choose not to visit very often. It’s not denial, it’s recognizing that those parts of my life are over, and any viewing of past mistakes and pain is not all that productive. It’s also because I am too sensitive to bear the look one someone’s face when I’ve revealed something that, to them, makes me a total freak. Two events in my life have brought the past back to the present. One is forming a soul mate, forever friendship with someone that has brought me tremendous joy and happiness. The other event has really been my gradual shift from being a well-dressed recluse to having a social network and even volunteering at my teenagers’ schools.

Some reasons behind my reclusive tendencies are documented here, but they also include my deep seated fear that people will only like me if they don’t know me too well. So, as I go out into the world, I find myself torn between the tension of guarding secrets (this is a wonderful post on the topic of secrets, and I recommend it), and a desire to just vomit it all up and get it over with. One of those secrets is what I want to talk about here; in part out of that need to “come clean” and in part because I think social attitudes tend to silence women at times when they really need to be able to ask for help or simply tell their stories.

This week, while volunteering at a school production, a very goth girl sidled up to me. She seemed to be in a crisis. I went outside with her. After we did the dance where I asked what was wrong and she didn’t answer, and I asked again and she let a few tears fall, and I asked yet again and she said she was sure she couldn’t tell me, we got to the point of the whole exercise, where she rolled up her sleeve and showed me the series of semi-fresh cuts and scratches on her wrist. And then I took a huge risk, and I told her that I knew she could stop if she wanted too, because I used to do that, too.

This certainly took the shock value out of her side of the equation; and we managed to get her sorted out well enough that she agreed not to hurt herself while under my supervision. She’s not ready to stop, so there’s not much more I can offer her, except to know that I don’t think she’s a freak, and the hope that maybe she will be able to leave this behind someday. What scared me was telling her that I was once a member of that same club. There’s a Catch-22 that has formed around cutting, which is that it is labeled as “attention-seeking.” As soon as that label is slapped on, even speaking about it can be dismissed and everyone can go back to ignoring it.

Understanding that this is largely a female disorder, it’s interesting to me that our social response to it is to suggest that a desire for attention is a bad thing. Doesn’t that put us right back to being the good woman BEHIND every successful man? I recall saying to my therapist, during my worst period, that it just didn’t seem so bad to me that I needed attention. The bad thing, really, was what I had to resort to in order to get it. [Some back story to that; I was not a teenager, but an adult, and I knew that I was losing control and that some bad shit was coming down the pipeline if I didn’t get help. My husband was in the military, so there was a protocol for seeking mental health help. I called for days, and went through the same process. They would ask if I was suicidal. No. They would ask if I was thinking of hurting anyone else. No. In that case, I could get on a six month long waiting list to see a counselor. I had no understanding of self-injury, nor did I know how to say, “I think I might want to hurt myself, a bit, but I certainly don’t want to die.” It wasn’t until I could no longer handle things on my own, hurt myself badly enough to need stitches, and then requested a psych evaluation when I walked into the ER that I got the help I’d been asking for all along.]

I wonder, in all this, how many teenage girls aren’t getting the help they need because of that “attention-seeking” label. How many women feel like they can’t talk about their lives and experiences because it will be dumped in that category? Other girls in this class, in seeing me talking with the girl in her class, were furious, and expressed anger at this girl’s “need to get attention.” They seemed to think the girl was getting away with something. I suspect it’s partly that girls aren’t supposed to draw attention to themselves. Sure, there’s room for some delicate weeping, perhaps even some sadness, but getting all spooky? That’s just not ladylike.

For me, my Mercury in Retrograde moment comes about because I am in a place where I fear being honest about who I really am, yet not being honest creates a “what I can and can’t talk about” division in my life. I got my tattoo to cover the hundreds of scars that people seemed to think it was their business to ask about. I didn’t want them gone, because they’re part of who I am, but I wanted to transform the past into something beautiful. And I get tired of talking about it (some people notice anyway, and if I trust them I explain; but only a select few, and it still makes me light headed with fear). Just having to roll up my sleeve for my tattoo artist and show him what I wanted covered was so terrifying that I took two years to make the initial consult appointment.

My new life as a former recluse, though, means that there will times when I want to roll up the sleeve and be loved anyway, and that there will be times when I feel that being honest will help someone else. Both are really scary, but overcoming shame and believing that I don't have to fake it to be accepted is what Mercury apparently wants me to get from this moment of retrograde.