The American Wasteland

plus THE secret to reverse aging 💫

This week brought up a lot of feelings. Mostly rage, behind which lies grief, and between those, shame. I want to talk about shame as a uniquely female experience—and how it is used to cut women off, separate us and keep us from our personal and collective power. Unsurprisingly, shame often manifests on the body.

Look to our origin story to see how embedded shame is in the female experience. A few years ago I encountered an encouraging re-read of the concept of original sin by the Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr. He writes: “Our primary and self-destructive illusion is that we are separate and alone. This is the true basis, motivation, and loneliness that leads to all ‘sin.’” In other words, original sin wasn’t Eve’s bite of the apple; it was her sense of being cast out that broke her connection with the sacred and divine. She’s not bad; only separate. But separateness opens the dark, fertile gap where shame lives and breeds.

My mother recently suggested I look up the Masaccio fresco in Florence: “Expulsion from Paradise.” (Above.) In it, I see Adam, holding his face, shaking his head, mankind’s first cringe: “Oh, Eve…why?” I see Eve experiencing the first pang of her corruptness. I see in her face the remorse that every girl after her will suffer that same wrongness in her being. They’re out, now: cut-off; un-whole and punish-ably unworthy.

Let me speak simply to my own experience of embodied shame. For ten years I walked around anywhere from twenty to thirty pounds lighter than I am today. (I am thin.) When I was twenty-eight, a concerned OBGYN sent me for a bone scan and I sat at a Starbucks reading the report while hot saliva filled my mouth. “The patient exhibits bone level density alarmingly below normal range,” it said. Osteopenia was my diagnosis. I’d spent a decade turning my skeleton into sponge candy, and how did I feel about what I’d done? Nauseatingly ashamed.

But it was shame that drove me to starvation in the first place. And for years, hunger relieved me. Physical emptiness absolved me from my fundamental wrongness. Anorexia was a communicable disease where I went to college and catching it was a way to say yes, I fit in. And I was mightily praised: I received compliments about my body every single day. I was once stopped at Caravaggio on the Upper East Side by a famous, infected woman who leaped from her chair, grabbed my arm and hissed: “You look FABULOUS.” Her misty Chablis-breath filled me with the hot, liquid gold of belonging.

Women and bodies and shame were swirling around my orbit all last week. Val Monroe, formerly the beauty director at O, The Oprah Magazine who writes How Not to F*ck Up Your Face linked to an essay she wrote a year ago about compassionate self-reflection: literally, looking at yourself with loving awareness before you decide to “get a little work done.” The snarky intellectual me (circa 2004) would have rolled her eyes in their sunken sockets. So earnest! How mortifying to feel feelings! And then I would have sucked down another Dr. Brown’s Diet Cream Soda and listened to the carbonated hiss of my corroding bones.

It was Val’s essay that got me realizing how much I’d bought into the belief that changing my body could relieve me of the pangs of my humanity: that what the diet/ beauty industries sell is an avoidance of the deeper thoughts and questions we would rather not confront. What’s more terrifying than to look hard at yourself and ask: “But why am I ashamed?” I would have had to feel the desperate powerlessness I busied myself hiding. Instead, I kept myself in a perpetual race with the unkind voices offered to me at the checkout counter of the UPenn bookstore, where I picked up my textbooks. As long as I was just a little bit meaner than STAR magazine, I’d be safe.

Also last week, Jessica DeFino, who writes The Unpublishable, offered this open thread: Beauty As A Coping Mechanism. All the best people on the Internet turned up to say how they’d hidden their vulnerabilities behind various beauty practices. Looking through the comments I see these words a lot: “armor;” “shielding;” “failure;” “performance.” We’ve been tricked into believing that whatever we look like—even people who are already the cultural ‘ideal’—we must work furiously against our bodies. This is how beauty culture preys on feelings of separateness: you can’t connect and be a part of a group if you’re offering armor; a false self; a performance. By hiding our shame we keep our real-selves apart. We keep the cycle of disempowerment going all by ourselves.

Shame keeps the money circling and the patriarchy in charge. As long as women experience the gap of worthlessness and existential embarrassment, there’s something that can be bought to fix it. If nothing else, we can rest our weary hairdo’s knowing we’ve done everything we can to stay in the garden, with someone else’s approval and permission. (You won’t be surprised to learn that the men who invented our current aesthetic standards look a lot like Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh.) As DeFino writes, the SCOTUS opinion is not separate from capitalism or the patriarchy: all of it stems from the same devaluation of the female body—it’s the same toxic sludge, leaking out in different places.

I’m not grappling with an unwanted pregnancy, but I have to ask myself: what can I do to change the way the system interacts with MY body? I can look at myself in the mirror, as Val suggests, and I can allow myself the rage and grief of having inherited, carried and acted out this exploitive shame all my life—without ever asking, “…but why?” And yet, given Monday’s news, I see how much worse the demands on my body might have been. This week we saw that evil thinking naked, brazenly out in the open: In fact yes, five out of nine robes agree: your body DOES have less value than someone else’s.

Up until a few years ago, I’d turn to stone if I caught my resting bitch face in a window. I became livid anytime someone asked if I was older than my husband. (I’m younger by a month Goddamnit!)  Looking at photos of myself in my twenties, I’m heartbroken by the green crescents under my eyes and by the dragging corners of my lips. The strain of shame aged me way faster than time.

The other day I saw myself in the rearview and, I kid you not, thought: “Wow! I look fourteen!” For the last few years I’ve been confronting my shame, rage and grief and in the unearthing I’ve discovered that actually I’m really fucking good. I belong; I am whole already and no matter what. I’m not a descriptive adjective on a jar of La Mer: I’m not “youthful;” I’m not “radiant;” I’m just NOT ASHAMED. Under all those un-felt feelings, waits a swell of love and power. And those I’ll carry forward, marching across this sludgy wasteland until I’ve made holes in my shoes.