Image description: A hand is holding Pamela Colman Smith’s Page of Wands from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the card, a youthful looking person is standing in front of three pyramids, dressed in yellow and orange and holding a wand which they are looking at closely. Behind the card is a wooden shelf with plants on it next to a window sill.
I've been in the thick of a project that’s involved re-reading, revising and rearranging some of the material from my book Tarot for Change. It’s hard to believe it’s only been two years since I was putting the finishing touches on that book. I feel like a completely different person with a whole other worldview. It's been harrowing to go back and read things I wrote then.
For me harrowing entails shame, and shame is often a consequence of learning. Re-reading a book I wrote not long ago, I do feel shame about things I didn’t know at the time. It's not enough to make me want to stop learning, but it’s enough to elicit intense and ongoing anxiety about writing publicly until I'm all-knowing. (That’s a joke.)
People often say that beyond a sense of having done something bad, shame involves being bad at one’s core. And once again, in my own experiences of shame, I’m thankful for resonant ideas which are forever riding to my rescue.
As part of the narrative training I'm in this year, I was assigned to read an article by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs about narrative therapy’s relational view of identity. In it they write that "we choose to think about self not as a noun referring to a container filled with resources but as a verb referring to a project we are pursuing in active, ongoing relationship with other people across a wide variety of contexts.”
For them, identity is “relational, distributed, performed, and fluid.” And a relational identity is a process, not a possession” (2016).
As I look back on past versions of myself in various contexts and want to crawl under the table, I do start to wonder if part of what makes looking back so hard is that I'm understanding my self as a possession and not as a process, something that’s contained inside my individual body, that’s fully formed, fixed, and with a true essence. A “true” self cannot be a relational self; the assumption that it comes into the world formed means that it is untouched by history or context.
In the context of shame, I think it's easy to see the ways that the “true self” is a slippery slope. It's all good as long as I think that the truth of who I am is “good,” but if for whatever reason, at any time I start to believe that this fixed and true self is any manner of bad, I'm in trouble.
What if when I feel ashamed of the past—or proud, for that matter—I’m taking entirely too much credit, not recognizing the many forces that were shaping me into what I look back on and call “I.” So many stories I hitched a ride on, other people's armor I pried off and wore, horses I rode that weren't specifically mine.