WHAT YOU TALK ABOUT WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT SHAME (final instalment)
ON SHAME, RELIGION AND MASCULINITY
You have moved to Berlin. Shame is there, still the loyal companion, still there in the eyes. You have had a few failed relationships. Doctors are helping you find names for the things that ail you — hypertension, depression, anxiety…
There is no doctor for shame.
***
Shame is in the eyes. And sometimes, shame and fear act as one. You remember looking away each time you would see the ubiquitous members of your former religion in the streets, offering religious publications and free home Bible study’s to strangers. In the beginning, curiosity would temporarily defeat shame, pin it to the ground while your eyes would linger on the copy of the Watchtower or Awake! they were holding, to see if there was anything new and interesting. Then you would spend the whole day trying not to be afraid of the implications of rejecting the faith, rejecting this god, rejecting this family you have been kicked out of. You know that fear better than you know most things. The fear that perhaps they are right: that you would regret leaving, that Satan would target you specifically to avenge the years you spent denouncing him, that there would always be a gaping hole in your life incapable of being filled by anything other than coming back to the fold, that like the many experiences you heard from the platforms growing up, some horrific death might snatch you from the earth before you were able to find your way back. The fear that makes you avoid risky sports or entertainment. The fear that makes you prefer train travel to planes which can fall out of the sky (thankfully you can lie, and say preferring trains is about the environment). You think of the biblical Jonah who, while running away from his god, dragged a whole ship with him almost to destruction, the sea only calming when he sacrificed himself and got swallowed by a whale. Once, you dreamt you were Jonah, but in a plane, and when the turbulence wouldn’t stop and everyone was wailing, confessing their sins and begging god to save them, you fessed up and told them: It is all happening because of me, I turned my back against god and stopped spreading the good news of his kingdom and that is why we are crashing. Throw me overboard and save yourselves.
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