You Feel Shame And Then You Get Free

It is maybe impossible for any of us to live at the level of our intentions.

Chopping leeks for breakfast this morning it occurred to me that you can’t just keep peeling the less-than-ideal layers off of a leek. That’s all a leek is, really: ringed layers staggered in a series of Vs of nature’s own design. Dirt gets in between them but you can’t really rinse it out. You peel too much and you end up with a whole lot less than you ought out of this misguided desire for clarity, cleanliness, perfection.

This has little to do with anything. But I have noticed recently a tension arising between my values and what is really required in order to carry them out.

To wit: this winter I made the acquaintance of a young man who is homeless and schizophrenic, by which I mean that he showed up on our porch one frigid night looking for help and has been back on it many times since. Those first few visits, it was easy enough to live my values: he needed food, money, a ride, someplace warm to sit for an hour, and these are easy enough to give.

But as his success in getting what he asked of us increased, so did the frequency of his visits, until at the peak of winter he was showing up four or five times a week. This turned into annoyance, and I’m ashamed to say some anger, on my part; many of these knocks on the door came well after eleven p.m. or before seven a.m., when we were warm in bed with no intention of leaving it. Which of course is nauseating to think about saying to someone who’s out in the snow in his socks.

This is what I mean, about shame. It’s easy enough to believe that everyone should give money to the homeless and probably go further than that. It’s harder to be roused from bed at what feels like a terrible hour and engage with someone who is perfectly rational in his desire to keep you on the hook as long as possible because it’s another warm minute and a better chance of getting something to eat on a night that could kill from the cold. I drive him around sometimes from place to place to place as he changes his mind about where he wants to go, and if most of his speech makes no sense to me the logic behind it certainly does.

And it all forces me to think: how much differently would I actually be willing to live in order to help someone to the degree that they need it? How do I balance my responsibilities toward those in the life I’ve created with those I have toward the stranger? As I’ve gotten to know him better I’ve had some success setting boundaries around the frequency and hours of his visits, and how much money I can reasonably give him, but even setting those boundaries can feel like a failure. If his needs are an inconvenience to me, they’re certainly far worse than that to him.

In the light of day as I type these thoughts I don’t like to think about the nighttime version of myself who can feel so hostile to the summons of the world. But that’s still me, after all.

All of this is, I’d guess, part of what has made the fascism of individualized conservatism so appealing to so many people in recent years. If your values demand engagement with the hard, messy work of being with other people, of loving other people, of learning to confront the distance between your beliefs and their practice, well: it’s a struggle you’ll be in your whole life, and you’ll fall short, especially if you’re trying to save others from harm. If your values demand none of those things, you can succeed pretty easily, I’d think, by dint of washing your hands of the rest of the human race and blaming them all for their own problems. Secure the homestead and fantasize about the apocalypse that would allow you to kill them all without consequence. There’s an emptiness in that approach I can’t possibly imagine. But it does seem easier than the other, especially if you can’t conceive of what you’re missing out on.

It is maybe impossible for any of us to live at the level of our intentions. But I am trying to work through the paralytic feeling of shame that comes when I notice the size of the gap between what I’m doing and what I’d like to have done, which doesn’t serve anyone.

Oddly enough I’ve picked up a mantra for this from the opening scene of the 1977 film Slap Shot. In it, hapless Charlestown Chiefs goalie Denis Lemieux attempts to explain some of the finer points of hockey to the audience of Jim Carr’s Sports Talk. This devolves into Lemieux demonstrating various penalties on Carr, and then waxing poetic about the nature of penalties themselves.

You do that, you go to the box, you know. Two minutes by yourself, and you feel shame, you know. And then you get free.

It’s a silly moment in an outrageous movie, but I’m in love with that line. I know I need to learn to sit quietly with the discomfort of my inevitable shortcomings, and then find some other way of living with them, for they cannot be solved. Two minutes by yourself, you feel shame, and then you get free. Two minutes by yourself, you feel shame, and then you get free.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

PPS - If you’re in the Detroit area, I’ll be reading some poems at Book Suey in Hamtramck on May 1 for their May Day event celebrating the renewal of spring and the international working class. Details here!