My heart is gripped listening to Gracie Abrams’ song Unsteady from her 2023 Good Riddance album.
“…I should be cool, but I panic
Out of the blue and I end up on the ground
Weaker all around.”
I am transported to when I was Abrams’ age – 24 – when I sometimes felt remarkably similar, even though she is of another generation, born in a different era, different country, in the city of LA, which I have never even been to.
And yet when I listen to “…But it's so hard when it feels like my fault
When I keep 'em so far Happens when
I go dark
I'm so unsteady.
I’m so unsteady.
I’m so unsteady”, I break down. I empathise so deeply with the feeling of guilt or shame that I struggle with a little steely knot forming in my gut. That feeling takes me back to numerous mornings after social events in my teens, twenties, and thirties when I lay in bed feeling somehow at fault, somehow ashamed. I would wake up early with that brutal feeling having crept in on me and taken over my whole being. I used to scan my freshly formed memories from the night before, desperately looking for a specific incident to attach my faultiness and shame to. A wrong sentence I had uttered; a tactless observation or inappropriate gesture I had made; the skirt I had worn being too short; a loud laugh I had let out that revealed my ever-present deficit of demureness.
Often I failed to match that tortured feeling of being at fault to any event. It was just there. Present. Alert. Demanding my full attention and pinning me down to the bed, like a one-night stand caught up in passion, holding down my arms on either side of my head a touch too forcefully, arousing in me a feeling of alarm or even panic.
Just like Gracie Abrams, in my earlier life I frequently felt unsteady. Why is it that Gen Z girls and young women from different corners of the world carry the same intrinsic feelings of guilt and shame as a Gen X woman born in a (then) communist country? Why does this feeling of being profoundly at fault travel through time so efficiently and take root so deeply?
It took me decades to unravel these debilitating and depressive feelings that robbed me of so much joy and freedom. It took work with counsellors to realise that the shame, the guilt, and the feeling of being at fault mostly did not belong to me.
I had inherited a big part of it from generations of women before me who had been conditioned to feel guilt and shame, to take on the world’s fault lines and make them their own.
Whether through absorbing the sexual violence that generations of women before me experienced in secret, or the powerlessness to fulfil dreams that expanded beyond the realm of the home, this heavy load of alien feelings resting on my tenuous shoulders had left me (and millions like me) feeling unsteady. Yet, instead of recognising the load for what it was – an outside repressive force, resulting from criticisms or unsolicited advice that my parents, relatives, teachers, clerks, doctors, and people on the street directed at me – I had internalised it as my own fault. I felt at fault for being too outspoken, or angry, or silly, or smart, or too ambitious, provocative, spontaneous, lazy, or not soft enough – you name it! All these deviations from the social expectation of what makes a good girl/woman fed into my deficit of demureness. Being demure was as necessary for every woman to be accepted decades ago as it seems to be today. This recent CNN article attests to the existing stereotype of someone who presents themselves demurely being a person (usually a woman) so modest and inoffensive that they are almost, if not wholly, invisible.
In his popular book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle introduces the concept of the pain- body, where our individual and collective pain from the past is stored. He argues that most often, women’s pain-body is much stronger than men’s due to the more intense collective suffering women have stored in their bodies over millennia in the form of sustained violence such as rape or murder, or childbirth and child loss, exploitation, slavery and so on. Reassuringly, he also suggests that this pain-body we all inherit does not equate to who we are and that we can work on transmuting it into spiritual growth by becoming conscious of it and the fact that it does not define us. (Of course, to succeed in transmuting the pain-body into growth we must be supported by social norms conducive to this change). Tolle suggests that we do not have to let the pain-body dictate our actions or future path.
Today I lie in bed on a quiet summer’s morning and I desperately wish I could hug Gracie Abrams and millions of young Gen Z women like her, to cocoon them in my infinite love and to assure them that there is light at the end of the dark corridor of shame that they have been unconsciously forced to walk along. I would love to share with them how one day somewhere in my forties I woke up with the realisation that this taxing feeling of being at fault was no longer there. My increased self-awareness and awareness of how the millennia-old system has misfired had dissipated it. I had become free to feel my own feelings, most of which were not guilt or shame. I gradually started feeling steadier. I feel steady right now. You will too. Perhaps sooner than you think.
