I think that many people have intimate lives that are free of shame. Not free of regret or longing or pleasure or heartbreak. But free of shame.

I don’t have that. I have a complicated, or not so complicated but unsavory relationship with intimacy. It can be wonderful. And at the same time it can be dark and shame inducing. A pleasurable experience is great in the moment. In some ways it can be like a drug – an addictive escape from the real world. And that is shameful enough. Because what is a natural, God-given way of connecting with another human being (and to make new human beings) becomes a marker of pain and a lack of discipline. No one celebrates how great it is to get drunk when they’re having a bad day. They feel bad about that, hide the fact, while doing the very thing they are hiding.

Shame has marked my intimacy. And this makes sense. My first intimate experiences were unnatural and abusive. They were, by virtue of their very existence, wrong. So intimacy is deeply connected to ‘wrongness’ or ‘badness’ for me. A dark shadows underlies it. And though it can be cleared away for moments in time, that shadow always returns. As if I’m doing something wrong.

So then what to do with the pleasure? It gets folded into the wrongness. And then I embraced it. I liked to be ‘bad.’ Not, I was human and desired intimacy like all other humans. I was different.

I’m tired of that feeling. Caring this unnecessary weight. The fatigue of the work is getting to be heavier than the shame itself. There’s more to say but not right now. This is just a short meditation on shame. And the intention to free myself of it.