Vulnerability, Shame–and 3 Regrets

We hear a lot about being shamed for doing the right thing–yet there’s little mention of the internal shame we might feel when we FAIL to step up and be vulnerable. I have very few regrets in my life, but I feel shame about three incidents where I had the chance to do the right thing and didn’t take it: one was right after we bought our first house and our immediate neighbors invited us over to get acquainted–and made a racist remark about Puerto Ricans. Knowing I was going to have to live next to these people for years, I chose to remain silent and I still feel shame over that. The other was many years earlier, when, as a teenager in high school, I walked by a large man who was addressing a petite young woman. He turned straight to me and asked, “doesn’t she have tiny t–ts?” I knew I didn’t want to encourage him but at 14 or 15, I didn’t yet have the languaging to effectively interrupt that kind of oppression. I didn’t know how to throw some comfort her way without sending him into a potentially violent rage against her. I took the cheap cop-out, “I can’t see. Her arm is in her way.”

The third was even earlier. I think I was 11. My only summer in sleep-away camp. There were six of us in my bunk. Three were bullies, two of us were constantly picked on, and the 6th was our protector. Near the end of that horrible two weeks, the bullies forced me and the other scrawny kid to fight each other. He was even weaker than me. Shamefully, I chose the self-protection of not getting beaten up by the three thugs. I hit him as gently as I could. Our protector (a small-framed boy, but one with enormous self-confidence) walked in near the end of the battle and was disgusted with the me. I lost his respect. He gained even more respect from me. And I don’t think I’ve hit anyone since.

And I was enormously proud decades later when my daughter, then just six years old, interrupted the bullying of the odd-boy in her kindergarten. 

The shame of letting others down and not being true to myself I felt in these three incidents is very different than the shame I felt at about age 11 when I experienced a rape by a stranger on the street (yeah, I’m a male #MeToo). I felt horribly unclean and ashamed, but I knew this was out of my control. Still, it was four years before I could bring myself to tell anyone–and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I didn’t discover my bisexuality until I moved 600 miles (1000 km) away from that stairwell.

There are plenty of times when I did speak out. When I did the right thing. When I took some personal risk. But these three failures still hang over me. The most recent was in 1986, yet, all those decades later, I am still ashamed.

Are there times in your life that YOU regret not stepping up?