At the beginning of this week, I took part in a workshop in Germany, which was an amazing opportunity for me to meet new people, gather inspiration for research, and… face shame. It came out of nowhere and attacked with redoubled force – just how shame likes it most.
The workshop took place in a small group, so we spent practically the entire two days together – taking part in formal discussions as well as those over coffee and dinner. I felt quite comfortable and was proud of myself for actively joining the conversations, which is not always easy for me when there are more people. On the second day, it was time for my presentation, which I was quite happy with – until the questions and comments started. Until then, all reactions to the presentations had been overwhelmingly positive, and suddenly I started being questioned about the concepts I used – why some didn’t appear, and why others did, even though “nobody uses them anymore.” In the academic world, criticism is not rare; we even have an internal joke about “reviewer 2,” meaning the anonymous oracle evaluating your text or grant application, whose main goal is to prove that your intellectual abilities are at the level of early childhood education. Here, however, it caught me by surprise, looking at the feedback for my predecessors.
Academic work is a bit like artistic work – it is difficult to separate our “creations” from ourselves. Pandora’s box was opened, and all the fears and beliefs that the mind was able to suggest to me spilled out of it: that I read too little, that I don’t know this subject, that my English is too weak to be able to convey what I would like. The spiral of shame fueled itself. Each of us knows that stinging feeling that encourages us to run away and hide as far away as possible. Never to expose oneself to evaluation again.
Guilt is necessary for us from the point of view of social functioning. We need a mechanism that tells us what is acceptable and what is not. What will allow us to build healthy, supportive relationships, and what will cause others pain or problems. Shame, however, is that feeling when we combine a mistake made with our personality and when actions merge into a whole with how we perceive ourselves as human beings. Shame can also be a tool of oppression – if you were raised in Catholicism, you know what I’m talking about.
The worst thing you can do in such a situation is to run away and try to drown out this feeling with easy dopamine. To give up the battlefield. Although it is not easy — and I know what I’m talking about — every such opportunity is a chance for us to look at what this sense of shame actually stems from. What makes such criticism, although it could wash right off me, circulate in my head for a few days? Why did the opinion of this particular person hurt me? Which exact part stung the most? It is also worth trying to look at it from the point of view of guilt – so let’s assume that I actually made all the mistakes I was accused of. First question – could I have avoided it? After all, I prepared according to the guidelines provided by the organizers, I put time and commitment into it, I didn’t make the presentation on the fly while already riding the bus to the venue. I knew what I wanted to say and how to present it. Second question – can I try to avoid this mistake in the future? And here comes another trap, because my first reaction was “I’ll go home and read all available texts” (perfectionists of the world – unite!). Doable? Sure, but you wouldn’t see another post on this page anymore.
So I attacked shame from still other sides: first, I confronted it with a different point of view, asking the event organizer over coffee what she thought of my presentation (I’ll surprise you — she liked it), and second, I am still at the stage of taming the thought that even assuming I made all these mistakes — does it ultimately mean that I am useless? Were the conclusions suggested to me by my mind definitely correct, or did they result from low self-esteem, national complexes, but also simple fatigue, overstimulation, and neuroatypical RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria)? Probably the answer is somewhere in the middle. Shame, therefore, has huge potential for self-development because it forces us to ask ourselves many key questions. Even if looking for answers to them is extremely uncomfortable, remember that by remaining the proverbial ostrich hiding its head in the sand, you leave your butt visible anyway. The result is that you don’t see the world around you, and people form opinions about you anyway. Would you, however, try to mess with an ostrich walking proudly in your direction? Me neither.