Ashamed Disgraced Embarrassed

When we do something morally wrong, these emotions can serve a valuable purpose. They act as a catalyst of sorts, propelling us to make amends, confess what we did, and take responsibility for our actions. However, if we use these emotions to beat ourselves up, then any valuable purpose they might have served is thrown by the wayside, and that is how many of us seem to utilize them the most.

In the last few years, I have come to know how it feels to be ashamed and embarrassed because of having a mental illness, felt the disgrace of being  hospitalized against my will, and experienced all three emotions at once after I tried to commit suicide.  I was able to move past those feelings by blogging about my experiences and sharing my story.

When I am experiencing a depressive episode, I am not a nice person.  I take all the anger that I am feeling towards myself and lash out at people around me. As a result, now that my thinking is more clear, I feel a great deal of shame about many of my past actions.  Logically, I can acknowledge that in some ways I am not responsible for those past actions because my mind was so unhealthy, but that logic does not stop me from beating myself up.

A few weeks ago, someone I knew when I was in high school requested to be added to my friend’s list on Facebook.  I accepted her, but did not say much of anything to her.  The reason I did not is because during one of my depressive episodes in high school, I was not very nice to her.    Even though it has been over 20 years since I have been in high school, every time I saw her name come across my Facebook time line I would feel a great deal of shame about how I remembered treating her at times.  Finally, I decided that I would write her and apologize for how I treated her when we were in school together, and I did.

Part of her response included this:

Hi there! You shouldn’t apologize for anything. I never habored any negative feelings toward you or about you…so put that to rest.

Not only was her response to my apology very gracious, it made me start thinking. My thoughts were about shame. I wondered how much shame and embarrassment I have felt about things that I really had nothing to be ashamed of. Not just beating myself up with these emotions, but just feeling them in the first place when there was no reason to.  After thinking about this for a bit, I realized that most of the time when I felt these emotions there was absolutely no reason too.  They were simply the product of an unhealthy mind and also of me being very hard on myself.

I have decided to free myself from the burden of unnecessary feelings of shame, embarrassment, and disgrace.  I will no longer allow them to be a part of my life if the sole purpose for my feeling them is to cause myself harm.

Are there times when you have felt ashamed, embarrassed, and/or disgraced?  Were those feelings used in the proper way, to bring something you had done wrong to your attention?  Or were they used to beat yourself up with.? Have you ever had those feelings when there was absolutely no reason to?

I read a very thought provoking post by Ginger Breo at The Seamstress of Avalon today.  In it she talks about how in her experience that it seems depression and creative people go hand and hand.  While I have absolutely no scientific evidence to prove whether this is factual or not, I have to say that in my experience it does seem that the more creative people tend to have more mental health issues than maybe someone who prefers to deal with facts and figures.

I was certainly not an over achiever in school, I think it would not be a lie to say I was definitely an under achiever.  Not because I was not smart, or did drugs, or drank alcohol.  It was mostly because I preferred to do my own thing.  That means when the class was supposed to be reading out of the History text book, I would be reading a real book about a historical time period I was more interested in.  Or when the class was dissecting a piece of literature from the Literature text book, I would be doing a cross word puzzle, because I had already read the Literature text book from cover to cover when they were first given out.  I lived in my head.  Told myself stories and had conversations with myself.  Looking back, I can see that I was more creative than I gave myself credit for.

As an adult, I have to say my creativity blossomed, but in an easily distracted kind of way.  Cross stitch, fabric applique,  painting on shirts, painting, knitting, crochet, just on and on.  I loved them all, and was quite good at them all.  However, when my depression got bad, I could not even concentrate on even the most basic of these. My imagination never stopped working though. The things that I imagined were definitely not coming from a mind that was even close to being healthy.

Once a proper medication mix was found and my thoughts quit racing, I was able to concentrate again.  However, all those things I used to be so creative in, no longer were of any interest to me.  My creativity blossomed in a completely surprising direction for me.  Writing.

Out of this new found direction, this blog was born.  What I have noticed though is that when my mental health is struggling a bit I am less outwardly creative, spending more time being creative in my head.  The creativity never stops, and when the struggle eases up, I find that I have a whole bunch of ideas and thoughts to write about.  Due to my therapy and medications, when I am struggling with my mental health my thoughts do not go nearly as dark as they used to.  In fact, most of them are more about what might have triggered things and how can I prevent it from happening again or what can I learn from it.  So in a round about way, it is as if my mental health issues feed my creativity.

As my mind becomes more healthy, I am finding more of a balance and it is not always the struggles that set off a bout of creativity in me.  I find that I am more able to use my successes as a creative outlet.

I guess what I am trying to say is that, if I had not gone through such a dark and terrible time in my mind, I would not have discovered that writing could be a creative outlet for me.  I had always believed my creativity lay in my hands and with textile art.  Not once in all the years before I chose to start writing did I believe that writing could be a form of art for me.

What do you think?  Do believe that there could be a link between mental health issues and creativity?  Or do you think that is just way off base?