~Todo lo que haces.~

[November 8, 2019]

I’ve spoken previously on many occasions about how I use emotions and/or thought memories as a means to set my mood or attain some goal. I use pleasantness to make light of moments, anxiety for adrenaline, fury for strength and vigor, et cetera. One such emotion that I ‘tap’ into that I feel like is oft misunderstood is failure.

Failure, in a sense, is an emotion of dread, negative in nature, and a downer, so to speak. But like sadness and anger, just because it’s a negative emotion, doesn’t mean it’s useless. Like how we need darkness to recognize the light, we need failure to recognize our degree of success. For me, the sense of failure is perhaps one of my most powerful emotions, because I use the sense-memory for DETERMINATION, among other things.

But that’s a topic to continue another time.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about a feeling that’s often confused and/or entangled with failure, namely, and as spoiled by the title of this post, shame.

There are very few things that I am ashamed of, and one of which coincidentally (or fatedly) was given reminder to me just today.

I took three years of Spanish in high school. And by took, I mean I was in class, I did learn some of the material (at least enough to pass the courses), but I didn’t really take it seriously and saw it more as a “for fun” thing, even as formal education has never really been a priority for me, I took this course even more casual still. My teacher [probably] knew that about me, and I honestly believe I was one of her least liked students, and this is one of my shames.

Shame is, for all intents and purposes, one of the simplest ways to describe what I call “useless” emotions, and simply put, it’s simply that, useless. Simple. [Alright, enough with the repetition.] There is no good use I’ve found for shame, but before going on, I suppose it’s better to identify what shame is to me.

Like I’ve said in the past, I carry memories of failure with me, and constantly think through them. Failures are mistakes or accidents, sometimes avoidable, sometimes due to unknown or unforeseen circumstance, or sometimes just pure misfortune. They are natural, but more importantly, pondering failure usually leads to insight, this process is like finding the silver lining of failure; a chance to learn.

I attempted to take Spanish in university, seeing as it was a possible credit for my optionals. I thought I learned [and retained] enough from my last three years that I’d be able to survive, and maybe continue learning. I was wrong. Yeah, I could read it and had decent understanding and vocab, but that was it. I wasn’t allowed to take the beginners’ class because I had the proficiency certificate, but I definitely did not deserve the title of “experienced”. This was the first and only time I dropped a course. I felt much shame in this.

However, like any looming cloud, failure threatens to rain down its cast, and one of failure’s precipitates is shame. Shame is the dread of failure; the fog of the rain. It prevents us from seeing clearly, or worse, it can mislead us and cause us more hurt in its confusion. We don’t want to fail because we feel shame in that outcome. We’re disappointed when we fail because that’s shame’s toll on our mindset. We fear failure because shame is consuming. For this, I previously couldn’t find a use for it, and despite trying again now, any such use for shame still eludes me. 

My shame didn’t come from failing to perform in the course though, rather it was more from failing myself/my time spent, in part, but mostly, failing my high school teacher. She was kind, and fun, and lax (at least towards me), a trait that I took advantage of. Thinking back, I possibly gave her much reason to be lax with me, as if I didn’t care to learn, she might as well give effort to someone else who was there for a proper reason. I don’t blame her for that, and I should blame myself for the happenstance. In retrospect, this is also a source of my shame.

That isn’t to say that shame and failure go hand in hand and always together though, or at least they don’t have to. Awareness and insight are powerful tools after all, and that’s what we do as learners.

Shame is one of those things that kinda creep their way in. Sometimes it happens slow and insidiously and you feel it growing, but sometimes all at once and entirely. and you don’t notice it at all until it’s already consumed you. That’s how this was for me. At the time I felt no shame; perhaps I should’ve, but I didn’t. I wasn’t shamed after each year in high school when going through my book and seeing my near-minimum effort. Nor when I checked the box to transfer out of the class in university. I realized my shame a little bit later when I chanced upon my former teacher in a grocery store.

When I saw her, I felt panic. Not unusual, if you don’t expect to see someone, it’s common to be lacking words and or not be in the mindspace to want to talk to that person. That wasn’t what I felt. I dug into my mind, things I had learned and used every day during school. I drew upon nearly nothing. Me, the one that remembers, recalled nothing of substance, nothing worth uttering. I went over scene after scene of classes upon classes, recalled words and phrases and activities, but it was then I realized how remiss I had been of storing those memories, and how little use I had gotten out of them in the times that I should’ve. I cited that I simply couldn’t recall anything at the moment and faulted memory. Internally, I conceded that I was actually ashamed.

“Identify the thought and grasp that consciousness. Segregate, determinate, and cogitate the circumstance and happenstance that lead to that thought, learn anything that can be learnt from it. Repeat until there’s no new consciousness to be gained.” This is one of my common mantras when remunerating my experiences. When applied here, it allows me to remove shame from failure. Failure is the feeling about the state and/or situation when something is gone wrong. Shame is a possible attached feeling brought on internally by failing. Gleaming failure brings insight to something that’s awry, or wrong, or could be made better. Shame is the veil that conceals and steers us away from failure because we fear dread.

Being able to confront, identify, and separate shame from failure (and then promptly discard said shame due to its uselessness) is why I say I carry a high sense of failure, but I have very little I’m ashamed of. I suppose that’s also why it’s that much more crushing when I come to terms with things I should be ashamed of, and why I don’t discard the shame attached to those failures.

Perhaps that’s the utility in shame. When used correctly and sparingly, instead of shielding us from particular thoughts by steering us away, shame can function as the accent to highlight something worth remembering, or that there’s more to be learnt.