In December of 2017, I decided to run for City Council in my hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin (a city of 70,000 best known as Justin Vernon’s hometown). We’re a beautiful city filled with trees and rivers and art and music (come visit!), but we also live in the shadow of decaying democratic institutions. In Wisconsin, gerrymandering and voter suppression have thwarted the will of the people, and we have one of the lowest electoral integrity scores in the nation. It’s painful to live with the pretense of democracy, yet feel that your voice doesn’t matter.

Still, it took a long time for me to decide that running for local office might be a way for me to make my voice heard and amplify the voices of others who feel their government refuses to listen. When a local candidate recruitment committee asked me to run, I hesitated. I worried running for office would take a lot of time (it did). I worried that if I became a public figure, I would face sexism (I did). I worried that people might say mean things about me (some did).

So, I said no.

It’s painful to live with the pretense of democracy, yet feel that your voice doesn’t matter.
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And then the committee asked me again. They told me that the average woman has to be asked seven times to run for office (the average man? less than once). That’s what changed my mind. I decided that my worries probably had more to do with my gender than with me, and that my anxiety was less important than our need for women in office. I talked myself down, reminding myself that oops, I was accidentally confusing a shared, public emotion (self-doubt brought about by misogyny) with a personal feeling, and proceeded.

Throughout my campaign, I experienced the trueness of the ‘60s slogan “the personal is political” in different ways — some of them surprisingly pleasant. In the past, when I’ve had to remind myself that the personal is political, it’s been painful. The personal and the political often intersect along the axis of shame and stigma. For instance, 10 years ago I had a tooth removed at a low-cost dental school clinic because I couldn’t afford a root canal. The procedure started to hurt before I even opened my mouth. Shame flared up inside me as soon as I sat down in the gray waiting room, surrounded by other people whose mouths hurt but who couldn’t afford to do much about it. The dental student used his body weight to rock my molar back and forth. While he worked, the shame of being a person who somehow let herself go all the way out of the middle class took root in my mouth.

When I experience shame, I feel like my skin turns inside out, exposing my hot, gunky insides to everyone. Intensely physical, shame feels personal: It’s easy to forget that shame is a social emotion. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, “it may be wiser to think of shame as a relationship rather than just a feeling: a relationship of domination in which the mocking judgments of the dominant are internalized by the dominated.” As such, shame is the emotional tool of social control.

When I developed my campaign literature (postcards to send to thousands of my neighbors) I felt hot and squirmy, like I was trying to talk my way out of a speeding ticket. I created draft after draft because I couldn’t escape the feeling that I wasn’t acceptable. This surprised me. I hadn’t known I’d been toting this toxic belief around until I tried to stand out front and become a leader.

As an educated, white, straight woman, I’m privileged. The fact that even from my relative position of power, I felt the disciplining touch of shame when I presumed to lead indicates how much work we have to do to empower diverse members of our society to overcome cultural prohibitions against their leadership. Despite my privilege, shame let me know that declaring my candidacy was something I wasn’t supposed to do — certainly not without the necessary financial prerequisites. My struggles with high student debt and low income had yielded me a gig-economy shame, a millennial shame, an avocado toast shame: but it was still shame, and it still gave me sharp — painfully sharp — insight into some of the challenges were are up against as we work for social justice.

Why Millennial Precarity Should Change The Way We Think About Class
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The thing about shame is you can’t entirely out-think it. As an Americanist scholar, I’m critical of the notion (popularized by those witch-hunting Puritans, and of course the Trump administration) that people who have money have it because they are worth more, morally and spiritually, than people who don’t. This belief has deep roots in the United States (roots that have wrapped themselves around our hearts, roots that can squeeze). For instance, In Stacy Schiff’s history of the Salem witch trials, she points out that widows with children (a.k.a. single moms) would often become destitute in early America. Their communities responded with cruelty and shaming. Mobs herded these families out of their houses and into the streets and then chased them to the borders of the next village so that they could become someone else’s problem. Sound familiar?

I could connect my feelings of shame with a long history of shaming as a tool for domination, but I couldn’t free myself from them. Not alone. But when I ran for office, I learned that even if you can’t out-think shame, you can out-organize it. The axis between the personal and the political is a two-way street, and shame isn’t the only thing that parades down it.

For instance: In the 16th century, English kings laid their hands on subjects to heal them. The royal touch was thought to cure scrofula, a shameful skin disease known as the “king’s evil.” I thought of this healing touch frequently during my campaign, especially when I met women in their eighties and nineties.

Thank God For Identity Politics
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Often, when I shook hands with older women, they wouldn’t let me go. These women squeezed my hand tightly and held on, often for the entire length of our conversation. Sometimes they would pat my hand or draw it close to their hearts as they spoke. Many of these women told me: “We need women in office so badly.” I could feel in their touch, and hear in their voices, their yearning to be represented, and how much it meant to them that a younger woman was pursuing a path that had been closed to them.

These women voters made me realize that the mystical qualities and “healing touch” we associate with the divine right of kings (or maybe with people like Princess Di) take place in a democracy too. It’s just that the magic operates in reverse, with power moving from the people to the person who hopes to lead them.

All I had to do was file some paperwork and send my picture to the newspaper, and people started to treat me like I was something more than I believed myself to be. When people treated me like someone capable of carrying a torch through our darkening democracy, I began to feel capable of it.

The support voters transmitted to me through their warm handshakes and good wishes made me realize that I don’t have to experience myself as a narrow, singular self, fretting about her own desires and feelings, worried that she’s not enough. I can be so much more than that — we all can. And when we work together, we can trouble the roots of policies and belief systems that cause suffering, so that maybe, in the future, people don’t have to be ashamed simply because of who they are.

When people treated me like someone capable of carrying a torch through our darkening democracy, I began to feel capable of it.
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Running for office didn’t take away my shame. But it gave me something like what reading gave James Baldwin, who wrote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” Running for office, I saw how my shame at being the person I am (a female person with more debt than assets) could help me connect with other people to create political change, even if that change were a small one, like the opportunity to vote for a new and different kind of candidate. Early in the campaign, I decided that just getting my name on the ballot and doing the best to get my message out would be a small victory for democracy.

This spring, voters could choose to support me. They could vote for a woman who — thanks to the way shame etches memories into our bodies — will always, on some level, be sitting in a waiting room with people who are hurting and can’t afford to do much about it. They could choose to vote for me, a candidate who wouldn’t let her beautiful city forget that 43% of our school children experience poverty or low income.

They could choose to vote for me — and they did.

No, My Right To Abortion Did Not Cost Hillary The Election
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On April 3, 2018, I was elected to represent District 2 on Eau Claire’s City Council, along with a slate of other progressive candidates. I now have a name plate and a little microphone with a button that lights up. I’ve voted “aye” and “no.” There’s a huge learning curve — I have to learn everything from municipal finance to parliamentary procedure, so I often feel overwhelmed. But you know what? I’m not the one who decides whether I’m right for the job. Voters made their choice. They wanted my perspective and my leadership, and my perspective is inextricably tied to my experiences. The personal and the political tangle at the tables where policy decisions are made every day, and my hope is that the complexity of my feelings will help guide me toward compassionate, inclusive policymaking even while I am learning.

The moral of this story of scarlet letters and magic touches is: If you’re thinking about running for office, do it. Yes, it’s scary. It will probably draw some of your hidden vulnerabilities into focus. But these vulnerabilities are your secret powers, the keys to your connection with other people and to politics itself. They’re what make your voice urgent and necessary — and when you use your voice to serve others, you help heal democracy, and you help heal yourself.

Running for office, you learn to work with other people to harness the powerful dynamic between the personal and the political. This dynamic often hurts people, but it’s also a force that can energize a group to fight for what they believe in. It’s a force that can sustain you.

So set your intention. Take a deep breath. And run.

It’s a problem of epidemic proportions because it has an impact on all of us. What makes it “silent” is our inability or unwillingness to talk openly about shame and explore the ways in which it affects our individual lives, our families, our communities and society. Our silence has actually forced shame underground, where it now permeates our personal and public lives in destructive and insidious ways.

Four years ago I graduated from Rutgers University with a Master’s degree in art history. I was surrounded on that sunny day by my family, including my fiancé and my soon-to-be stepdaughter. I was one of the first kids in my family to go to college, and this felt like my greatest accomplishment yet. But when I look at photos from that day — my fiancé’s daughter grinning and wearing my mortarboard, my father standing gravely with a bouquet of flowers — I feel not pride or nostalgia, but shame.

Several months later, I would shove as many things as I could carry into large plastic trash bags, grab my cat, and get into a car with my mother, only returning to that house once, briefly, in order to pick up the rest of my things. But even though I got out, the shame lingers, poisoning even my happy memories. Like many survivors of abuse, I wonder: did I put up with it for too long? Was it somehow my fault?

In her book I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t), author and speaker Brené Brown calls shame a “silent epidemic”:

Brown says that shame needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. It’s no wonder, then, that people who have endured abuse at the hands of an intimate partner are so likely to feel ashamed about it. Abusers thrive on secrecy, silence, and judgment, too. They rely on planting the very feelings that nourish shame.

My ex-fiance was a master gaslighter, which is to say that he thoroughly manipulated me into questioning my own sanity and perception of reality in the course of our relationship. He was adept at making me believe the problems in our relationship were my fault. He went to great lengths to distance me from family and friends so that the only support that I perceived for myself was him. He made me feel small. He made me feel useless. This, in turn, made me feel ashamed — and that shame did his work for him. Shame made me doubt myself; it tricked me into believing that everything he said about me was true. Once he began nurturing an environment that encouraged shame, I was less likely to put up a fight.

For the last nine months of our relationship I thought daily about leaving, but was held in place by the paralyzing fear of what other people would think of me should I break off the engagement. Coupled with the bond that I had formed with my stepdaughter, that fear kept me nailed in place throughout the summer that followed our engagement.

After I left my fiancé and his daughter, I did not stay at my parents’ house; I preferred to couch-surf rather than grapple with the fallout of that relationship in front of the people who loved me. Eventually, shame drove me into a shell of a home that a friend had purchased with the intent of renovating it for his family. I would live out the winter there without heat or most basic amenities. I chose to be alone and miserable rather than show myself to others. I was sick more times that winter than I had ever been in my life. Not once did I consider reaching out for safe housing or a place to land.

Shame carves deep scars in people who have endured psychological abuse, myself included. In fact, I didn’t even acknowledge that what happened to me was abuse. That word in itself is filled with shame. Using it feels like you are invoking something bigger than yourself. Calling it abuse felt like I was making a big deal out of the situation, making excuses for myself, asking for attention I didn’t deserve. I told myself other people had endured so much worse than I had. I told myself it wasn’t that bad. I was ashamed of the abuse, but I was also ashamed to think of myself as a victim.

Shame is not easily shaken off. In fact, it can affect the core perception of ourselves and our identity. People who have experienced traumatic events may rewrite their self-perception to include feelings of disgust and humiliation, as well as negative comparisons of themselves with other people. Acute, chronic shame can erode self-esteem in ongoing and destructive ways.

Even now, I cannot banish the shame. As survivors of emotional abuse, the language of shame perfectly echoes the language used by our abusers. It tells us what they told us: that no one will believe us. That we aren’t worthy of support and compassion. That we aren’t just people who make mistakes, but rather that we are, at our very core, mistakes in and of ourselves. Shame tells you that, if you are truly seen, the world will judge you as harshly as you judge yourself. It tells you that you are unworthy of acceptance and belonging. It tells you lies. And even knowing what a liar shame is, I still fear the effects of allowing this part of myself to be seen.

The research done on intimate partner abuse has touched on shame in various ways over the years. An Australian study into shame in the context of trauma concluded that shame is “an effective tool for perpetrators to exploit the vulnerability of their victim and enhance their own power over the relationship dynamic.”

The researchers found that abusive partners deployed shame in different ways at various points in an abusive dynamic. During the relationship, shame worked to erode victims’ self-esteem, in order to keep them compliant with the will of their abuser. Shame worked both within and outside the abusive dynamic by rooting itself in social cues surrounding sex and gender, relegating intimate partner abuse to the private realm and discouraged victims from disclosing. As if all that wasn’t traumatic enough, the shame had the added effect of isolating victims post-trauma. Shame is relentless, not only keeping victims locked into their abusive relationships, but also ensuring that survivors do not feel comfortable speaking out or seeking support after they have left an abusive situation.

Shame tells the victim of psychological abuse that the degradation, putdowns, and judgements of their abuser are all true and thus threatening to the social self. Survivors are ashamed of the terrible people they believe they are. And even after they escape, lingering shame tells the victim of psychological abuse that people will think less of them if they tell the truth about what they have endured. That their peers will not accept them. That they will be rejected and outcast if they choose to speak their truth openly.

Shame, of course, is lying.

So how do we find our way back from shame? One word: empathy. In her influential 2012 TED talk about shame, Brown stated that:

If we’re going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy’s the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive. The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: “me too.”

And I’m here to tell you that it’s true. The more I have spoken openly among my peers about the truth of my relationship with my ex-fiance, the more acceptance and warmth I have experienced. The louder I shout, the more people have come forward to support me.

The empathy that others have shared with me has allowed me to be more gentle and empathetic with myself. And even though there have been some who have chosen not to believe me, or who have turned their backs on me because of what my openness has made them feel, the majority have applauded my courage in speaking out. Those kind, compassionate listeners have swaddled me in empathy, insulating me from my own shame as well as the judgment of others. When someone rejects me, I no longer feel the sting.

I have been a prisoner of shame for many years. In many ways, if I’m honest, I still am. But if shame needs my secrecy and silence to grow, speaking openly about the most shameful time in my life is a big step toward healing myself.

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