Welcome to the house of shame…

By Kira Emslie (aged 2, 12, 16,18 and 31)

I knew shame, secrecy and solitude before I knew how to read and write.

I will never know the exact cause; perhaps it was my Mum’s emotional instability as she tried to figure out how to be a homeless, single mum in those first few months and years of our life together. Maybe it was my absent father, kept apart from us because he couldn’t get a visa to join us in the UK.

My parents got pregnant with me accidently. They were traveling, neither with a place to live and a rocky relationship that wouldn’t have lasted without me. I was two when Mum and I got our first stable place to live. And she was struggling to cope with all the stresses of those first two chaotic years.

Whatever the reason, I learned that it was my responsibility to fix it and when she cried or had an outburst, it was my job to make it better. But of course I couldn’t do the job of an adult at that age (by then I was five, six, seven…) and the pressure I felt showed-up soon enough. I began wetting the bed at night and it was mortifying… no more than that. It was fucking mortifying.

Then there was school, a full-on nightmare. I got bullied, who knows why – kids pick up on stuff and they can be little shits left to their own devices. But I couldn’t burden my parents with that sort of stuff, after all this must be my fault, so I kept it inside and felt ashamed for letting myself be bullied. It became a secret from my parents.

And all this bottling up had to come out somewhere and the worse it got, the more the shameful bed weeing went on. It got so bad that every time it happened, I would wake up in horror, desperate to hide the sodden evidence. Sleep overs at friends or sleep over parties were the worst. I would try to keep myself up all night panicking about it happening and all the while desperately not wanting anyone to know.  It was impossible and I felt ashamed and disgusting.

This was the story until I was 12, weeing and  bullying were my world. Then Mum must have noticed something, or been told by someone, after all these years and took me out of school to be home schooled instead, which of course was no panacea for me, but was her way of trying to help. The bullying was replaced by loneliness and my old friend helplessness – here I was once having to grow myself up, without friends or grown-up grown-ups.  

With all that mess inside my head, I started developing some terrible habits. I believed I was disgusting, bad inside, and not worthy of real friendships or connections because I was out of control. At 13 I did something about that sense of being out of control and the bed wetting stopped, I could command that, and for my next act I did what all imperfectly, ill-adjusted teenage girls do when they’re all at sea, and embraced the world of eating disorders.

The old me had to be put to bed, buried in the past. I was determined not to be who I’d been before, and would do anything to pretend to be someone else. I fabricated truths (I was a fake-news monster before it was fashionable), exaggerated, and tried to desperately fit in with anyone around me. I could be whoever anyone around me wanted me to be. Of course, this only made me feel even more alone, where there should have a been a growing sense of ME was instead a swirling hole, the opposite of me. This didn’t fool anybody, and people kept telling me to stop pretending and be myself, whoever that was? And for god’s sake get real! The idea of being me was out of the question. I had a lifetime of experience that the real me was horrible, disgusting and it was not an option.

When I turned 16, I left home. I needed to escape, start over and find some balm for the unbearable shame of my past. I headed to Mexico and for a while all my old troubles seemed to fall away. Respite at last, I was a woman of the world – despite my obvious youth and naivety. And more than respite, there was affirmation. I started to get a lot of attention from the Mexican boys. Being a white girl, they glorified me and my appearance and it went to my head, especially after all the bad years. I got hooked on the validation and how it made me feel awesome in my own skin. I loved the sensation of being desired by so many men. I felt seen and liked, something I’d never experienced before. Looking back, I can see this as ‘bad’ and fucked-up, but at the time it was manna from heaven. Unsurprisingly it also played straight into my eating disorder.  

Two years on I stepped into another maelstrom, although it looked a pretty good move at the time. I was at a party in Scotland and met the man who I would marry. He was 32, 14 years older than me, and absolutely adored me in every way. He put me on a pedestal and worshiped me – I was his goddess and I can tell you it made me feel fucking great. For a bit. We had a wedding, created a life together and he provided a safe place for me to heal, grow and generally let go of so much of the past.  The relationship would last five years.

Adoration and worship are no basis for a real-life relationship, whatever old-School Disney movies have to say on the matter. While it helped to begin with, the seeming solidity of being married saw me start to grow-up and come into my own. However, this wasn’t part of his plan. While I became more real, more myself, he became insecure and turned to drink, drugs and other women. And as things fell apart so all my old habits came back to life, out of the cesspit I’d grown-up in. Time to say hello once more to a world of shame, guilt, terror, and embarrassment. I believed it was my fault, that I was obviously not thin enough, impressive enough, I was simply WRONG.

I got jealous and insecure around him. He began to be mean, to throw his power around with me, old fashioned physical power to go with all the usual mindfuckery. I walked in on him in bed with a woman when he was drugged up to the eyeballs and I was terrified. But who would believe anything I said? I was after all the teenager who’d told any story, fabricated any truth, to be seen and get her needs met. I was the girl who’d cried wolf on a whole load of occasions - and if I spoke up about what was happening in my not-happy-ever-after marriage, maybe no one would believe me.

It took me many lonely months to find the courage to ask my mum if we could go away together. In a rental car park in Albuquerque USA, I finally burst into tears and told her everything that had gone wrong. I’d only been married a year, but I had to get out.

            She was really there for me, meeting my story with compassion and taking every word I said as truth, she could see that this time I was speaking from my reality not the fantasy of my early teens – and that was the lifeline I needed. We told my dad on my return from the States, and he helped me to get out of the situation I was in, taking care of the hard-nosed logistics that come when you have to put safe distance between your daughter and her bad husband.

I made the decision to go into therapy, really work on myself so I wouldn’t keep repeating those hard grooved patterns that kept me locked into a life that would do me no good. I needed to learn to have confidence in who I was, work on my feelings of worthiness, release me from that goddamn ghost of shame that seemed to have haunted me from the very beginning. Therapy and talking really helped me, although, I never told anyone I had been a bed wetter, somethings were still too painful to admit – or maybe if I went public with it, then the rest of the story would have to come out too. I’ve stayed in therapy on and off ever since, always believing that personal development is a choice for me, that my life doesn’t have to stay stuck and I have real choices to make and own.

It’s been 10 years since that conversation in an Albuquerque car rental lot, and I’m still recovering. I still struggle with my eating; it’s pretty disordered. I have been in another toxic, addiction fuelled relationship and come out the other side. I’m learning to fail better as the saying goes! I know I’ll repeat a few lessons and each time I’ll come out stronger. But I still struggle some days with self-worth, especially when I don’t speak up and ask for what I need.

But what really saved me was finding one rock of a friend. Someone who I was able to share everything with slowly and in my own time. Someone who was there with me by choice, not a paid professional. It took us five years or so to find and cement our trust, compassion and loyalty, time well spent. She’s restored my faith in myself, helped me experience being worthy of love, connection and belonging. That I wasn’t alone in the world, that she would be there for me no matter what.

When I lost my father last year, she stood by my side every step of the way. She helps me navigate my world gently, always by my side with care, listening and offering her own vulnerabilities as we build the layers of trust between us. With her love and friendship, I have had the strength to grow into the woman I am today, to believe in myself enough to tell this story to the world, to believe I deserve love and family and unconditional acceptance of all of who I am. She believes in me even when I don’t and for this I will always be in her debt, in her love. 

I hope by sharing these parts of myself with the world, others will be able to feel less alone. It’s all I ever needed, one person to say: “I see you for all that you are, you are beautiful inside and out and enough without having to earn it.”