Learning Shame

If home is where we first learn what love feels like, it is also where we often learn what fear feels like.

After my parents divorced, life did not stop. Children still had school in the morning. Laundry still had to be folded. Birthdays still came and went. From the outside, it probably looked as though we were adjusting.

But grief rarely announces itself all at once.

It settles quietly into ordinary days.

My mother eventually remarried, and with that came another home, another set of expectations, and another version of family life. Looking back now, I can appreciate how much courage it must have taken for the adults in my life to begin again after so much heartbreak. Everyone was trying to build something stable from pieces that had already been broken.

As a child, however, I couldn't see any of that.

Eye-level view of a serene landscape with a vibrant sunset

I only knew that nothing felt familiar anymore.

The home I entered operated by different rhythms. Rules that made perfect sense there felt foreign to me because they were not the rhythms that had shaped my earliest years. I found myself constantly comparing what was with what had been, measuring every new experience against memories that grew more beautiful each time I revisited them.

I missed my father.

Not simply because he lived somewhere else, but because being with him reminded me of a version of life that no longer existed.

Children have a remarkable ability to live in two worlds at once. Outwardly, I was learning to navigate new routines, new relationships, and new expectations. Inwardly, I was still wandering through the hallways of the house filled with music, trying to understand why I couldn't go back.

My stepfather entered our lives carrying his own convictions and understanding of what a Christian home should look like. He inherited a family already wounded by loss, though I doubt any of us fully understood how deeply those wounds ran.

At the time, I didn't have language for what I was experiencing.

I only knew I longed to be understood.

Children do not usually rebel because they hate rules.

More often, they rebel because they do not feel seen.

I remember longing for someone to notice that beneath my frustration was grief. Beneath my resistance was fear. Beneath my anger was a little girl who still wondered whether her family had fallen apart because she somehow wasn't enough.

Instead, I often interpreted correction as confirmation.

See? You're failing again.

Shame has a remarkable ability to translate even ordinary moments into evidence against us.

It whispers that every mistake reveals who we really are.

Over time, something subtle began happening inside me.

My understanding of Christianity slowly became tangled with my experiences at home.

As a child, faith had once felt warm and inviting. It was connected to music around the dinner table, bedtime prayers, and parents who loved one another. Now it became associated with conflict, misunderstanding, and the uncomfortable feeling that I could never quite measure up.

The tragedy was not that God had changed.

The tragedy was that my picture of Him had.

I began confusing people with God.

Looking back, I don't believe anyone intended for that to happen. Families are imperfect collections of imperfect people trying to love one another while carrying burdens they often don't know how to set down.

Adults bring their own histories into parenting.

Children interpret those histories through their own wounds.

Somewhere in that complicated intersection, misunderstandings are born.

Mine certainly were.

As the years passed, I became increasingly convinced that freedom existed somewhere outside the boundaries of faith.

I envied classmates whose lives seemed less complicated. I imagined that if I could simply escape my circumstances, everything inside me would finally settle down. Like many teenagers, I mistook independence for healing.

I thought changing my environment would change my heart.

Instead, my heart came with me everywhere I went.

Meanwhile, another part of my identity was quietly taking shape.

Art.

While much of my world felt uncertain, a blank sheet of paper never judged me. A pencil never demanded explanations. Colors welcomed emotions I didn't yet know how to express.

When I drew, the constant noise inside my mind became quieter.

Sometimes I filled sketchbooks with faces.

Sometimes landscapes.

Sometimes things I couldn't have explained if someone had asked.

I wasn't trying to become an artist.

I was simply trying to breathe.

Looking back, I think God was already planting seeds long before I recognized His hand.

The very gift that became my refuge would one day become my calling.

At the time, though, I had no idea.

I simply knew that when life became confusing, I reached for a pencil.

As adolescence unfolded, the distance between the person others saw and the person I experienced inside myself continued to grow.

Outwardly, I learned how to smile.

I learned how to succeed in school.

I learned how to appear responsible.

Inwardly, shame had become almost invisible because it had become so familiar.

It no longer felt like an emotion.

It felt like my identity.

Years later, I would discover that shame always makes the same promise:

If you become someone else, you will finally be loved.

It is a promise that has lured countless people into perfectionism, addiction, achievement, approval, and endless self-reinvention.

I would spend years believing it.

The irony, of course, is that shame cannot be healed by becoming someone else.

It can only be healed by discovering that you were loved before you ever tried to earn it.

I wasn't ready to believe that yet.

Like so many young people standing on the edge of adulthood, I still imagined that freedom was waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.

College would soon offer me exactly what I thought I wanted:

A chance to become someone entirely new.

I had no idea that the person I was trying hardest to escape was myself.

I think this chapter is stronger because it doesn't accuse or defend anyone. It invites readers into the emotional landscape of your childhood and adolescence. That kind of restraint builds trust, and it allows the themes of shame, identity, and grace to emerge naturally instead of feeling imposed. It also sets up Chapter Three—your college years—as a search for a new identity that readers will already understand and emotionally invest in.