The Authentic Eclectic

Shame And Blame They Follow My Name

One Reason I Feel Shame (Teenage Angst)

Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash

This story is really difficult to tell. Not only because of what actually happened, the shame and guilt I feel about it, but also (even more so, I think) because of the fact that I became such a damn cliché. I would never have thought I would ever be That Girl. Even looking back, with the wisdom of hindsight attached, I would have bet real money on being just too smart to ever let that happen. I just couldn’t have been her. I simply couldn’t have been so gullible. Yet I was. I did. She was in fact Me — I Was That Girl. The girl who ‘had an affair with a teacher’. And not only that, the teacher whom I worked for as a babysitter. So, a double whammy of shame there really, twice the cliché.

I’ve never told this story before, not in its entirety. Well, except during therapy for my C-PTSD, and that only very recently. The shame is deeply rooted. The silence I’ve held for over thirty years has been cemented in by two things: the first I’ve always acknowledged in my head, a desire to protect the wife and children for whom I always had genuine feelings of friendship and fondness for (yes, I know, betrayal, hypocrisy, you don’t have to tell me — in fact, really, please don’t); the second, something I’ve come to realise has been a…