Kill shame with fire

A love letter to Brené Brown

I recently watched a short video about the difficulty of making friends in this day and age.

The video concludes with this quote: “One of the necessary steps to making a friend is to admitting that you want to make a friend, to being open to that. That requires a certain vulnerability. It requires you, in some ways, to reveal a need, a desire. And I think as we get older, there’s sometimes a sense of shame that comes along with not having enough friends, and actually saying ‘I need a friend’ is maybe one of the hardest sentences that any human being can utter.”¹

But why? Why does it feel so terrible to say “I need a friend?”

On an intellectual level, I understand that there is no shame whatsoever in wanting to improve your social life. After all, we’re biologically wired to seek connection with others. And in modern society, finding community is not the easiest task.

But practically speaking? I know all too well that being earmarked as A Person Who Needs Friends makes you want to flee the earth. Because I’ve definitely been there.

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In the early days of my neurology residency, work felt like a nonstop revolving door of new and uncomfortable situations. At that point, I was thinking help me I know NOTHING at least once a day.

September 2019 was not great. One woman told me “your clinical knowledge is…LACKING” and demanded to speak to my manager when I failed to explain why a basal ganglia stroke was causing her mother’s arm to fling out involuntarily. I had gone down hard when my attending was quizzing me about the particulars of the brachial plexus. Another attending had called me into his office to rip me a new one after I apparently made a decision that was stupid.

Basically, my confidence levels were at historic lows. Trust me, being a new resident will pour industrial-grade fertilizer into any soil where shame can take root.

One fall day, I arrived to the psychiatry unit, where I was rotating that month. Please let today be free of fuck-ups, AMEN, I thought to myself as I keyed into the unit. My hopes were quickly dashed when a nurse handed me a yellow disc with a button.

“You should carry around this panic button,” she told me. “One of our patients just told me that she would like to kill you.”

I was in that raw, vulnerable place where you take everything very personally, so I assumed it was because I was a shitty doctor. I sighed and opened the electronic medical record to read about my patients.

Later that day, I was tapping away my notes on Epic when I got a text from my program director: Do you have time to meet up so we can check in?

SHIT, I thought to myself. It happened. The psychiatrists told my program director that my clinical skills are bad enough to inspire homicidal mania. You can’t just sit on a WE-NEED-TO-TALK type of text, so I immediately called her. She confirmed that I wasn’t in trouble, just wanted to “check in.” So I headed to her office as soon as I had a pocket of free time.

I nervously sat across from my program director at the little table in her office. “How are you doing?” she asked.

Exhausted, stressed, pretty sure that all of my colleagues and patients think I’m a total dud?

“Uh. OK, I guess. Why do you ask?”

“I just want to make sure you’re feeling supported here.” She went on to continue, “I got vibes during our recent program meeting that you haven’t been very happy lately.” And then the kicker: “I worry that you’re feeling disconnected from the group here.”

Now, my program director was one of those people whose IQ and EQ are both about fifty billion, so I suppose it’s possible she could have gleaned all that from a thirty-minute meeting. But I knew the far more likely scenario was that somebody - an attending, another resident, I don’t know who - tipped her off that I seemed sad and lonely.

Great. I’ve been earmarked as a loser who needs friends. As my program director gave me words of kindness and encouragement, I weighed the feasibility of staying in my apartment and never interacting with humans again.²

For the record, I was eventually able to gain a foothold of confidence in both my clinical skills and sense of belonging among my peers. By the time I graduated from residency, this foothold had snowballed into a strong sense of satisfaction with my career’s direction. And graduation was bittersweet, because I knew I'd miss the people in my residency.

But that day in fall 2019? I left her office humming that stupid children’s song to myself: Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms!

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You cannot write a post about shame without paying homage to Brené Brown, the patron saint of killing shame with fire. Dr. Brown has researched, as well as written about, the topic of shame more extensively than anyone. “Shame is about the fear of disconnection,” she says. “When we are experiencing shame, we are steeped in the fear of being ridiculed, diminished,  or seen as flawed. We are afraid that we’ve exposed or revealed a part of us that jeopardizes our connection and our worthiness of acceptance.” As one of her research participants put it, “You work hard to show the world what it wants to see. Shame happens when your mask is pulled off and the unlikable parts of you are seen. It feels unbearable to be seen.”³

Seen. Seen. Seen. Whoever approached my program director wasn’t wrong. I WAS perpetually cranky. I WAS lonely. Feeling this way was bad enough. But when you’re visibly unhappy and lonely, to the point where someone else notices? That’s when spontaneous combustion feels like your best option.

So, it feels like poo when you know people are aware of your shortcomings. It can also feel horrifying when people try to help you. Dr. Brown’s work can explain why getting help feels scary. As she says, “Interestingly, to be perceived as ‘trying too hard’ was identified as an unwanted characteristic…we want perfection, but we don’t want to look like we’re working for it—we want it to just materialize somehow.”

My program director, and probably whoever tipped her off, wanted to help me. Getting help implies that you need to work a little harder at something than a normal person - and that you’re not achieving your goals naturally. And we really, really want to be good at things naturally. Forming social connections is definitely no exception to this phenomenon. This is why online dating was, until recently, stigmatized. You had to resort to meeting people this way. Because things weren’t happening naturally.

Here’s the thing, though. Sometimes people’s efforts to help you actually work. Which I will demonstrate with a much older story of being earmarked as Someone Who Needs Friends.

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Y’all, I was a WEIRD kid. I had severe social anxiety. My parents would literally bribe me with quarters to talk to people outside my family. I also learned how to read at a very early age, and was reading far above expected grade level by the time I started kindergarten. All this combined to make me an uncooperative, difficult student.

Based on my report cards from early elementary school, my poor teacher was clearly throwing shit at the wall and hoping something would stick. I have records showing my participation in the Students Managing Attitudes Responsibly Together (SMART) program for the behaviorally challenged. I also ended up in a program for the book-obsessed called Eager Readers. “The committee recommends a hearing evaluation,” read a Special Services document signed by six people.

The upshot was that I didn’t have a snowball’s shot in hell of fitting in with my peers. And yet, I did manage to make a few friends.

A decade later, I learned that the origin story of some of my older friendships involved an adult directing a little kid to befriend me. (Yep, I learned this about multiple friends. GOD I’M COOL.)

My friend Kristen's mom volunteered regularly in our first grade classroom. She had apparently seen me burst into tears when my teacher asked me to leave the reading corner, and figured I could use a friend. So, she told Kristen to make friends with me. My friend Eva, who was on the opposite end of the social skills spectrum from me, was assigned to me in a Peer Support Program that pairs popular children with the socially challenged.

I am not making this up.

Of course, I learned all this at a point where finding out someone’s mom bribed them to befriend me was hilarious, not traumatizing. By high school, I was reasonably well liked and academically top of the class. I also had many friendships that, as far as I know, formed without adult intervention. Nobody felt sorry for me anymore. If Kristen weren’t a real friend, she would have been long gone by the time we were teenagers. And yet, we graduated high school closer than we were as little kids.

Sure, there’s something mortifying about needing extra help in the social skills department. But you know what? Sometimes that shit works. Because I got real friends out of the efforts of a few concerned adults all those years ago.

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During some of the lonelier stretches of my post-college twenties, I attempted to chase down shame by coming up with a reason why I feel lonely - specifically, a reason that wasn’t my fault. I accomplished this through the infallible diagnostic acumen of the internet quiz. Here is a non-exhaustive list of diagnoses I’ve given myself: Asperger’s, social anxiety disorder, attachment problems, a Highly Sensitive Person, INTJ, oh wait actually ENTJ, scoring 6/113 on a Buzzfeed “Are you basic?” quiz, and the Game of Thrones character I’m most like is Daenerys (also courtesy of a Buzzfeed quiz).

It’s not easy being the mother of dragons.

Some of these diagnoses are obviously silly and made up. Others are normal variations of human personality. I have plenty in common with high functioning autistic and anxious people, but I am too emotionally, socially, and occupationally functional to qualify for any meaningful psychiatric diagnosis.

Why do people go down this wholly unproductive rabbit hole of self-diagnoses? A recent editorial in the New York Times by a young woman diagnosed with autism provided a convincing answer:

“Knowing I had autism gave me the permission I needed to accept my quirks and insecurities…The attraction of a flattened label is the way it provides meaning to common insecurities. Disorganization can be A.D.H.D.; social ineptitude can be autism. This approach provides quick relief from many of the anxieties central to teenage and young adult life. Am I weird? Is something wrong with me? Is this normal?­ When labeled, what makes you wince isn’t your fault, and it’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s what makes you unique.”⁴

The destigmatization of mental health problems is an unquestionably positive societal development. It’s great that we’ve increased the visibility of neurodivergent folks. But a side effect of all this is that many people are quick to wrap up their insecurities in the safety blanket of a diagnostic label, often from dubious sources (aka an internet quiz or TikTok influencer). This can lead to problems: you can dig yourself deeper into isolation (“I’m special and no one can understand me!”), and diminish your agency to make positive changes. Brené Brown speaks to this in her book Daring Greatly: “Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement…shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better.”⁵

Shame is honestly pretty useless.

If I could advise my twenty-something-year-old self, I would tell myself that I don’t need to find a “valid” reason for feeling lonely. Removing the layers of shame around loneliness allows me to say “yeah, that can happen,” and try to figure out a path forward. It allows me to stop marinating in certainty that I am uniquely fucked up, and accept that I exist in the mundane state of being a human with strengths and weaknesses.

If you find yourself saying “I need a friend,” you can make it the least interesting thing about you. It’s simply a mundane fact. My toothpaste is blue and the name of my electric provider is Eversource and I would like to have more local community than I do now.

Even though I don’t have any ride-or-die people within driving distance (yet!), I rarely feel lonely these days. Maybe I’ve reached the promised land of your thirties where you generally feel less self-conscious. But I think a lot of it stems from being able to say “eh, my in-person social life could be better, but that’s not a big deal. I can work towards improving it without saying ‘make more friends or else YOU SUCK.’ In the meantime, I’m grateful for my far-away loved ones and genuinely enjoy my own company.”

It’s okay to admit you’d like a friend. It’s okay if other people know you’d like to make a friend. It’s okay to get help making friends. For real. It’s okay.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpOan0hqdNA

2. Dear 2019 Hannah: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. ~ 2020 Hannah

3. I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” by Brené Brown

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/opinion/tiktok-mental-health.html

5. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown