Tag Archives: shame

The lost art of joy – Vulnerability

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“Masquerade!
Paper faces on parade …
Masquerade!
Hide your face,
so the world will
never find you!”

It was 1994 and I was a clown.

I say that quite literally. I was at Hillsong conference, doing a stream on drama and performance, and one of the available workshops was clowning. It was a transformative day in so many respects. We all put on clown clothes, with wig, full face paint and the big red nose, and I managed to score some of those big red clown shoes too. After the workshop, the facilitator encouraged us to leave the costume on and practice our new skills amongst the unsuspecting Hillsong delegates. So I spent the rest of the day, including riding the bus back to the main convention centre, dinner and the evening concert in full clown costume.

It was exhilarating.

I was painfully shy as a teenager. Actually, I had social anxiety disorder, debilitating shyness. I discovered drama and performance through the church youth group I was attending at the time and it helped me overcome a lot of insecurities and grow in confidence. Still, performing improv style in front of hundreds of strangers was not something I was comfortable with … until I donned the clown outfit. I had the perfect disguise – my own identity was hidden, and my new identity was associated with fun and laughter. I made hundreds of people laugh that afternoon because I could dance around, make silly jokes and sing silly song without fear of personal ridicule. I got three hundred people in the food court at dinner time to all sing Happy Birthday to someone. Sometimes I didn’t need to say anything at all, people just laughed at the shoes. Eventually I had to take off the wig and the shoes and literally wipe the smile off my face, and I was back to plain old me.

From ancient cultural traditions to the modern superhero, we’ve used masks to create new personas or hide old ones. Masks empower a temporary transformation. When you wear a mask, you disguise who you are which frees you from your own limitations, and at the same time, it projects a different persona, empowering you to act within a new set of rules that the mask allows.

I got to hide who I was and clown around because of the mask the clown costume provided me, but it wasn’t the real me, the authentic me. It was a version of me the mask had created. While the mask I wore that day made lots of people happy (including me), it wasn’t sustainable. I couldn’t stay as a clown forever. If I tried, I would have worn myself out. At best, the mask gave a surge of temporary happiness, not long term joy.

Our social connections bear a striking resemblance to my clowning experience. We live in a society which encourages masks. We are consumed with creating the right appearance, from designer clothes to botox injections. We have to say the right words to be liked by the right people, in our on-line and our real world communities. We harshly criticise those who don’t share our beliefs, who don’t fit into our ‘tribe’, and we try desperately to ensure we aren’t treated in the same way.

We fear real connection, because we fear shame and rejection.

We wear our masks, we put our paper faces on parade, hiding our faces so the world will never find us.

I have a wonderfully wise friend who, in recent conversation about this subject, said this,

“Wearing a mask all the time is exhausting. Sure, we all have to wear a mask to get through life intact … but we need to be able to take it off with people we really care about.  Otherwise we disconnect completely and that can be a very lonely place to be in all the time.”

I also love the work of Brene Brown, who has so many applicable quotes, it’s really hard to limit myself to just one … and that’s why I have two!

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

and

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Shame suffocates deep, sustainable joy. We might be able to use our mask to inspire a temporary happiness, but it’s only through authentic connection that we can experience joy in the truest sense.

Being authentic, being real, being vulnerable is scary! But without authenticity, without vulnerability – without being real – we can’t form the connections to others that allow real joy to flourish.

We don’t have to open ourselves up completely to everyone, but we do need to practice vulnerability with those who are most important to us. By being real, and being vulnerable, at least with those of us who are the most important to us, we can enhance our connection and in doing so, grow our joy.

‘Vagina’, and other ‘offensive’ medical terms

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Back in my university days, I emceed a 21st birthday party for a friend of mine. One of the games I got everyone to play was the peg game.

The premise is simple enough. Everyone gets a clothes peg at the beginning of the party, and whoever had the most pegs at the end of the party was declared the winner. In order to get other people’s pegs, you had to catch them saying certain words that I arbitrarily chose to be forbidden. The words I banned just happened to be “Happy”, “Birthday” and “Craig”, the name of the party boy. It made singing “Happy Birthday” at the end of the night more challenging, but everyone still had a great time.

The peg game on a cultural scale is the modern scourge of political correctness. Terms like ‘manhole’ are replaced by ‘personal access units’ to avoid upsetting women, while ‘baba black sheep’ has been changed to ‘baba rainbow sheep’ in some schools, in case the nursery rhythm could be deemed racist. Meanwhile, ‘brainstorming’ is unacceptable because it may offend epileptics.

Proving that the centuries-old terminology of medicine is not immune from the PC plague, the Journal of Sexual Medicine has published an article in which the authors declare that the term ‘vulvovaginal atrophy’ should no longer be used because the word ‘vagina’ is not publicly acceptable [1].

Perhaps I’m just old and inflexible now, but to me this smacks of puerility and paternalism (sorry … authoritarianism, just in case I offended fathers). Lets face it, lots of medical terms have stigma attached to them, or are in some way publicly unacceptable. Lets rename herpes for a start … how about ‘Blistering of the Reproductive Parts’ or BoRP for short, unless someone is offended by the term ‘reproductive’. Maybe, ‘Blistering of ones bits’ … damn it, that’s shortened to BooB, which is an offensive reference to mammary glands. ‘Blistering of bits’ … but then that’s shortened to BoB which is offensive to people named Robert. I guess we’re stuck with ‘herpes’ then. In the end, it doesn’t matter what term you use, because the connotation or stigma is in the meaning of the word, not the word itself.

And how childish is it to be offended by the word ‘vagina’ in the first place. Half the planet has one for goodness sake. Refer to it by any other word, and no one cares. Va-jay-jay, flower, pussy, muffin, her ‘Downton Abbey’ … there are too many euphemisms to list. To me, they all sound like they belong in either the playground of a kindergarten, or a high school boys locker room (depending on the term, of course). And yet somehow the neutral, anatomical term is apparently less acceptable.

What really worries me is the example this sets for our children. I went to great pains to teach my children the anatomically correct words for their body parts from an early age, and answer their questions about their ‘private parts’ openly without embarrassment. Why? Not just because I’m a doctor, but because they’ll grow up to view their bodies as normal and natural, not shameful or taboo. This is beneficial for their health and for protection from child-sex predators. From The Atlantic magazine, “Teaching children anatomically correct terms, age-appropriately, says Laura Palumbo, a prevention specialist with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), promotes positive body image, self confidence, and parent-child communication; discourages perpetrators; and, in the event of abuse, helps children and adults navigate the disclosure and forensic interview process.” [2]

What sort of example does it set when, as has happened in the US, a biology teacher was suspended because he said ‘vagina’ in class, or a Michigan State politician was removed from their parliament because she said ‘vagina’ on the floor of the chamber? What sort of example does it set when major medical journals are advocating that neutral, anatomical words are considered offensive? A poor one, I’d wager. All it achieves is to further stigmatise our bodies while impeding good communication, “reinforcing the culture of secrets and silence perpetrators rely on for cover.”

Rather than stop using the word, we just need to get over it. I’m not suggesting that we go around yelling ‘vagina’ at the top of our lungs, or gratuitously slip it into conversation at every opportunity. Lets be mature adults instead. Lets talk about any parts of our body in an appropriate context, without shame or condemnation. That’s how we protect our most vulnerable, and live in a truly progressive society.

References

  1. Portman, D.J., et al., Genitourinary Syndrome of Menopause: New Terminology for Vulvovaginal Atrophy from the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health and The North American Menopause Society. J Sex Med, 2014 doi: 10.1111/jsm.12686
  2. Buni, C., The Case for Teaching Kids ‘Vagina,’ ‘Penis,’ and ‘Vulva’. The Atlantic, 2013, Atlantic Monthly Group, Washington USA