Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From City of Night (1963)

  Almost despising me, I knew, for having duped them—for having exposed my own panic to them when they had sought momentary refuge from theirs in the flaunted, posed lack of it in me—the two moved away, trying perhaps—I think with perverse pleasure—to forget they had ever wanted me. Now theyre talking to a youngman who looks as unconcerned as I had tried to pretend to be with them. I moved back, against the wall, feeling a wave of depression sweep over me; depression made many times more horrible by the fact that, although unfocused (like the thousand unnamed fears experienced in the dark when you know only that Something lurks, waits), it had something to do with vulnerability. I closed my eyes, right at the point where I will admit: Im going to be drunk. But I cling to sobriety when I hear someone say: “Youll feel much better if we leave this place.” When I opened my eyes, I saw a man standing before me looking at me strangely. “Im staying right around the corner,” he said. “Will you come with me?” Outside, a small stranded hotdog wagon steams ominously like a relic out of hell. 2 “But you do want love,” Jeremy said. This time there was not the slightest note of a question. Hes so composed, so sure. And I think purposely: Only a short time earlier my legs straddled his shoulders. And at that thought I feel fully armed to cope with his words, aimed, Im sure now, at some kind of revelation of me. It is only their purpose which is to be determined. “I want to be wanted,” I corrected. “Oh, yes, I forgot.... Maybe because Ive stopped running away.” His words slapped at me. This time they resounded unequivocally with the petty, malicious put-down of so many of the others—and I slapped back viciously: “Now you run after?” “In a way,” he said, unperturbed by the clearly vicious intent of my words—and I have the feeling that he may have purposely exposed himself to them. “If you mean that what I do now, sexually, I do without inhibitions—that I can talk to the people I want instead of waiting to be spoken to—attaching no great symbolic significance to it, well, then, youre right.” “And you think it has a ‘great symbolic significance’ for me?” I asked him. I know that possibly, later, I’ll regret these words. Now, freed by the dormant effects of the liquor and the pills into heightened lucidity and rashness, I dont care. The feeling may not last.

• From Educated (2018)

  He asked what he could do for me, and I said I didn’t know. No one could give me what I wanted, because what I wanted was to be remade. “I can help,” he said, “but you’ll need to tell me what’s bothering you.” His voice was gentle, and that gentleness was cruel. I wished he would yell. If he yelled, it would make me angry, and when angry I felt powerful. I didn’t know if I could do this without feeling powerful. I cleared my throat, then talked for an hour. The bishop and I met every Sunday until spring. To me he was a patriarch with authority over me, but he seemed to surrender that authority the moment I passed through his door. I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from me like a healer draws infection from a wound. When the semester ended, I told him I was going home for the summer. I was out of money; I couldn’t pay rent. He looked tired when I told him that. He said, “Don’t go home, Tara. The church will pay your rent.” I didn’t want the church’s money. I’d made the decision. The bishop made me promise only one thing: that I wouldn’t work for my father. My first day in Idaho, I got my old job back at Stokes. Dad scoffed, said I’d never earn enough to return to school. He was right, but the bishop had said God would provide a way and I believed it. I spent the summer restocking shelves and walking elderly ladies to their cars. I avoided Shawn. It was easy because he had a new girlfriend, Emily, and there was talk of a wedding. Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in high school. Her temperament was compliant. Shawn played the same games with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had no doubt—although those words were not mine. They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them. When the summer ended, I returned to BYU with only two thousand dollars. On my first night back, I wrote in my journal: I have so many bills I can’t imagine how I’m going to pay them. But God will provide either trials for growth or the means to succeed. The tone of that entry seems lofty, high-minded, but in it I detect a whiff of fatalism. Maybe I would have to leave school. That was fine. There were grocery stores in Utah. I would bag groceries, and one day I’d be manager. I was shocked out of this resignation two weeks into the fall semester, when I awoke one night to a blinding pain in my jaw. I’d never felt anything so acute, so electrifying.

• From Educated (2018)

  Next we were supposed to leap, reach upward and spin. My feet remained planted. Instead of flinging my arms above my head, I lifted them only to my shoulders. When the other girls crouched to slap the stage, I tilted; when we were to cartwheel, I swayed, refusing to allow gravity to do its work, to draw the sweatshirt any higher up my legs. The music ended. The girls glared at me as we left the stage—I had ruined the performance—but I could barely see them. Only one person in that room felt real to me, and that was Dad. I searched the audience and recognized him easily. He was standing in the back, the lights from the stage flickering off his square glasses. His expression was stiff, impassive, but I could see anger in it. The drive home was only a mile; it felt like a hundred. I sat in the backseat and listened to my father shout. How could Mother have let me sin so openly? Was this why she’d kept the recital from him? Mother listened for a moment, chewing her lip, then threw her hands in the air and said that she’d had no idea the costume would be so immodest. “I’m furious with Caroline Moyle!” she said. I leaned forward to see Mother’s face, wanting her to look at me, to see the question I was mentally asking her, because I didn’t understand, not at all. I knew Mother wasn’t furious with Caroline, because I knew Mother had seen the sweatshirt days before. She had even called Caroline and thanked her for choosing a costume I could wear. Mother turned her head toward the window. I stared at the gray hairs on the back of Dad’s head. He was sitting quietly, listening to Mother, who continued to insult Caroline, to say how shocking the costumes were, how obscene. Dad nodded as we bumped up the icy driveway, becoming less angry with every word from Mother. The rest of the night was taken up by my father’s lecture. He said Caroline’s class was one of Satan’s deceptions, like the public school, because it claimed to be one thing when really it was another. It claimed to teach dance, but instead it taught immodesty, promiscuity. Satan was shrewd, Dad said. By calling it “dance,” he had convinced good Mormons to accept the sight of their daughters jumping about like whores in the Lord’s house. That fact offended Dad more than anything else: that such a lewd display had taken place in a church. After he had worn himself out and gone to bed, I crawled under my covers and stared into the black. There was a knock at my door. It was Mother. “I should have known better,” she said. “I should have seen that class for what it was.” —MOTHER MUST HAVE FELT guilty after the recital, because in the weeks that followed she searched for something else I could do, something Dad wouldn’t forbid.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Here’s what she shared with us: The mind is a broken thing. It runs, races, and paces, taking me places that consume me, distract me, and tempt me to believe I’m not good enough, no…never will be. You’ve got to strive to survive, to thrive, to stay alive in this world of ever-changing, evolving ideals, images, idols, and icons. You have to work for your worth, clean yourself up, do more, be better, don’t show weakness, be tough, try to be enough, collect piles of treasures, trinkets, and stuff. Maybe then…you’ll be loved. Yes, the mind is a broken thing. If unguarded and let loose, it can attack you and snatch you and trap you, leaving you stuck, self-obsessed, asleep, and enslaved. But “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” Your mind doesn’t have to be out of control. Those thoughts and loops and cycles can stop. You’re not left unarmed; you have a tool to interrupt the racing, pacing, list making, restless, unending, repeating, defeating, distracting, disorienting, consuming, controlling thoughts. Yes! You can interrupt and fight against the lies, the arrows from the enemy that fly in the darkness of the night. They are coming for you, but they don’t want to be realized. You have the Word, you have light, you have life. Wake up from your twisted perspective that keeps you despairingly focused on yourself. Instead, fix your eyes to see and know and understand what really matters. You’re not a victim of your own mind, because if you’re in Christ, you have victory. A God who loves you, knows you, sees you, has shown you a love so radical, intimate, personal, and wild that He would painfully choose to lose a child to reconcile all mankind. “While we were still sinners, Christ died.” It’s hard to fully grasp the vastness of His steadfastness, His mercy, and His grace that move past any mistakes that you or I have made to pull us from the pit that we were once in. And if you truly knew Him, you would love Him. You would believe Him. And you would kill any seed of a thought that would twist and thwart and take your mind from whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable. Yes, the mind is a broken thing, But God’s Spirit dwells deeper, His Word rings truer, For in Christ Jesus we are free.17 We are free. Will we live in tandem with Him, aware of this reality? Or stay in our brokenness? We have a choice. [image file=Image00033.jpg] 9 Lifelines I Choose to Be Known Just before Zac and I adopted Cooper, our son who spent the first four years of his life at an orphanage in the hills of Rwanda, we went through “adoption training.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  I asked him. “Outside,” the man says, then noticing me hesitating suspiciously: “I just want us to take a little walk. Dont worry—I’ll pay you.” That night, for about an hour, I walked with him through Times Square, from block to block in that area, into the park, silently—just walked. A couple of times I was tempted to leave, walk away with his clothes—but Im curious and I need the money. At the end of the hour we returned to the room, I removed the clothes. He didnt touch me once. He hands me $10.00. I looked at him surprised. I thought somehow I had disappointed him, and I felt grossly rejected. “Thats all,” he said; he smiles. “You were fine, just fine,” he says, sensing whats troubling me. “But, you see,” he said, rather wistfully, “thats all I want; to be seen along Times Square with a youngman in those clothes.” A few minutes later, I was back on 42nd Street, and Pete was still there, slouched outside the spaghetti place. He smiled at me. “Some scene, huh?” he said. “Did he give you anything for it?” I ask him. “What do you think, spote? He gives me five bucks for everyone I get him. I meet him once every two, three weeks. He spots someone he digs, I introduce him. Hes too shy to talk to anyone, so I do it for him, and he lays some bread on me—and I dont have to do nothing,” he says smartly. “Did you ever go with him— spote?” I said. “Oh, sure!” He laughed. “And thats all he digs, spote. He dresses everyone he goes with in that motorcycle drag—and it bugs him for me to call it that. Then he walks around with them. Hardly anybody ever walks away with his clothes—theyre too curious. Hes hung up on that drag, thats how he gets his Kicks.... Oh, sure, I been with him.” Then proudly—his gaze shifting back and forth from me to the street, pegging people—he adds. “Im the only cat he walked around with two nights— in a row!” 2 Pete was a familiar figure in that world of Times Square. With his slouched army fatigue cap and his thick shaggy army jacket which he had dyed brown, his bouncing walk—it was easy to spot him in any crowd. After that first night, I would meet him often, never by arrangement, but always at about the same time, around the same place. We would hang around together for a while, and then, compulsively, we’d split.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  My vision blurs. We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes. I cannot pull it back. Fog seeps in from the rugby pitch where Prideaux strode. Slow, white breaths. There’s a hush in my head; it grows louder. ‘I am not a spy,’ I’d told my father. ‘I’m a historian.’ But watching everyone around the table, their faces entranced by my hawk, it seems I’m not even that any more. I am the Fool, I think, dully. I used to be a Research Fellow, a proper academic. Now I am in motley. I am not Helen any more. I am the hawk woman. The hawk pulls on the rabbit leg. Wasps circle her like electrons. They land on her feet, on her nose, seeking shreds of rabbit flesh to take back to their paper nest in some nearby Cambridge loft. She flicks them away with her beak and I watch their yellow-and-black striped abdomens spinning through the air before they right themselves and fly back to the hawk. This summer lunch feels deeply unreal. Shadows of damask and silver, a photogravure in an album, something from Agatha Christie, from Evelyn Waugh, from another time. But the wasps are real. They are here, and they are present. So is the hawk, the sun at their centre. And me? I do not know. I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  The truth is that the God who is creator and sovereign over the universe and the God who conquered sin and death is the same God who wants to be with you in your pain, doubt, shame, and other circumstances. “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.”4 LIE: I’ll feel better if I stay distracted. TRUTH: Only being with God will satisfy me. Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.5 I CHOOSE TO BE STILL WITH GOD. The thing that became abundantly clear to me, once I initiated contact with God again, was that the fears I’d harbored about connecting with Him were completely unfounded. This should have come as no surprise. If I were to ask you to complete the sentence “When we draw near to God…,” what truth follows it? “He will draw near to us.” The line is taken from James 4, from a passage cautioning believers against being overtaken by the ways of the world. The apostle wrote, Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.6 And then in summary he wrote, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”7 When we humble ourselves before God, submitting fully to Him, regardless of what has kept us away—and regardless of what we were doing while we were away and for how long we allowed that chasm to grow—we find He was always there, waiting for us to come back. [image file=Image00031.jpg] The Power of Focused Attention Friend, we were physically built for silence. God designed us this way, and science confirms that design. Secondary to the spiritual impact of time alone with God, according to the emerging field of neurotheology, quiet meditation quite literally changes our brains.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  In Philippians 2, he wrote, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.”9 [image file=Image00045.jpg] And what was that mind-set? Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.10 He emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant. He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death. Does this sound as convicting to you as it does to me? A sacrifice requiring emptiness, ultimate meekness, devastating lowliness of heart—this wasn’t merely a kind act from Jesus for humankind. It was also intended to be an example—as in, a move that His followers would consistently make. Inviting the death of self-centeredness. Enduring the death of dreams. Allowing for the death of hyperconsumerism. Being least awesome, least liked, last. Jesus humbled Himself deeply so that we’d be compelled to live lives of deep humility too. That is, if we so choose. The Upside of Humility When we realize we’ve bought into the lie of our own greatness and we make the shift to choose humility, we then can follow the example of Jesus, who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped…” who “emptied himself…” who took on “the form of a servant…” who “humbled himself…” who became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” When we mimic the qualities that motivated these acts, we put God in His rightful place. We replace the lie of our greatness with the truth of who God is—and how needy we are apart from Him. Humility becomes the only logical posture of our hearts. The day after my little lashing-out episode and under undeniable conviction from God, I pulled aside my coworker and asked for her forgiveness. “I need to apologize for something I said yesterday,” I started. “I was wrong, and I’m so sorry. My reaction was really unfair.” You know how I wondered whether maybe she hadn’t even noticed the slight, whether maybe she’d looked past it and just moved on? Yeah. Not so much. “Can I cool off for a while,” she asked quietly, “and then we can sit down and talk this out?” I had hurt her—deeply. She’d been miserable for twenty-four hours.

• From City of Night (1963)

  There had been none of the hurried hungriness of some of the others. And then—as I sat up on the bed again, farther from him now—he said this, completely unexpectedly, without hint of its coming, without preparation; bluntly: “You want, very much, to be loved—but you dont want to love back, even if you have to force yourself not to.” I faced him on the bed. He was looking at me steadily. I grasp defensively for the streetpose that will dismiss his statement. “Oh, man, dig,” I said, “I just want to ball while I can.” “I was standing right near you at the bar when you were talking to the two men you were with,” he said. “I heard you—everything you said—everything about ‘pretending’—about being just as frightened as everyone else.” I felt my face burning with shame. Emotionally, in that bar, for those few moments, I had stripped myself naked; and this man had witnessed it. “Dont be embarrassed,” he said quickly. “I had sensed something like that, even before I heard you in the bar. I’d seen you several times before—the first time was near the French Market. I saw you staring at the cooped-up roosters there, I saw your reaction when they seemed to want to claw their way out of their cage. Do you know that you actually winced? Do you remember?” Yes, I remembered—and I remember the eery feeling that I had been in that cage. “I would have talked to you then,” Jeremy went on, “but you walked away very quickly.... I knew you wouldnt speak to me—it’s difficult for some people, and I was sure it was so for you.... I was right, wasnt I?—about not wanting to love back; not even wanting to feel anything—for one person.” Curtly, squashing out the cigarette to indicate that the direction of the conversation will push me to leave, I said: “I dont even know that I want to be ‘loved.’ I just know that I want to feel Wanted. I dont even want to feel that I need any one person.” “Just many,” he said ineluctably. “Im sorry,” he apologized. “Dont be... ‘bugged’” he laughed. His use of that word, so obviously for my benefit, made me laugh too. He seems to realize that Im not so eager now to leave; and he seems to sense, too, my unfocused fears of the streets. Perhaps taking advantage of that, he pursues the subject. “Youve never loved anyone?” he asked me. I wanted to say something flippant that will make his question seem ridiculous, particularly at this carnival time. Instead, I answered hurriedly. “Not the way you mean.” But I think of my Mother—her love like a stifling perfume.... Yes, that was “love”—on both sides—a devouring potentially choking thing—like Sylvia’s love for her son—but love nonetheless....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took off the rest of my clothes, then pulled my night-gown over my head - then remembered my hair. I could not sleep with the plait still fastened to me. I glanced towards Alice again - she had paled at my words, but still watched - then pulled at the hairpins until the chignon came loose. From the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fall open. I ran my fingers through my flat, shorn locks; the action - and the cigarette that I had just smoked - made me feel wonderfully calm. I said: ‘You can’t tell, can you, that it’s a false one?’ Now Alice sat up with the blankets gripped before her. ‘You needn’t look so horrified,’ I said. ‘I told you all, I wrote and told you: I’ve joined the act; I’m not Kitty’s dresser any more. I’m on the stage myself, now, doing what she does. Singing, dancing...’ She said, ‘You never wrote it like it was really true. If it was true we would have heard! I don’t believe you.’ ‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’ She shook her head. ‘Singing,’ she said. ‘Dancing. That’s a tart’s life. You couldn’t. You wouldn’t...’ I said, ‘I do’; and just to show her that I meant it, I lifted my nightie and did a little shuffle across the rug. The dance seemed, like the hair, to frighten her. When she spoke next it was with a show of bitterness - but her voice was thick with rising tears. ‘I suppose you lift your skirts like that, do you? and show your legs, on stage, for all the world to look at!’ ‘My skirts?’ I laughed. ‘Good heavens, Alice, I don’t wear skirts! I didn’t get my hair cut off to wear a frock. It’s trousers I wear: I wear gentlemen’s suits -!’ ‘Oh!’ Now she had begun to cry. ‘What a thing to do! What a thing to do, in front of strangers!’ I said. ‘You thought it good enough when Kitty did it.’ ‘Nothing she did was ever good! She took you off, and has made you strange. I don’t know you at all. I wish you’d never gone with her - or never come back!’ She lay down, pulled the blankets to her chin, and wept; and since I don’t know a girl who is not moved to tears by the sight of her own sister weeping, I climbed in beside her, and my own eyes began to sting. But when she felt me close she gave a jerk. ‘Get off me!’ she cried, and wriggled away. She said it with such real passion, such horror and grief, I could do nothing but what she asked, and let her lie at the cold edge of the bed. Soon she ceased her shaking, and fell silent; and my own eyes dried, and my face grew hard again.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Father asked after Kitty, and I said that she was well. Where was she playing now? they asked me. Where were we living? Rosina said, there had been talk that I had gone upon the stage myself -? And at that I only answered, that I did ‘sometimes join Kitty in the act’. ‘Well, fancy that!’ I cannot say what squeamishness still made me keep the fact of my success from them. It was, I think, because the act - as I have said - was so entangled with my love: I could not bear to have them pry at it, or frown at it, or pass the idea of it on to others, carelessly ... It was, I suppose now, a kind of priggishness; indeed, I hadn’t been amongst them more than half-an-hour before George, my cousin, gave a cry: ‘What’s happened to your accent, Nance? You’ve gone all lardy-dah.’ I looked at him in real surprise, then listened hard next time I spoke. It was quite true, my voice had changed. I was not posh, as he had claimed, but there is a certain lilt that theatre people have - a rather odd, unpredictable mixture of all the accents of the halls, from coster-man to lion comique; and I, all unknowingly, had picked it up. I sounded rather like Kitty - occasionally, even like Walter. I had never realised it till now. We drank our tea; there was a lot of fussing over the little boy. Someone handed him to me for me to nurse - when I took him, however, he cried. ‘Oh dear!’ said his mother, tickling him. ‘Your Aunty Nance will think you a real cry-baby.’ She took him from me, then held him near my face: ‘Shake hands!’ She seized his arm and waved it. ‘Shake hands with Aunty Nancy, like a proper little gent!’ He jerked at her hip, like some great swollen pistol that at any second might go off; but I dutifully took his fingers in my own, and squeezed them. Of course, he snatched his hand away at once, and only wailed the louder. Everybody laughed. George caught the baby up and swung him high, so that his hair brushed the cracked and yellowed plaster of the ceiling. ‘Who’s a little soldier, then?’ he cried. I looked at Alice, and she glanced away. The baby quietened at last; the room grew warmer. I saw Rhoda lean towards my brother and whisper, and when he nodded, she coughed. She said, ‘Nancy, you won’t have heard our bit of good news.’ I looked at her properly. She had her jacket off and her feet, I noticed, were bare but for a pair of woollen stockings. She seemed very much at home. Now she held out her hand. On the second finger from the left there was a narrow strip of gold, with a tiny stone - sapphire or diamond, it was too small to tell - mounted upon it. An engagement ring.

• From Educated (2018)

  For two days I tried to wrestle meaning from the textbook’s dense passages, but terms like “civic humanism” and “the Scottish Enlightenment” dotted the page like black holes, sucking all the other words into them. I took the quiz and missed every question. That failure sat uneasily in my mind. It was the first indication of whether I would be okay, whether whatever I had in my head by way of education was enough. After the quiz, the answer seemed clear: it was not enough. On realizing this, I might have resented my upbringing but I didn’t. My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us. On the mountain, I could rebel. But here, in this loud, bright place, surrounded by gentiles disguised as saints, I clung to every truth, every doctrine he had given me. Doctors were Sons of Perdition. Homeschooling was a commandment from the Lord. Failing a quiz did nothing to undermine my new devotion to an old creed, but a lecture on Western art did. The classroom was bright when I arrived, the morning sun pouring in warmly through a high wall of windows. I chose a seat next to a girl in a high-necked blouse. Her name was Vanessa. “We should stick together,” she said. “I think we’re the only freshmen in the whole class.” The lecture began when an old man with small eyes and a sharp nose shuttered the windows. He flipped a switch and a slide projector filled the room with white light. The image was of a painting. The professor discussed the composition, the brushstrokes, the history. Then he moved to the next painting, and the next and the next. Then the projector showed a peculiar image, of a man in a faded hat and overcoat. Behind him loomed a concrete wall. He held a small paper near his face but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at us. I opened the picture book I’d purchased for the class so I could take a closer look. Something was written under the image in italics but I couldn’t understand it. It had one of those black-hole words, right in the middle, devouring the rest. I’d seen other students ask questions, so I raised my hand. The professor called on me, and I read the sentence aloud. When I came to the word, I paused. “I don’t know this word,” I said. “What does it mean?” There was silence. Not a hush, not a muting of the noise, but utter, almost violent silence. No papers shuffled, no pencils scratched. The professor’s lips tightened. “Thanks for that, ” he said, then returned to his notes. I scarcely moved for the rest of the lecture. I stared at my shoes, wondering what had happened, and why, whenever I looked up, there was always someone staring at me as if I was a freak.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Both give, both take.... All. Or is it, rather, nothing? “I have a feeling,” Jeremy had gone on, slowly at first, as if again to test how far I’ll listen, “that sex isnt even sex any more for people like you. That you actually come to loathe it.” “Sure,” I aimed at him. “You saw it earlier.” “A compulsion to reach orgasm,” he accused me, “to get it over with. Not sex. Something else that youve got to cram your life with—some kind of revenge for what youre convinced is the lack of love.... But what a short rebellion which relies exclusively on how long you can look young!... Afterwards,” came the inevitable words, “after the youth is played out—when youre ghosts, with painful memories of being young—when they no longer want you—what form will the rebellion take then?” And he stared at me relentlessly in that way that makes me retreat from him on the bed, turn my face from him; that glaring uncompromising look which makes me think: He knows things Ive never spoken. And his words conjure phantoms of that insidious empty tomorrow; and I think of youth ebbing out, of youth equated with rebellion, rebellion with orgasm.... “Now it’s you who arent supposed to care,” he said. “But, later, theyll be the ones who wont care.... In a way we’re all phonies, pretending sometimes not to care—out of fear; other times pretending to care more than we really do.” “I hate that word ‘phony,’” I told him. “After all, we only see what ‘appears.’” “I agree with that—but underneath, we know,” he said. “Certainly the hustler knows he hasnt created the legend of what he is in our world. Like all other legends, it’s already there, made by the world, waiting for him to fit it. And he tries to live up to what hes supposed to be: And, mainly, hes not supposed to care.” “And yet,” I said, “those times when you want to be taken as you think you really are, beyond the Mask—like for example earlier, with those two in the bar, before I met you—when you try, then youve exploded their dream of you. Youve shot right out of it, by revealing that you, too, are as terrified by the isolation as they are; and what should bring you together pulls you apart. Not even that other sharing can exist then.” Jeremy said: “I know someone who fell very much in love with an awol marine; he worshiped him, did everything for him. One day the man came home to find the marine ironing the man’s clothes. The man wanted nothing more to do with the marine—just like those two in the bar when you said what you did to them.... I guess you could say they had given up, to indifference—to the emotional masochism of our world, because of the unfair guilt thrust on it. (When I first realized I was homosexual, I prayed to be changed.

• From Educated (2018)

  A moment later I was standing. I folded napkins from paper towels and put one at each setting. When I placed one at Shawn’s plate, he again jabbed his finger into my ribs. I said nothing. Charles arrived early—Dad hadn’t even come in from the junkyard yet—and sat at the table across from Shawn, who glared at him, never blinking. I didn’t want to leave them alone together, but Mother needed help with the cooking, so I returned to the stove but devised small errands to bring me back to the table. On one of those trips I heard Shawn telling Charles about his guns, and on another, about all the ways he could kill a man. I laughed loudly at both, hoping Charles would think they were jokes. The third time I returned to the table, Shawn pulled me onto his lap. I laughed at that, too. The charade couldn’t last, not even until supper. I passed Shawn carrying a large china plate of dinner rolls, and he stabbed my gut so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I dropped the plate. It shattered. “Why did you do that?” I shouted. It happened so quickly, I don’t know how he got me to the floor, but again I was on my back and he was on top of me. He demanded that I apologize for breaking the plate. I whispered the apology, quietly, so Charles wouldn’t hear, but this enraged Shawn. He grabbed a fistful of my hair, again near the scalp, for leverage, and yanked me upright, then dragged me toward the bathroom. The movement was so abrupt, Charles had no time to react. The last thing I saw as my head hurled down the hall was Charles leaping to his feet, eyes wide, face pale. My wrist was folded, my arm twisted behind my back. My head was shoved into the toilet so that my nose hovered above the water. Shawn was yelling something but I didn’t hear what. I was listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall, and when I heard them I became deranged. Charles could not see me like this. He could not know that for all my pretenses—my makeup, my new clothes, my china place settings—this is who I was. I convulsed, arching my body and ripping my wrist away from Shawn. I’d caught him off guard; I was stronger than he’d expected, or maybe just more reckless, and he lost his hold. I sprang for the door. I’d made it through the frame and had taken a step into the hallway when my head shot backward. Shawn had caught me by the hair, and he yanked me toward him with such force that we both tumbled back and into the bathtub. The next thing I remember, Charles was lifting me and I was laughing—a shrill, demented howl.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I did the same with my bonnet and my rusty frock - exchanged them, for a hat with a wired flower and a dress with ribbon at the neck. ‘Now, there’s a pretty frock!’ said Ralph to me, when I put it on for the first time; but Ralph would have told me I looked handsome wrapped in a piece of brown paper, if he thought it would make me smile. The truth was, I had looked awful ever since leaving St John’s Wood; and now, in a flowery frock, I only looked extraordinarily awful. The clothes I had bought, they were the kind I’d used to wear in Whitstable and with Kitty; and I seemed to remember that I had been known then as a handsome enough girl. But it was as if wearing gentlemen’s suits had magically unfitted me for girlishness, for ever - as if my jaw had grown firmer, my brows heavier, my hips slimmer and my hands extra large, to match the clothes Diana had put me in. The bruise at my eye faded quickly enough, but the brawl with Dickie’s book had left me with a scar at my cheek - I have it there still; and this, combined with the new firmness at my shoulders and thighs, got from carrying buckets and whitening steps, gave me something of the air of a rough. When I washed in the mornings in a bowl in the kitchen, and caught sight of myself, from a certain angle, reflected in the darkened window, I looked like a youth in the back-room of some boys’ club, rinsing himself down after a boxing match. How Diana would have admired me! At Quilter Street, however, as I have said, there was no one to gasp. By the time Ralph and Florence came down for their breakfasts, I would have my frock upon me and my hair in a curl; and then, more often than not, Florence would only gulp at her tea and say she had no time to eat, she was calling at the Guild on her way to work. Ralph would help himself to the red herrings left on her plate -‘My word, Cyril, but don’t these look good!’ - and she would leave, without a glance at me, wrapping a muffler about her throat like a woman of ninety. However much I thought about her - and I spent many hours at it: for there is not much to occupy the brain in housework, and I might as well puzzle over her, as over anything - I could not figure her out, at all. The Florence I had met first, the Green Street Florence, had been gay; she had had hair that twisted from her head like bed-springs, she had worn skirts as bright as mustard, she had laughed and shown her teeth.

• From Educated (2018)

  The nights they went out, I was grateful. One night, he came home late and in a strange mood. Everyone was asleep except me, and I was on the sofa, reading a chapter of scripture before bed. Shawn plopped down next to me. “Get me a glass of water.” “You break your leg?” I said. “Get it, or I won’t drive you to town tomorrow.” I fetched the water. As I handed it over, I saw the smile on his face and without thinking dumped the whole thing on his head. I made it down the hall and was nearly to my room when he caught me. “Apologize,” he said. Water dripped from his nose onto his T-shirt. “No.” He grabbed a fistful of my hair, a large clump, his grip fixed near the root to give him greater leverage, and dragged me into the bathroom. I groped at the door, catching hold of the frame, but he lifted me off the ground, flattened my arms against my body, then dropped my head into the toilet. “Apologize,” he said again. I said nothing. He stuck my head in further, so my nose scraped the stained porcelain. I closed my eyes, but the smell wouldn’t let me forget where I was. I tried to imagine something else, something that would take me out of myself, but the image that came to mind was of Sadie, crouching, compliant. It pumped me full of bile. He held me there, my nose touching the bowl, for perhaps a minute, then he let me up. The tips of my hair were wet; my scalp was raw. I thought it was over. I’d begun to back away when he seized my wrist and folded it, curling my fingers and palm into a spiral. He continued folding until my body began to coil, then he added more pressure, so that without thinking, without realizing, I twisted myself into a dramatic bow, my back bent, my head nearly touching the floor, my arm behind my back. In the parking lot, when Shawn had shown me this hold, I’d moved only a little, responding more to his description than to any physical necessity. It hadn’t seemed particularly effective at the time, but now I understood the maneuver for what it was: control. I could scarcely move, scarcely breathe, without breaking my own wrist. Shawn held me in position with one hand; the other he dangled loosely at his side, to show me how easy it was. Still harder than if I were Sadie, I thought. As if he could read my mind, he twisted my wrist further; my body was coiled tightly, my face scraping the floor. I’d done all I could do to relieve the pressure in my wrist. If he kept twisting, it would break. “Apologize,” he said. There was a long moment in which fire burned up my arm and into my brain. “I’m sorry,” I said.

• From City of Night (1963)

  This is a familiar story. Many tell you this for whatever purpose. Hustling, it emphasizes your masculinity for a score. For the others—even, sometimes, the very effeminate—this may be a symbolic subterfuge to emphasize the quandary of being in that world.... With this man, though, Im convinced beyond any doubt that what hes just told me is true.... I notice an untanned circle about his finger from which he has probably just removed a ring. “Ive only been with two men in my life—that way—” he went on slowly. “And those two times, nothing really happened. I just—... And, once—...” He broke off abruptly. “What I mean is that Ive never really done anything,” he said. “Oh, sure, Ive known for a long time. I guess—I guess thats largely the reason I got married, but I didnt really know, then.... Now Ive got a kid nine years old.... But things—from the beginning—they didnt go right. Thats mainly why she wanted a kid.... And then I started driving to the beaches, I guess to make sure there was a whole world ready to welcome me when I finally decided to join it—if I ever decided to. I always came there with the intention of meeting someone. But then I would see a screaming fairy—and suddenly I’d be ashamed. It’s very strange—but I couldnt bear to look into his eyes, afraid, I guess, that he’d look back at me with recognition. And I didnt want a fairy, I knew that I didnt even want them to look at me in that strange, piercing way. So I would drive away—but then I’d come back.... I’d seen you before. One time I almost talked to you. You see, I’d see you there alone—then youd go off with someone youd just met. So—well—I knew—well, that if I talked to you, youd at least talk back to me. I mean—those people I’d see you with, many of them were—well—obvious, and so—” Turning to look at him—a man still not middle-aged, with still the hint of the attractive youngman he had been—I understood something of his struggle. That thought disturbs me, and I say quickly: “It’s getting cool, isnt it?” “Very cool,” he said. A long silence. “Will you stay with me tonight?” he asked me. The breeze is rising rapidly. The sun is now a blaze of white fusing with the glaring ocean. I cant help asking: “Are you sure you want me to?” “Yes,” he said—but uncertainly. “I think Im sure. Yes, Im sure.” Quickly, as if once having said that, he was resisting the instant compulsion to reverse himself, he said: “Im on vacation—I told you that already, didnt I? My wife—she—...

• From Educated (2018)

  He dropped my wrist and I fell to the floor. I could hear his steps moving down the hall. I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared into the mirror at the girl clutching her wrist. Her eyes were glassy and drops slid down her cheeks. I hated her for her weakness, for having a heart to break. That he could hurt her, that anyone could hurt her like that, was inexcusable. I’m only crying from the pain, I told myself. From the pain in my wrist. Not from anything else . This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect. [image "Chapter 13 Silence in the Churches" file=Image00015.jpg] In September the twin towers fell. I’d never heard of them until they were gone. Then I watched as planes sank into them, and I stared, bewildered, at the TV as the unimaginably tall structures swayed, then buckled. Dad stood next to me. He’d come in from the junkyard to watch. He said nothing. That evening he read aloud from the Bible, familiar passages from Isaiah, Luke, and the Book of Revelation, about wars and rumors of wars. Three days later, when she was nineteen, Audrey was married—to Benjamin, a blond-haired farm boy she’d met waitressing in town. The wedding was solemn. Dad had prayed and received a revelation: “There will be a conflict, a final struggle for the Holy Land,” he’d said. “My sons will be sent to war. Some of them will not come home.” I’d been avoiding Shawn since the night in the bathroom. He’d apologized. He’d come into my room an hour later, his eyes glassy, his voice croaking, and asked me to forgive him. I’d said that I would, that I already had. But I hadn’t. At Audrey’s wedding, seeing my brothers in their suits, those black uniforms, my rage turned to fear, of some predetermined loss, and I forgave Shawn. It was easy to forgive: after all, it was the End of the World. For a month I lived as if holding my breath. Then there was no draft, no further attacks. The skies didn’t darken, the moon didn’t turn to blood. There were distant rumblings of war but life on the mountain remained unchanged. Dad said we should stay vigilant, but by winter my attention had shifted back to the trifling dramas of my own life.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He was certain that these fantasies had been shaped by his early abuse, and they shamed and horrified him, for in them he played the role of the abuser , just like his father and the masters who had beaten him. Therapy with Bennet had not taken these urges away. They never left him. Late in his life he wrote a pornographic novel about spanking schoolboys: it was a prolonged and awful confession. But he locked it away and never showed it to anyone. All his life he suppressed his desires. But sometimes, just sometimes, he could speak of them through other selves. Colonel Cully is one of them: a hawk wracked with desire to hurt a boy who is also a bird – a boy who is also himself. You can see the whole of his life’s tragedy there in one small scene. Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys’ secret societies. White had put his hand between the cocked hammer of an unloaded revolver and its frame before the trigger was pulled. The pain was a triumph; in bearing the agony, he proved he could belong . But White was not always the victim in these rituals. School taught him that as he suffered at the hands of older boys, so he should punish the younger. He joined gangs and terrorised those weaker than himself, testing them as he had been tested. One term the test was to jump from a window in Big School fourteen feet to the ground. Puppy Mason was too scared to do it, so White assisted in pushing him out. When the fall broke his leg in three places, they were impressed by his silence. He told the masters that he had tripped over a twig on the headmaster’s garden path. Puppy had been tested, had behaved heroically, and his membership of the fraternity was approved. I knew nothing of such things. I knew about being hurt: the impossibly clumsy child that was me scraped her knees, tripped, grazed herself, hit her head on open windows and bled terribly. But I did not understand the logic behind ordeals of belonging. I did not see pain and bravery as steps toward gaining self-reliance, as necessary parts of growing up. But still I noticed, when I read The Sword in the Stone , that whenever the Wart became an animal, he seemed to be in danger.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  If our toddler is throwing a fit in the grocery store, we correct him, redirect him—yet we have allowed our minds to have outright meltdowns with zero correction. For eighteen months straight, I thought I was a victim of the arguments against God rising within me. For too many years of my life, I thought I was a victim of the negativity rising within me. Do you relate to what I’m saying? Have you also spent way too much of your life believing you are a victim to your thoughts? Paul tells us that we don’t have to live this way, that we can take captive our thoughts. And in so doing, we can wield our power for good and for God, slaying strongholds left and right. The Interrupting Thought This promise of wielding power over our thoughts sounds great, doesn’t it? Yet I sense a small question from you: “Um…how?” As in, “Thanks, Jennie. Sounds terrific. But how on earth do I get that done?” Throughout the coming chapters you and I will learn how to go to war with the weapons that God has given us, weapons that can take out seven strategic enemies that attack us and undermine our efforts to maintain steady, sound minds. The big picture here is this: We have chaotic thought lives. These thoughts often lead to wild emotions, true? Emotions that tell us how to behave. Those behaviors dramatically affect our relationships, continuing that downward spiral we looked at previously. What we’re saying, then, is that how we think directly results in how we live. This may sound terrifying, but, in fact, it’s exciting. You’ll have to trust me for now. This is what I know: while we may not be able to take every thought captive in every situation we face every day, we can learn to take one thought captive and, in doing so, affect every other thought to come. So what is the one thought that can successfully interrupt every negative thought pattern? It’s this: I have a choice. That’s it. The singular, interrupting thought is this one: I have a choice. If you have trusted in Jesus as your Savior, you have the power of God in you to choose! You are no longer a slave to passions, to lusts, to strongholds, to sin of any kind. You have a God-given, God-empowered, God-redeemed ability to choose what you think about. You have a choice regarding where you focus your energy. You have a choice regarding what you live for. I have a choice. We are not subject to our behaviors, genes, or circumstances. We are not subject to our passions, lusts, or emotions. We are not subject to our thoughts. We have a choice because we are conquerors who possess weapons to destroy strongholds. Now, we rarely get to choose our circumstances, but Paul said we have a choice about how we think about those sometimes-challenging things.