The Anatomy of Shame

A Call to Creative Liberation

Jun 15, 2025

The Anatomy of Shame: A Call to Creative Liberation
By Michelle Ried

Here I am in a Kia service center on a Saturday morning, waiting for an oil change and rereading All About Love by bell hooks—feminist theorist, cultural critic, and one of the most vital philosophical voices of our time. There’s something quietly poetic about sitting in such an unremarkable space, reflecting on something so profoundly personal. It strikes me that so much of life happens in these liminal places—the waiting rooms, the spaces in-between—where we are most likely to encounter the truths we’ve kept tucked away. For me, the truth that keeps showing up is shame.

Before her passing in 2021, bell hooks wrote deeply about the relationship between shame, love, and power. Her work has become an anchor, especially as I’ve tried to name and move through the shame that has haunted my creative life. My connection to her work became even more personal in August 2024, when my son Joshua and I had the opportunity to visit Berea College in Kentucky. My former colleague Tim Binkley, Head of Special Collections and Archives was appointed by hooks herself to manage the processing and curation of her archives.

Seeing her papers and artifacts so lovingly curated was a powerful experience. In those archives, I could feel her presence—insisting that we all matter, that we all belong, and that our truths, no matter how complicated, deserve to be spoken. Yet that truth-telling often comes at a cost, especially for those of us who’ve been taught to keep quiet.

I’ve felt shame in many ways. It feels, at times, like I’ve lived my entire life under its weight. Writing this, naming it, has been harder than expected. Like many writers, I’ve always processed my thoughts through writing. From the moment I could hold a pencil, I’ve been scribbling my way through life. When I could not connect with the outside world. When I struggled to make friends. When I felt so alone. When I had complicated feelings. When I could feel the rhythm of the earth and stars and wanted to express its song in words. When I just needed a way to be free. I wrote.

That space—my private, creative world—became sacred. It became a place of wild freedom, unshaped by outside judgment. But the idea of sharing it? That felt like exposure. Vulnerable. Dangerous. If the outside world already misunderstood the version of me it could see, how would it respond to my truest self? The thought filled me with shame. I feared my inner world—strange, musical, and free—would be met with rejection. And so, I kept it hidden.

It never even occurred to me to call myself a writer. I wrote research-informed essays, poetic prose, academic work, journal entries, and strange stories meant only for me. Sometimes, I wrote in a kind of trance or as I’ve learned other writers call it—a flow state—where language flowed through me rather than from me. But still, I didn’t claim the title. The word writer belonged to other people. People with mastered technique, with best-selling books, with certainty.

That changed slowly. In graduate school, a few professors and classmates started to speak it aloud. They told me they needed to get me published. That my writing mattered. That I had something to say. It seemed preposterous at first. I couldn’t quite absorb it, but something inside me shifted. In January of this year, after encouragement from a trusted mentor who I’d been sharing my writing with, I launched a Substack as a personal challenge—to begin the slow work of moving past shame and into empowerment.

That movement hasn’t been smooth or linear. Anger has been part of the journey too.

There are people in my life—some still present, some long gone—who imposed their own narrow definitions of who is allowed to be an artist. Who gets to have a voice. Who is worthy. I’ve been shamed without cause, excluded without explanation, denied opportunity before I could even knock on the door. And for too long, I let those judgments define me. I believed the lies. I internalized the rejection.

But I’ve learned something important since then—something I had always known intuitively but had been shamed into forgetting: art does not require permission. It does not have to meet anyone’s standard of polish or pedigree to be valid. Authenticity is what gives art its power. Its aura. Its resonance.

That’s what I see in the life and work of artists such as Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery around 1853 and spent 45 years as a sharecropper. He didn’t begin creating art until his 80s. Using whatever materials he could find, including discarded paper, cardboard, and scraps—he created striking, original work that ultimately transformed American folk art. He wasn’t trained or credentialed. He was called.

His work reminds me that expression is of the soul. Despite limitations imposed upon creators by the world, creative expression lives within us as a free bird soaring untethered. That kind of expression doesn’t ask for validation. It simply exists because it must.

Even when we know better, shame lingers. Brené Brown calls shame “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” It convinces us to stay small and remain hidden. But eventually, if we’re lucky or brave, anger arrives to break us free.

Especially as women, we’ve been taught to fear anger—to see it as dangerous, inappropriate, and shameful. Laura Bates, in her work documenting everyday sexism, names this as part of a larger pattern of silencing. However, it’s important to combat this by remembering that anger is not the enemy. As bell hooks taught us, it may be the key. “When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves,” she writes, “we build the necessary foundation for self-love.” That process must pass through anger, and through the refusal to accept the distortions we’ve been handed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of anger as a transforming force, one that must be organized and channeled to become a vehicle for justice. The difference between destructive rage and transformative anger lies in how we hold it—and that’s where emotional intelligence (EQ) comes in.

According to Forbes, EQ is a set of emotional and social skills that help us understand ourselves, build relationships, and navigate the world meaningfully. In practice, it means learning to feel anger without letting it control us—to recognize shame without allowing it to define us.

As an example, Jermaine Williams, a youth boxing coach uses physical discipline to help his students process trauma. Through trust, movement, and routine, his students learn to channel their emotions into strength. They transform frustration into focus, mistrust into teamwork, rage into resilience.

This transformation isn’t just personal—it’s political. Because shame doesn’t arise in a vacuum. As Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us in The Body Is Not an Apology, shame is often rooted in oppressive systems: racism, fatphobia, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. We are not born ashamed of our bodies or identities. We are taught to be. Radical self-love, Taylor writes, is the map back to our original wholeness.

But not everyone takes that journey. Some people respond to shame with manipulation rather than reflection. Psychology Today explains how narcissists, for example, deflect shame through rage. Without emotional maturity, anger becomes a weapon. Empowerment requires something deeper—self-awareness, compassion, and the willingness to change.

That change must include how we think about leadership and power. As Forbes explains, we’ve long associated leadership with agentic traits, including dominance, decisiveness, and confidence—qualities traditionally coded as male. But leadership can also be collaborative, emotionally intelligent, and deeply empathetic. Those aren’t weaknesses, they are forms of wisdom.

For me, writing has always been a form of inner wisdom. It’s been a way to return to myself, to resist, and to reimagine. However, it’s also where I’ve had to confront my deepest shame and anger. Launching my Substack was an act of reclamation—not because I no longer felt afraid, but because I was ready to create and share it with the world anyway.

bell hooks said, “If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.” I believe we begin by standing for our own voices. When we allow ourselves to move through shame, when we transform anger into intention, when we meet ourselves with honesty and care—we begin to access real power.

That power can and must be used to create change. One of the most potent ways that change is unleashed is through creative expression.

Art, language, and story are lifelines. The world needs our voices now more than ever. And not just the polished voices that have been given permission to speak. The world needs to hear the voices of the vulnerable, the complicated, the angry, and the hurting. The world needs most to hear the voices that rise from shame and dare to speak anyway, even if their stomachs are tied in knots and their hands are trembling.

We must be brave. We must create and share, not because we’ve mastered our technique or our fear—but because we’re done letting anything hold us back.

Let me gently encourage you to stay on your path. You are not alone in your fears or your feelings of inadequacy. No matter how strange or singular your inner world may seem, it is exquisitely and undeniably yours—divinely shaped by your unique life and perspective. That alone makes it worthy. You are the expert of your own experience, and your creative voice carries value simply because it is yours.

When the time comes, when the shame begins to loosen and the anger finds direction—if you feel ready to step forward and share even a glimpse of your beautiful self—know that I’ll be here with open arms, and without judgment, ready to welcome you.

Threads of the Tapestry

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