Dear Valentina, Ronnie and Keti,

Like many people, I have felt my fair share of shame when I reflect on past actions I wish I hadn’t taken, and I’m all too familiar with that “awful recurrent feeling.” It’s a sensation of discord – a misalignment between who we were in that remembered moment, and who we are (or think we are) today. I recognise that many of my regrets stem from a time in my life that was reckless, irresponsible and chaotic, perhaps even dangerous. However, despite these wrongdoings, in many ways I am glad I lived those years outside normal societal constraints. That period gave me a great deal, precisely through the raw experience itself. I don’t say this in defiance, but because I believe there is a certain richness to life that can emerge even from its transgressions. In The Divine Comedy, just before he passes through the gates of hell, Dante encounters the tormented “spirits who lived by avoiding both disgrace and praise.”* I suppose there are those who can reflect on their lives without shame, simply because they lived so cautiously that they have little need for it. But I am grateful for the time when I had the audacity to make bad decisions, to crash about, doing the next wrong thing, to be young and messed-up and free to live regrettably.

When I look back now, though, from this greater distance, the remorse no longer burns with the same intensity it once did. Instead, it is tempered by a kind of nostalgia – a shame that smiles back at me.  I am not saying I have stopped feeling shame, but I don’t feel it so sharply when I look back on the bad old days, Ronnie. I feel it more when I catch myself in the present doing or saying something that contradicts the person I have come to believe myself to be. Suddenly, shockingly, something I do or say – usually something I say – shatters that image, and my sense of self comes crashing down. This is far harder to reconcile and is a fairly regular occurrence. I have a contrary streak, and as a friend once said, “a mouth on me.”

In the end, shame has its purpose, of course. It acts as the great course-corrector, with a kind of redemptive electricity that forever nudges us towards a more righteous path. We stray, we are shamed, we return to the path, temporarily chastened and, I hope, a little wiser.

Love, Nick

*Translation from Mark Scarbrough’s Walking with Dante podcast – the slowest, maddest, most beautiful, most obsessive podcast in existence! Amazing! Thank you for recommending it, Keti!