The Great Migration: Owning a Culture of Secrets, an Inheritance of Shame

What is my culture anyway?

In the recent months I have noticed that I feel rootless, without a culture I identify with. This leaves me often feeling empty, without an identity, without a sense of greater belonging. And so I’ve become more and more of a hermit, content with who I am becoming and gaining a sense of self-belonging. However, I still find myself asking,  

“What does it mean to be a white woman in America anyway? 

Do I go back to my Irish or German or French or British heritage so many generations ago? 

Do I start reading stories about the unseen realm of faeries from Irish lore, or do I adopt a linguistic pattern that identifies the sun as  feminine and the moon as masculine like the German language? 

Do I listen to music that no one ever personally taught me but my ancestors would have known and sung?

Do I thread together all the pieces of all the cultures from all over the world that I am drawn to into my own tapestry of beauty, balance, seasonal living in attunement to the natural world, music, story, and rites of grief, sorrow, coming of age, birth, and death?

Do I invent a personal culture?” 

In short, I’ve simply wanted more life, more liveliness, more richness in existence in my day-to-day activities and in celebrations thick with love, remembrance, storytelling, singing, and grieving. Something bigger than me to bind myself to in a way that fosters larger perspectives and narratives that are beyond the individual. 

Everything I come up with feels empty, or like putting on a patronizing costume that doesn’t fit nor do I resonate with completely. This is where my heart and mind have been. How do I feel so empty in my own cultural skin? Why am I so ashamed of my culture? I do not want to claim any of it. This morning all the threads finally came together after years of watching and witnessing the horror of how black and other communities are so violently and ruthlessly targeted by hate and discrimination; after years of reading how the system was set up to exclude these communities and hoard opportunities for my lineage--for me. 

My Cultural Inheritance of Shame and Secrets

This morning I realized that what I’ve known about my own family, is true about my entire culture:

I have inherited shame in a culture of secrets.

For the past two years I have been realizing how much pain, suffering, and cruelty my family hides--some things seem like the big, movie-worthy secrets, like the time my grandfather walked all the way to California from Salt Lake City because he thought he was dying. While there, he realized he wasn’t dying and started another family. After a few years, he returned back to his family here in Salt Lake City and never said a word to anyone about his long disappearance or his other family. 

And then there are many smaller secrets of personal pain and suffering that no one wants to talk about or acknowledge--like when we used to ask our Grandma to tell us about her childhood, and she often refused to say anything about her childhood because “why would I want to talk about such a sad time?” My grandparents grew up in the Great Depression, and my grandfather, newly married, was sent off to Germany during World War II at the age of 18. He didn’t talk much about the war either--the war that he was supposed to be honored for fighting, but he was tormented with PTSD because he was ashamed and traumatized at what humanity was capable of. Perhaps he was ashamed to even be human, to be alive. 

I grew up in a family and a religion that didn’t dwell at all on the unsavory side of our past. Why would we want to talk about such sad, ugly, shameful things? Why would we talk about a massacre where our religious ancestors killed 120 men, women, and children in an emigrant wagon train from Arkansas passing through Utah territory in 1857? That was not a faith-building pioneer story, so it still gets left out of cultural remembrance and storytelling. Unlike the Germans who have a powerful message to “Never Forget” the Holocaust with museums, monuments, and policies to remind every citizen of this harrowing and atrocious part of their history--to remind them that humans are capable of such inhumane savagry, my culture is really, really good at sweeping all of that under a nice and tidy rug. Cleanliness is near to godliness, they say.  

How Subtleties Become Substantial

I was taught to live in denial in subtle ways--that is to say, in substantial ways. Subtle cues and lessons build into the substance of our behavior and beliefs. Those subtle cues included: don’t focus on the negative; do not tell the sad stories; stay positive and faithful and hope for a kingdom of your own in heaven; be happy and positive, get married and have kids, and all will be well; don’t cry; talking about the sad things brings up contention, and the devil loves contention. All is well. Nothing to see here. 

So when there was something wrong, it was bottled up and became traumatic. I had “nothing to confess” until I was 21 and making out with a boy for the first time in a way that left me feeling shameful--that I was breaking my covenants with God and would be eternally damned. I shook in fear and cried tears like I have never shook or cried before or ever since when it came time to confess to my bishop. I had led such a “clean” life without doing anything harmful or shameful. So I confessed and got married to clean up my record. There. Shame and secrets swept under the rug. Clean and tidy--and near to God. Unhappy, but clean. Divorced eleven years later. No kids. Thank goodness. Turns out a marriage formed in shame and guilt has no real roots, and that tree is bound to collapse sooner or later. 

My culture is rooted in shame and guilt. I am in a constant state of subconscious repentance, trying to keep everything under the rug. The heart-warming stories I’ve been fed my whole life lack real substance, real nourishment, because they’ve grown out of sterilized incubators. It’s like the stories I was handed were strong doses of antibiotics that killed all bacteria that actually had a healthy purpose. A sterilized culture is no culture at all. To cultivate something, as any gardener or biologist knows, you have to have dirt, bacteria, and rot for a garden or an organism to thrive. We have fed the organism of denial. And it is thriving.

Sterilizing Culture & The Genetics of Shame

So why am I surprised that my religious micro-culture is influenced by my greater American, puritan-rooted, culture? Can I even call this sterilized way of living a culture? Our history is full of things swept under the rug. Slavery? Swept under the rug; something that we’ve fixed and we had nothing to do with. We are clean and near to God and so humane now, aren’t we? Railroad barons using immigrant slaves to build the infrastructure of this great nation? Let’s not dwell on that. We would never do that now. Housing discrimination in America’s big and liberal and enlightened cities? Oops. Sorry, but let’s just move on and not dwell on it. Big agriculture paying immigrants almost nothing so we can have cheap food? If I don’t talk about it, it isn’t real. I’m eating so clean and healthy anyway--I feel great. Moving on. We are humane and equal and the leaders of democracy. We would never support anything shameful or inhumane.

Except we do. I do. My clothes, my food, my stuff is so affordable because someone is paying the price. With their life. I am part of a system that sweeps the unsavory realities under the rug. Again and again. And I feel empty, unrooted. I feel ashamed. I feel my own shame of not speaking out more, “Never Forget.” And I feel the shame of my heritage. 

If the emerging science of epigenetics tells us that we can, quite literally, inherit trauma through our genes, then can’t we inherit shame as well? How many generations of shame am I carrying in my cells? How many untold stories are blocking the arteries of my culture? My culture is dying of a slow heart attack, and we’re keeping ourselves artificially alive on the ventilators of perceived success: “See? We’re happy and alive and thriving. We have our American dreams: great jobs, nice houses, friends over for dinner parties, we meditate, exercise, and we give to charity! Clean and tidy. We are so woke. So enlightened. We love light. We are light. We are a light to the world! America! But please don’t shine a light on our unsavory past. Don’t look there. Nothing to see there. America!”

My ventilator was ripped out slowly over the course of two decades. Little by little, I have come to see how denial and shame and secrets are part of my personal, familial, and cultural genetics. And I get all in a rage when nobody talks about it. Why aren’t we talking about this? Why do we wait until someone is dying? Why do we wait until it’s too late? Now I know why I have been searching for elderwomen. I want to know the stories that no one would tell me. I want to hear the worst of it, and how we looked the terrible things right in the face and turned away, and swept them under the rug. I need to hear it all, in all its horror. 

Owning Our Stories

I want us to own our stories. To stop blaming, denying. I want to descend to my roots and see where I am rotting because of decades of denial. I must integrate the rot--I must decompose and compost it. I must own it if new life is to grow and thrive again, without the aid of a ventilator. 

We do not talk about politics and religion if we are to be socially acceptable. A nice white girl knows nor cares about politics or religion anyway, right? Other people’s politics and religion are none of our business. Except they are. We are a dysfunctional national family that has no idea how to converse, listen, or speak with honesty and respect. The more we sweep under the rug, the more siloed we become because we are afraid of being socially judged and outcast. So we find the people who agree with us because it’s safer, easier. We can sweep anything and everything under the rug. We can rant and rave with our own choir, and it feels so good. There is no work to do. It’s easy. I get to keep believing and behaving as I always have. 

The thing is, evolution isn’t painless. There’s a reason we call them growing pains. If we want to be better, more alive, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to make us squirm. It’s going to make us scream. It’s going to terrify us and we’ll wonder what we’ve signed up for. We will feel it all. 

If we are to own our own stories, and own them we must, we can not leave out any of the awkward, unflattering, terrifying bits. We must integrate our shame and our imperfections. We must tell our stories in full first to ourselves and then to our communities. Not from a place of blame or victimhood--this is not true vulnerability. Own it. Do not pass it off to ancestors, neighbors, parents. Own your very own story, that has been integrated into your genetics. 

What did you and do you still believe that contributed to a culture where black men are murdered while exercising? How have you behaved that sustains modern day slavery? Descend to the roots, to your roots. You are the gardener. Use the rot beneath the surface to initiate new possibilities. David George Haskell says, “rot is the detonation of possibility.” We must integrate the rot, own it, and cultivate it into our stories so that new growth can begin.

Embracing the Scars, Identifying the Wounds

It is time to remove my ventilator of “toxic positivity”, as my friend and co-visionary Allie calls it. I am diving into the rot of my roots, and going beneath the surface where these incomplete narratives fall apart because they lack integrity. These narratives I’ve been fed do indeed lack integrity, meaning they are not whole, they are not honest--they are therefore, lies. Incomplete stories are fragile stories that require a strong defense system. Our defense systems are breaking down and the lack of integrity is being exposed like never before. We see the rot at our roots. No more denial. Now, we integrate, we own it all. Yes, these are my roots, and they are rotting. I inherited this and I contributed to this through neglect and denial.

It is overwhelming to get into the roots of things, yes. But we can no longer cosmetically cover over the scars. Let the scars remind us and show us where to dig beneath the surface. Let the scars lead us to question, how did this happen? Where is the wound? And so we dive beneath the surface and we find that all of these scars are interconnected, they are related, and entangled. Sexism entwines with racism entwines with modern-day slavery, and leads to violent and horrific warfare and attrocities. It is dark here where we cannot see immediate solutions. We must feel our way through the dark. There are no algorithms or maps here. We must make the paths that will heal us:

“Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.” -Antonio Machado

We must walk. This is a slow, step by step process. This is not the fast-paced inertia we are used to--we are used to immediate results that satisfy our true cravings for change. We go for the quick diet rather than change our entire lifestyle to look good rather than feel alive. We aren’t wired for a slow pace--or maybe we are and we’ve lost those muscles to move with the strength of torque. 

Pilgrimage to Healing Integration

It took generations for all of this to rot, and it will take generations to integrate and heal and grow anew. We must begin this now for the generations to come after us. The more we deny and let rot, the harder it will be to right these wrongs, to bring justice and beauty and equality and a natural rhythm to the surface where we can see it. Things will break down again and again, let us teach the generations to come through example how to face the rot, compost it, and recultivate it into something truly alive.

The poet in me is ashamed at the wordiness of my contemplation. It feels so messy, so untidy, so out of control. And so I know I am beginning, starting in the right place on a path to integrity. It’s always messy in the beginning. There are so many threads and roots going in every which way and so very entangled. I’m going dark, descending into the rot, the grief, the shame. I’m integrating it all, no more denial or neglect. Owning my narratives of shame as well as my stories of triumph because they are the same thing. I cannot have a culture full of life if I do not integrate and cultivate the shame and grief for what has been lost.

I’ll know I’m on the path of integration when it is slow and awkward and frustrating. I’ll know I’m getting to the root of things. I know that when I begin a new book or start a new venture or project, it will be a slow process full of hurdles and entanglements that must be addressed to fully integrate the narrative and the culture that will give the next generation life--deep and real and vibrant life. I feel that I am part of a threshold generation. I will most likely not see the fruits of my personal labors to shift collective consciousness and evolution. I don’t even have children to share what I am learning with. And so I write, and hope that my struggle becomes someone else’s roadmap, as Brene Brown says, to continue The Great Integration. 

The Great Integration

I am a writer, a creative. I am deliberately and devotedly in the thick of struggling to create entirely new patterns and symbolism in the literature at the foundation of our culture. I used to want to start businesses, to be an entrepreneur that changed the way we produce and consume. There were so many hurdles, but there were people coming up with incredible solutions if you took the time to look for them, and integrate them into the process of production. 

I’m starting with one step at a time. I want to embrace the dark, decomposition, rot, and the healing that comes when we acknowledge and integrate it all so that we can be transformed into the nourishment we ourselves need to live. This is the culture I want to cultivate. This is how we rebuild a culture of vibrant living for all, without discrimination or injustice. I am beginning to feel alive again, like I might have a culture that is worth creating with others who are on similar journeys. 

This is personal. It begins with me, the individual. This is The Great Integration. My Great Integration.