Shame, Shame, I know Your Name!

Struggling to find your spark, your voice, or yourself? Here's a clue: look in the last place you feel like looking. 

IG: @sarahonpurpose

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Let me clear my throat. Hello and welcome to Glad Bitch season two. I'm Sarah and I'm so glad you're here. I noticed that there were people last season that were listening from around the country, which really surprised me. So, hola, good day. To my sisters and to my friends, thank you for getting me here again. And to the lurkers who just want to listen and see if I'm gonna say anything weird, well, I can assure you that will happen. But no matter where you're from or what brought you here, I hope you're here for the same reason. You want to know how to be you on purpose. Maybe you want to know how to express yourself more fully or not feel like a jackass when you try. Maybe you don't know what to do next, or maybe you don't know what to do with your life. That's good, because if you're aware of this journey, you're on it. I can't believe I'm already starting out this season with a few confessions. Number one, I said there'd be no script. But true story, I spent the last several days writing this episode out word for word because I was worried it wasn't gonna sound good or polished or perfect, and then I remembered that isn't the purpose of this exercise. So I had to throw it in the trash. So now I'm currently sitting here dressed like a hobo, doing some laundry, and I decided that kind of tracks. Because you know something, self-discovery isn't glamorous, it isn't polished, and it isn't perfect, but it is real. So let's just go ahead and look at this whole podcast glad bitch, like the Velveteen Rabbit. The Velveteen Rabbit of podcasts, okay? You love it and it's real. But if the podcast is real, then I gotta be real, and you gotta be real when you listen. The second confession is that I said this podcast would be just me, and that's not really true. I have a co-host sitting here named Max. He loves the sound of his own voice. He's also very opinionated, and he's here for moral support. He's also a dog, and he's trying to be quiet. I have so much to say, but I do want to keep these episodes as short as I can. This one might be kind of a long one because we're just getting started, but I do want them to be digestible. Part of the problem with other self-discovery stuff is that you gotta treat it like a goddamn job. So let's not overthink it. I'm not asking you to work on anything. In fact, self-discovery shouldn't be treated like a job at all. It's more of a quest. So the more simple it is, the less you complicate it, the better chance you have of not looking for yourself in all the wrong places. It doesn't need force, but it does require effort. But there's no one size fits all way to do it. No magic bullet, no quick fix. Self-discovery is weird and it's personal. It's not called, what do you think about me and what should I do about my self-discovery for a reason. Okay? It's an inside job, and only you can do it. But we can help each other along the way. This season I'm gonna try to help by using my voice, and I am gonna try to complete a purpose quest in real time. These episodes are my stories and what I see, that's true. But what we have in common are two things. We all have our shit and we all have our light to protect. So if there's something in here that you can use to keep it lit, by all means take it. You don't have to do it how I do it, you have to do it the way you do it. I know not everyone will like this or get it, and there's definitely a point that I was like, oh no, they're not gonna like it. And then there was a point that I was like, yeah, fuck them if they don't like it. But neither of those things are the vibe. Those people can go find their own thing. This is for you and this is for me. So let's get personal and let's get into it. I mentioned in the little teaser that this season would be for you if you feel like you lost your spark, your voice, or yourself. I feel qualified to talk about that because I know what it's like to lose all three. Sometimes all at once. I've done it before and I'll probably do it again, but I'm getting faster and better at the return. I want to warn you that this episode might sound like a real Debbie Downer, but stick with me. We won't be here for too long, and I think there's a payoff. This episode is called Shame Shame I Know Your Name. That's right, we're talking about shame. Look at you, both pretty and smart, figuring that out. I know I could have started with something easier, something light, something fluffy. But we actually do have to start here. At least I do. When I did the podcast a few years ago, I thought I had it figured out. Like, okay, I'm all set. I'm getting my voice on the mic, I'm expressing myself, whatever, at first. I talked a lot about shame and vulnerability in that first episode too, but what we don't know is that I had a meltdown after I posted every single episode. It made me super in my head, and I got really insecure. It's not that I didn't love the content, I just didn't like me delivering the content. Each time an episode went live, I'd freak the fuck out. Chris, that's my husband and producer of this podcast, would say, It was good, don't worry. And I would be like, Oh my god, you're just saying that. And he'd be like, Okay, it was fine. And I would be like, oh, oh, just fine? What do you mean it's fine? I want it to be good. And then he would say, What do you want me to say? It was bad, it wasn't bad, and then I would go, Oh, you think it was bad? I mean, for fuck's sake, please tell me, I'm not the only one that's like this. So I felt like a big imposter talking about how to confront all these sides of yourself, and I still didn't know how to deal with it. Well, scratch that. I wasn't willing to deal with it. I was just over here intellectualizing ways to deal with my shadow and not actually going there. Why? Because I didn't want to. It was easier not to. More and more time was going by without me making anything. Eventually I went back and listened to every single episode from season one. Did you know that I've never done that before? It actually wasn't bad for the first try. It wasn't that I didn't think the podcast mattered. It started to occur to me that maybe I thought I didn't matter. I thought I was ashamed of the podcast, and then I thought, uh-oh, am I ashamed of myself? That's when shit got real. So I had to make a decision. Do I make another season or do I confront my own shame? I decided to go dark, or rather, go into the dark. So I spent a couple years there. And while that sounds icky and scary, now it's just called backstory. I don't want to bum anybody out, but being so hard on yourself is like such a drag. I have to bring it up here because people would ask me, are you doing the podcast? Are you gonna do the podcast? When are you gonna do the podcast? Why aren't you on social media? I haven't seen very much of you these days. Blah. And it's just kind of a weird thing to answer. Can't right now, dealing with my own shame. Wow, wow, wow. But you guys, I learned a ton. Because the thing is, if you let yourself stay in the dark long enough, your eyes adjust. You won't believe what you can see. So, in order to really understand this, I had to go all the way back to the beginning. Uh, just a small town girl. No, not like that. You ever hear the phrase, we all come from stardust? Well, I was born in the 1900s, and if you really want to know, the 1970s. And while we didn't have cell phones then, we did have microphones. Well, the star I wrote in on happened to come here looking for one. I loved a microphone when I was young. I'd say about half the pictures of me and family photo albums, I've got one in my hand. I don't tell you that to illustrate that I was any good at using it, or that I was meant to be some big motivational speaker someday, but mainly just that there was an ease to using my own voice. I might even say I was delighted by it. Being me wasn't the problem. But I got older, and the world the world started to inform me of who I am, not the other way around. They say nobody puts baby in the corner, but they sure as shit put me there a few times. I could feel my voice got smaller and weaker over the years. I started to believe that if someone didn't like my voice, they didn't like me. At least my authentic voice. So I kind of just stopped using it. And then I forgot how. I got embarrassed when I tried it. I resented the people that could do it. I was super jealous of the people who so effortlessly put themselves out there. People usually get a little surprised when I say that I struggle or struggled with using my voice, because I'm not a shy person. I was voted most outgoing in my high school. I never met a dance floor I didn't like. There was still something about that vulnerability of being totally authentic that made me feel really scared. Somewhere along the way, I learned that quiet was good, questions were bad, and that everything would be fine if you just did what you were told. Maybe you understand what that corner feels like, but man, I don't recognize myself there at all. And it's not that I never put myself out there. I just felt kind of ashamed when I did. Or I went over every single word. I thought about what people might think of me. Was I funny enough? Was I smart enough? Was I cool enough? Was I ever enough? And the thing about true and authentic self-expression is, it doesn't matter who likes it, or how many people like it. One person, the expressor, needs to like it. That doesn't always mean it's easy, but that's what makes it real. And that just wasn't landing with me. So anyway, after last season, I knew something had to change. You might be thinking, girl, lighten up. Relax. It's just a podcast. And it's just a podcast that only tens of people listen to. It's not that big of a deal if you don't want to do it. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. While some of that's true, I actually did need to do it. I needed to do it because it's part of the lesson plan. It's part of the lesson plan of my life. Part of the curriculum. It was something that was put in place for me to learn something I really came here to learn. And those things, they just hit a little different. So we squared up, Shame and I. We started walking towards each other real slow-like. How they do in an old western. Boots just making jangly noises and shit. One step after another, until I got close enough to see that Shame didn't have any weapons. Just one message for me. You ride or die. Well fuck shame. Kind of dramatic. And I thought about it and I decided to ride. And what a lot of these last couple years have entailed was a few things. Finding practices to increase my ability to be uncomfortable, which I'm gonna share more about later. Um learning to be with myself, to just be with myself and listen to myself in a new way. Like not hide behind busyness or um noise, or even trying to be sarcastic about it all. Which, if you know me at all, that was incredibly hard. Uh yeah. Uh and then it was a lot of wading through the stories of my past and deciding what was fact and what was fiction. And I have so many stories, just like you, stories that have been guiding me and pointing me in the right direction, and I just wasn't reading them right. Sure, shame sucks, and it's normal, and we all have it to some degree, and we all try to avoid it. But here's the kicker. Something I wasn't prepared for came out of sitting in the belly of the beast. How to get out of shame was to get into shame. Now, if you're confused, I don't blame you, because I was too at first. But shame was the key to the goddamn kingdom. So I'm going through all those stories, and uh I finally remembered what I started pinning my shame to to begin with. All the voices, when I tried to be myself, they said things like, Don't be too proud of yourself. Don't think you're special. Don't be full of yourself. Who do you think you are? Look, I took that shit on like gospel, and I'm not even religious. So over time, sat with it, thought about it, and I learned there's a thing I'm gonna call sacred shame. That's the kind of shame you feel when something's real off here. When you're acting one way, but you feel a different way on the inside. It's the kind of shame, like a big blinking light, that you're avoiding something that's calling your name. So no wonder I couldn't get it together. Deep down, what I wanted was to be proud of my podcast. I wanted to be proud of myself. I wanted it to be special because I made it. I wanted to feel full of creativity and life force of myself. I wanted to know who I was. And I want everyone to have that. That's when I knew there was a purpose, not only to me loving a microphone once, but the struggle it was gonna take for me to learn how to pick it up again. It was there in my bones that I knew those people were wrong, and it was my quest this whole time to figure it out. So I want to ask you, what would make you truly proud of yourself? And imagine you could let yourself feel it. What if, heaven forbid, you treated yourself like you were actually special? What if you could be so full of yourself that it turns out that's the best and maybe only way to give to the people and communities and causes that you love? What would it feel like to be in your full glory? All shit worth thinking about. Now, I finally feel like I have something to say into a microphone that really matters. And I don't think I'm gonna shut up about it. I don't think I ever would have learned that in a real way if I wouldn't have taken a good hard look at the things that I was most afraid of in myself. And I just want you to know that if you're not looking there, if you're not looking where the fear is, you might be missing some really important clues about being you on purpose. Because your highest potential, your fire, anything you want to call it, might not be hanging around in the light and easy. It might not be in the shallow water, and it's certainly not an answer you're gonna get from Chat GPT. I'm not suggesting you shame spiral or pull a disappearing act for three years, but this really is my life's work, so I got the time. But listen, listen, your stories matter, and what you believe about them matters the most. So self-indulgent to talk about myself like this. So full of myself. That was some real dear diary shit. I'm sure that I'm gonna have a little vulnerability hangover afterwards. Probably better than some of the other hangovers I've experienced after 45. But now that I'm picking a microphone up again, it's crazy. Like it's crazy that I can pretty much say whatever I want here. Like I could literally fart into this thing and call it self-expression. And maybe that's something to look forward to in a future episode if I run out of content. We'll see. Another thing I want to try when it comes to picking up a microphone is learning how to drop it. Maybe something like shame, shame, I know your name. But do you know mine? Well, it's Sarah fucking warman, but you can call me Sarah on purpose.