Queer people aren’t strangers to shame, or to reclaiming one of the darkest feelings a person can carry deep in their gut. Shame is distinct from guilt in that shame is about doing something nonnormative, whereas guilt implies a breach of morality. Still, the consequences of shame can be profound — isolation, stress, secrets. Shame is relative to our surroundings, to the people who have power over us or to the communities we try to find homes in. For this A+ personal essay series, writers wrote about things they can barely whisper to aloud, things they thought was once a blemish that they’ve turned into crown, things that make them feel like a “bad queer”, or the ways that other peoples’ shame has woven itself into their life and existence. Answers to nagging questions, positive conclusions from difficult times and happy endings are not necessary, and you might not find them in every essay in the SHAME series. But I do hope you fill find something that challenges some shame you might be feeling, that is too relatable, that leaves you questioning whether it is actually serving you to hide whatever it is you’re hiding. As always, thank you for the support that allows Autostraddle to publish the breadth of pieces that we do, whether we’re celebrating the bright spots or descending into the basements of our psyches — this is a space where queer people can pitch, write and publish work like nowhere else.

xoxo,

Nico

Though I was born with a genetic condition (Ehlers-Danlos) that makes my joints unstable and puts me at higher risk for other chronic conditions, I didn’t know about this condition until I was an adult and didn’t identify as disabled until recently. As a child, my extra stretchy joints mostly meant that I was particularly good at ballet classes where I could easily do splits and bend in any number of odd poses. But when puberty came, bringing growth spurts with it, my joint instability became a problem that only makes sense in hindsight after my diagnosis. All I knew at the time was that I seemed especially prone to injury, always dislocating or spraining something and spending a lot of time at doctors, in physical therapy and wearing braces.

I attended a school that went from seventh through twelfth grade, so I had the same set of gym teachers for six years. They seemed to take a quick dislike to me because I was always turning up with a new injury and a medical note saying that I wasn’t able to participate. But one of the teachers, let’s call her Ms. G, seemed to have a particular problem with me and my medical issues.

Gym class always met in the gendered locker rooms, which were accessible only via two flights of stairs. There was no elevator. When I was injured, starting in seventh grade and regularly through senior graduation, it often took me a while to hobble down the steps so I was late to class, despite my best intentions. While other students were at their respective lockers getting changed into their gym outfits, I would go directly to the teachers’ office. It was a small room the size of a large closet, surrounded by glass windows so that the teachers could watch over the locker rooms and make sure no one was goofing off when they were supposed to be getting ready for class. I would have to awkwardly interrupt whatever conversation the teachers were having. Sometimes, if the injury wasn’t obvious — for example a knee injury where a brace might be covered by my pants — the teachers would respond to my interruption with accusations: why was I both late and not getting dressed? I would explain that I was injured, late from struggling to make it down the steps, and that I had a doctor’s note explaining that I could not participate in gym activities right now. After it became clear my injuries and need to be excused from class were a recurring issue, Ms. G started to respond with jokes and snarky comments. She would say things like “Again?, ”Are you sure you’re not faking it?,” or “Didn’t you just have another sprain a few weeks ago?”

As a 13 year-old, I didn’t know how to respond to this. I was shocked and confused. I had done what I was supposed to do and this authority figure was still giving me a hard time. I was injured, I went to the doctor to have it evaluated, and I turned in the appropriate documentation to prove it. I was following all of the rules and yet I was being treated as though I was a liar. As a child who had appeared able bodied most of my life and who found a sense of comfort and logic in rules, this injustice was hard to understand. Why would she suggest I was faking? It had never even occurred to me that I could try to fake an injury. Since my school required proof, I would need to lie to a doctor to get a medical note and, as a perfectionist overachiever, that was beyond comprehension. 13 year-old me was so stressed out. Was the teacher going to dock my grade because she didn’t believe me? Was I in some sort of trouble? Why require a note if it was going to be questioned? Why did it even matter so much to her? When I was injured, the school required me to complete written reports on various sports and famous athletes. Why did it matter whether I played tennis or sat in an office writing a report on Billie Jean King? It seemed so unfair.

Even when I was well enough to participate in class, it seemed to me like Ms. G’s grudge against me persisted. I could earn A’s in every class, but never in gym class. When I confronted the teacher about my Bs and Cs, she said grading was based on how hard you try. That seemed really unfair to me. I was not an athletic person and was always recovering from an injury. Even when it was healed enough for me to be cleared to participate in gym, my joints were still weak. I was never going to be like the student athletes she coached after school. It seemed really arbitrary to claim that I wasn’t trying enough. I was doing the best I could manage.

At the same time, there were rumors that this gym teacher was in a long-term romantic relationship with another teacher, a woman, at the school. In fact, these rumors had persisted for so long that my parents’ generation had heard and spread the same rumor when they attended high school. I figured if the same rumor had been spreading for so long about two specific teachers, then it was probably true, but the teachers themselves never confirmed it. Conversely, two straight gym teachers were very open about the fact that they were a couple and everyone was very excited when they eventually got married.

Simultaneously, students often said that Ms. G shouldn’t be in the glass-enclosed teacher’s office while the girls change in the locker rooms. They said that it was disgusting because she might “like what she sees,” suggesting that even though she was an adult woman who was rumored to be in a committed adult relationship, that being queer meant she was attracted to children, too. Given that these rumors had persisted for generations, I am sure that the school and Ms. G knew about them. In a way, the school was silently standing against this hate by keeping Ms. G employed and in the locker room, but I wished that the school’s leadership and Ms. G would more actively condemn this hate or at least more actively celebrate and welcome the LGBTQ community. I was contemplating my own queerness at the time, and I needed these community leaders to show me that it was okay to be myself. Instead, my school environment taught me a clear lesson. My gym teacher’s closeted relationship and the suggestions of pedophilia served as a template, urging me to bury my own truths and perpetuate a cycle of self-shame. I became an outspoken “ally,” (though I don’t believe that was a term I heard or would have used at the time) who advocated for acceptance and LGBTQ-inclusive school policies, but would vehemently deny any suggestion that I could possibly be LGBTQ.

In my senior year, the shame around my joint issues reached a new extreme. During a high school musical rehearsal, I dislocated my knee, chipped off a chunk of cartilage, and tore several ligaments. When the ambulance removed me from the school theater on a stretcher, I became the first person to ever use the newly installed accessible elevator and ramps at the school (this elevator was only in one building, the rest of the school remained inaccessible). The injury was so bad that my doctor, the leading knee surgeon at one of the top hospitals in the country, told me he had never seen each of the injuries I had all together at one time like that. I had urgent surgery to repair the damage and put my kneecap back in the joint. But the recovery was not simply a matter of resting and going to physical therapy, I had to relearn everything, starting with simply bearing weight and bending my knee.

I couldn’t walk, stand, drive, shower, lift my leg, squat, or go up or down stairs. I used a combination of crutches and a wheelchair to get around, and my parents’ house was not built to be accessible. I was 17 years old and I suddenly needed help with everything, and I had absolutely no privacy. To get inside my house, which had stairs to reach the front door, I had to sit on the side of the porch, drag myself inside with my arms, and scoot my butt up the stairs until I was high enough that I could balance on one leg to stand and transfer to my wheelchair. To wash my hair, I leaned over the side of my bed (which had been relocated from my bedroom on the second floor to the living room on the first floor) and sprayed a hose that my dad connected to the kitchen sink into a bucket. To bathe, I did something similar with a bucket and a loofah. I sometimes fell over when I tried to use the bathroom and needed my mom to help me get back up. I was struggling, infantilized, and embarrassed at home, and things felt even harder at school.

Being in a wheelchair meant I was not participating in gym class – not because people in wheelchairs can’t participate in sports, but because my school was ableist, inaccessible, and wildly unprepared to be inclusive. I couldn’t even access the locker rooms, down two flights of stairs, where gym class met, or get from inside of the school to the track or field, so I spent gym class in an administrative office doing reports about various sports.

I already felt isolated because the inaccessible school meant it was hard for me to get to my classes, locker, club meetings, or social events. Several students had been making fun of me and calling me names like cripple or comparing me to Christopher Reeve, the actor who had played Superman and had become disabled. The hostility escalated when Ms. G sought to have me expelled, not because I had violated any rules, but because she believed I fell short in expressing enough gratitude to those who assisted me with my wheelchair. To add a bitter twist, Ms. G explicitly cited an alleged failure to thank bus drivers. But my own father was the school bus driver, and he had never once been thanked by her on any of the school and sports trips where he had transported her.

Looking back now, I see outrageous ableism from Ms. G and the entire school. The school was physically inaccessible, and I was working harder than the abled students just to keep up and access my classes. I was kept out of gym class, forced to leave all of my classes early to navigate inaccessible buildings and reach the next class on time, and had to keep all of my heavy textbooks with me at all times because I couldn’t access my locker. Yet, here I was being accused of not being grateful enough. I was expected to be shouting praises from the rooftops.

“Thank you for pushing me to class in my wheelchair because the hallways don’t meet accessibility requirements for me to get there without help.”

“Thank you for excluding me entirely from gym class and the locker room and blaming me for it.”

“Thank you for pushing me down a ramp so quickly that I slammed into a wall.”

“Thank you for having one wheelchair accessible restroom in the entire school so that I have to miss half of my class every time I need to pee.”

“Thank you for the cafeteria that has no table that is accessible for people in wheelchairs so that I have to eat my lunch alone in a classroom.”

The abled students weren’t expected to thank the school for having desks, chairs, or regular bathroom stalls that met their basic access needs. But I was expected to practically worship anyone who assisted me with navigating the school’s inaccessible facilities. In Ms. G’s view, I was the one who was failing, not the school or the ableist system of which it was a part. But I wasn’t educated enough in systemic oppression and liberation at the time to understand these things as injustices. I believed Ms. G and blamed myself.

I spent hours being pulled from class to meet with Ms. G and my guidance counselor in order to defend myself against her accusations. I clung to my academic accomplishments as a shield, a testament to that fact that I was a “good disabled person,” not those “lazy entitled disabled people” you hear about on the news. I practically spewed the contents of my resume and college applications at this woman who was trying to kick me out of school a few months before graduation. I’m president of these clubs. I’ve had my essay published in a book. I’m 5th in the senior class of hundreds. I’ve spent hours doing volunteer work and was recognized by the state for it. Here are my SAT scores, my GPA, my list of AP classes. Each served to bolster my argument that it made no sense to expel one of the highest achieving, award-winning students in the senior class. And after many hours spent in these meetings and many classes missed, it actually worked. My guidance counselor slammed his fist on the desk and said enough is enough. He spewed the same resume-style details back at Ms. G and told her that he could pull any random teacher from the hallway and ask their opinion about me and it would be positive. He told her that she seemed to be the only one who had a problem and her complaints didn’t stand up against everything positive I had done for the school and its reputation. I was relieved to be free of Ms. G and her allegations, but I left these meetings with a clear takeaway. My disability required me to be perfect in every other aspect of my life.

A shadow loomed over my subsequent years, urging me to relentlessly push my limits, downplay symptoms, and overwork myself. Throughout college, I held entry-level jobs while managing a side blog, and still earning honor roll status. After landing my first “adult” job at a climate non-profit, I strove to be the best activist possible. My days began and ended with the sun. Weekends blurred into workdays as I answered emails and monitored social media as if responding to a crisis that didn’t truly exist. When I finally left my office in the dark, I would go to volunteer meetings or hang up flyers, not because I was required to, but because I wanted to be the best. Friendships, hobbies, and fun became casualties of my relentless schedule. I used to say things like “it doesn’t matter if I’m tired because I’m doing it for the Earth and the climate.” Yes, now I had to be perfect for the entire Earth.

I kept the facade going for a decade of working for different social justice causes. I ignored my body and pushed myself to constantly do more for the cause. I pushed myself to do one more hour of volunteering on phone banks, one more hour of registering voters, one more weekend answering emails or hanging flyers, one more night painting protest signs. It was an endless cycle of working, achieving, perfecting — and ultimately burning myself out and making myself sicker and more disabled.

In the midst of this perpetual cycle of overachievement, my body finally reached its breaking point, leading me to make a crucial decision for my well-being: to apply for short-term disability. This unexpected pause has been a revelation, forcing me to confront the pain and fatigue that I had long suppressed and ignored. I often find myself questioning how I managed to work through such agony in the past, now grappling with a newfound awareness of my physical limitations.

Beyond the physical realm, I’m working to unlearn the shame that had been ingrained in me. I decided to try to contact Ms. G and tell her that the way she behaved towards a teenager, still legally a child, was inappropriate and taught me to be ashamed of myself. I was hoping for acknowledgement, if not an apology. But when I tried to Google her, I found out she had passed away from an illness. I wondered, perhaps, if in becoming disabled herself she had been able to work through her own shame that she had taught to me. Then I saw that the obituary named the other closeted teacher, her alleged partner, as her “longtime friend.” I thought this was both suspicious and sad so I googled the two teachers’ names together hoping perhaps I would find a wedding website or some other happy confirmation of their love. I did find photos of the two of them together from an LGBTQ community newsletter in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a famously gay beach town. They looked happy in the photos, sitting side-by-side and surrounded by other smiling women. It seemed like they had in fact been a couple. So why couldn’t the obituary admit it? Even in death, she was still hiding who she truly was and hiding her love from the world.

She, too, had been trapped in the confines of her own shame, unable to break free. The very shame she imposed on me was, in turn, a reflection of her unaddressed internal struggles. While it was still unfair to project her own shame onto a teenager and, as a result, teach me to feel that shame, I couldn’t feel angry anymore. I found compassion for the person that I felt had abused me: I felt sad for her and her partner, perhaps even pity.

I have worked and am still working to heal my shame and to live openly and unapologetically as a queer disabled woman. I got to have a beautiful wedding surrounded by friends, family, and our dog. I get to share my life with an amazing partner who makes my life better. I have gained empowerment and connection as part of the disabled community. I get to experience many joys that her shame probably kept from her. In an alternate reality, she could have been a role model for embracing my queerness, but instead, she taught me to hide my authentic self. I wish she had found the strength to heal her own shame, just as I am striving to do.

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