The Other Side of Shame and Death

A voice in the shadows says "I'll be gone without you"

I wrote a substack post the other day called It’s Raining Meaning and it was very cathartic and opened up a space for me to bring in more voices from my shadows that want to be heard. Much of my writing lately is a very personal attempt to revision an understanding of “bipolar disorder” and “psychosis.” I think everyone with these kinds of diagnoses has stories just as intense and interesting as mine. I hope this story inspires you to tell your own stories. This post is mostly about shame and the fear of annihilation and my relationship to my dead father who I never got to grieve as a 13 year old and how I’m beginning to learn to grieve as an adult.

My Own Internal Pompeii

In the year 1986 I used to come home from school and watch this video everyday on MTV called “Take On Me.” If you’re my generation you know the video I’m talking about. It’s a love story that takes place half in reality and half on the other side of an animated comic. When I watch it all these years later it’s like a visceral time portal to a sensitive and lonely 11 year old that felt emotions really strong and didn’t fit in to the culture of my high pressured Manhattan elementary school. I was always imagining myself escaping on to the other side of a screen or a comic book.

My dad died about a year later and everything before his death—my entire childhood—became like my own internal city of Pompeii, covered in molten lava and frozen in time, only to be discovered after many years as a grown man. In my 20s I’d often remember the music videos and sit coms I watched better than my actual life, as if they were a shiny surface that was covering something much more painful and real. Why did I feel so frozen inside when I thought about my childhood? What happened to my actual memories?

If you’ve never lost a parent as a kid it’s hard to explain all the different ways it can tear a hole in your heart. I’m sure it’s different for everyone but I’m 49 now and I’m just coming to understand the depths of psychic suffering I’ve experienced because of the way my dad died, when he died, and how there was not a single person or a cultural framework to give me space and help me grieve.

The Riddle of Identity

The man who raised me knew he was dying the whole time he was raising me. He had a disease called cystic fibrosis that was tearing apart his insides. I imagine he got a lot of pleasure spending time with me as a little person. Now that I have kids of my own I understand the kind of joy that children can bring to someone’s life. Because my dad was in a lot of physical and mental pain, he carried around this sense of being an underdog and felt cheated by the world. He had a wicked temper and his face would get purple with rage. I don’t think he was that conscious about it, but I’m also pretty sure there were parts of him that wanted to live through me, and even saw me as a way to keep living after he died.

When my dad actually died there was an Obi Wan Kenobi quality to his death, he became way more powerful to me as a memory. There was suddenly an enormous void and I looked for him everywhere with a broken heart that I was constantly trying to mend. I kept looking for the guy for years and years, in lovers and in older mentors, I’m not sure how conscious I was about it, but I sure can see it now. My dad was like the love of my life, suspended in animation for eternity, waiting like a ghost by my side but always so far away.

I’ve come to believe that some of my father’s parts actually figured out a way to live through me—I took him on—in this very intimate way, so he could stay alive. It’s only now, as a middle-aged man—the exact same age he was when he died—that it’s becoming easier for me to see what parts of me are actually me, and what parts of me are my father. 

Shame Suspended in Animation

There’s this idea in Internal Family Systems theory, which is the kind of therapy I practice, that we all have a bunch of different parts inside of us, and that those parts have relationships with each other. Some of our parts are like young hidden children that carry old pain and some of our parts play the role of protectors that attempt to keep our system in homeostasis, often by doing things to further bury our exiled child parts. Oftentimes, the protector parts get in the way of each other and end up in polarizations. The goal of the therapy is to get our parts in right relationship, and sometimes this involves helping to compassionately unburden the old pain of our exiles.

One of the more recent realizations in my life is that my father carried an incredible amount of shame about his illness and that one of the ways I’ve attempted to stay close to the guy has been to unknowingly carry his shame around with me, as if it is my own. For as long as I remember I’ve identified as the underdog and the outcast, and identified with others in similar social roles. Some of this feels healthy and righteous, but some of it has actually been deeply confusing and made me fucking miserable. I’ve also held a disproportionate amount of shame, seemingly since I was a little kid. I’ve always felt very uncoordinated and had a sense of being physically weak. I think part of it was that there was no one around to teach me how to use my body as a child, but I also think I deeply identified with my sick father and on some level I didn’t want to be threatening to him. I’ve carried this physical shame around with me for so long and it’s only now that I’m unraveling it at the source and working on putting it to rest. 

I’m starting to realize that so many people who get diagnosed with “serious mental illness” do some version of this: carry around other people’s suffering because it’s a way to stay connected to them, even after they are gone. Shame is very relational in that way, even though it’s often so hidden.

Manic Depression Captured My Soul

But there’s something deeper: because of what I witnessed as a child I have these young exiled parts of myself that are mortally terrified of dying, terrified of becoming a man like my father who was hooked up to a bunch of machines and withering away and leaving the world in physical and psychic agony. But not they’re just scared of getting sick, they’re literally terrified of NOT EXISTING. This is something I never really understood about myself, but I’m coming to see that it’s this deep mortal fear that has inspired some of the more egotistical and obnoxious parts of me in directions of wanting to be seen and recognized for my work in the world - TO NOT BE FORGOTTEN. The times in my life where I longed to be recognized in the limelight were literally because I was trying to comfort the young parts that are terrified of being forgotten.

There have been number of times in my life when I’ve been psychotically depressed, where I’ve felt like I was just a ghost maybe wandering late night streets, maybe alone in my room in any number of cities, frozen in time, unable to break out of this horrible sense that everything was completely meaningless, and that I didn’t really exist. It is a deep terror, if you don’t know what I’m talking about I hope you never have to experience it. It’s only now I’m understanding that in those times I’m blended with a terrified child part that feels he can’t exist without his father. He is an exile trapped in time.

On the flip side I have these other parts that carry all this meaning like the colors of the freak flag Rainbow Connection and know how to take that child out of his suffering and make him feel like he’s living in an epic love story about the universe where he’s the main character. It’s the other end of the spectrum, the doctors call it “mania.” Those parts are powerful and important, like I think they actually hold so many of the keys to what’s important in my life, but I don’t ever want them to totally take over. When they take over is how I’ve gotten into some serious trouble in my life. I’m in the process of negotiating which parts of me hold those keys.

Someone I trust told me recently that I need to get close to those young parts, the frozen ones that live in the psychic void carved by all that trauma I lived through as a kid. The ones that are terrified of annihilation. When I’m blended with them I can’t comfort them, I’m lost in their pain. For me it’s most often late at night when I can’t sleep and I have this sense of terror that I can’t name or understand and I take sleeping pills to make it go away. They want to be paid attention to but I’ve been too scared to get near the pain. Well, I’m getting closer. Writing these thoughts down really helps. It is a feeling of being witness by my older self, but also by the potential for others who might understand. This is an integral part of the healing for me.

The End Times Over and Over Again 

Do you ever listen to a song for years and you think you know the words and then you discover that you made up your own words to fit into your own story? That happens to me sometimes. I always thought the chorus to the Ah-Ha song Take On Me were:

Take on me/Take me on/I’ll be gone/Without you

I just learned that the actual words to the song are “I’ll be gone in a day or two”* which has a very different relational feeling, less intense, way more like a guy trying to get a girl to make out with him. Maybe like me in my 20s. If you didn’t know me when I was a young man, I was so full of life and passion, but I constantly thought I was going to die. It was like it had been prophesied inside my inner system that death was Coming Soon, like those apocalyptic Christians who stand on the street corners in New York City with signs that say The End Is Near! Except that drama was playing out inside of me. I was living out my dad’s fears of death! And it drew me to connect with people in intense ways.

When I was young I always felt like I was living close to death but it gave me an uncanny superpower where I wasn’t scared to put myself in wild and dangerous situations or be very real and honest with people about my desires. I didn’t consider myself a spiritual person but I felt this deep connection to the Universe, and I saw my friends as the most Important people in the world, the work we were doing was Sacred, we were making History. Sometimes it was almost as if I was living in a comic book and beckoning people over to the Other Side, where we were fighting a battle against the Evil Empire and I wanted everyone to join us. Maybe it was real or maybe it was just a crazy story I made up in my head to tame my shame demons and my deep fear of death.

Death Trip/Life Trip

All this time later I realize those parts that were on a Death Trip were protectors I inherited from my dad, trying to comfort my inner little kids who were scared of disappearing into the Void. But those protectors also carried their own exiled fears, and I ended up in some kind of complicated intergenerational bind. In 2024 I’m in the process of putting those old fears to rest and unburdening the shame my young parts have been carrying all this time, shame that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

Sometimes I still get confused about what’s ME and what’s these old dramatic parts of me. But as I explore the inner territory with compassion and curiosity, I find all kinds of interesting messages in there waiting for me, like a multi-layered riddle waiting to be decoded. When I have enough distance I’m grateful for the complexity. And as I learn to take care of my internal little kids, my beautiful little exiles, the manic and depressed parts even out and get to know each other better, they share memories and understandings, in ways I never knew was possible. It’s wild to realize how our internal lives both mirror the outside world we come from and shape are relationships with the people in our lives.

After all these years the story is still very familiar but keeps getting more interesting. Let me know if any of this resonates with your story and I’ll see you around.

*As a teenager I played in a punk band and we actually covered Take On Me and changed the lyrics to be about corporate trash music. “They don’t play unless you pay!”

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