Shame’s Gravity

By Deidre Lopez

On the surface, I am everything you might hope for: a business owner, a confident woman, an attentive wife and an involved mother. Strangers and friends tell me, almost apologetically, that it looks like I have it all together. I smile and thank them. What they cannot see is how recently I wore the same polished face while something unnamed gnawed at my soul.

Maybe you know that feeling too the kind where everything looks fine on paper, but your heart is heavy, and your smile feels borrowed. You go through the motions, hold the world together, but something inside you whispers, “If they only knew…”

This invisible hunger is more common than any of us like to admit. Many people: mothers, fathers, sons, daughters walk around with it stuffed so deep inside that they forget it is there until a moment of possibility brings it back. You go for a promotion, step into a new relationship, dream of being someone better, and suddenly that still, small voice rises up: You’re not good enough. You won’t make it. Who are you to try?

Before I tell you how mine showed up, it helps to name the pattern: we’re taught to hide what hurts and to label what we don’t understand. That training shapes the moments that undo us.


The question that used to undo me was simple: “How many children do you have?”

I would count the two little ones at home and feel the third rise in my throat, the daughter I lost. My mouth would open, but shame got there first. It wasn’t just a feeling; it was a weight. Shame made every answer heavy, every room smaller, every new beginning suspect.

I learned shame early. My mother drank. I learned to scan faces, to measure moods, to make myself smaller so things wouldn’t break. Later, when I became bulimic, I told myself the scale was a kind of honesty. Really, it was another ledger of not-enough. I carried that ledger into adulthood and into my own alcoholism.

When my sister took temporary custody of my daughter, I told myself it was a bridge not a surrender. I did the things you’re supposed to do: went to treatment, found an apartment, kept a job, showed up, checked boxes. But every success seemed to shrink in the rearview mirror as soon as I earned it. Progress didn’t feel like progress. It felt like proof that I still had more to prove. Every time a small win collapsed, the old pull returned, and I’d claw my way back to daylight, one rough inch at a time.

Eventually, I went through CPS and started walking the path they set out for me. Then I heard my sister say, “It will seriously hurt me when she is no longer with me.” Those words rang like a bell that wouldn’t stop. I was split down the middle: one hand reaching forward, the other guarding my sister’s heart. The sister who had stepped in twice, first for my daughter and, years earlier, for me when she shielded and raised me while our mom drank and searched for herself. The loyalty and the guilt tangled. My focus slipped. I did, too.

The truth is, I didn’t want to drink. I wanted relief. I wanted quiet. I wanted to stop feeling like a failure in a story I was trying so hard to rewrite.

The bigger pattern we rarely name

What happened to me lives inside a larger story. As a society, we use labels to feel safe. We say “bad choices” where there is untreated pain. We say “weakness” where there is illness and trauma. We say “discipline” when we mean conformity. LGBTQ+ people are shamed for who they love; people living with addiction are shamed for continuing to use; students who leave school are shamed for learning on a different timeline; parents are shamed when their kids struggle; kids are shamed for not being “obedient” enough. Do you see the pattern? These hand-me-down rules were never facts, but we treated them like scripture. And the labels stick. They become the scarlet letters we pin to one another; addict, dropout, difficult kid, failed parent.

In some eyes, my mistake is the worst kind: a mother who lost custody. But those eyes are looking through rules that were never meant to define a person. Judgment doesn’t make families stronger; it makes shame louder. And when shame gets louder, people hide instead of asking for help and the problems we fear only grow in the dark.

I don’t tell you my mistakes so you can judge me; I tell them so you can’t… and so I don’t have to.



Here’s what I know now: shame is not a compass. It doesn’t point to what’s true. Shame is gravity. It pulls you back to the lowest story you’ve ever told about yourself and names it destiny.

People will say, “Use the guilt to do better,” but shame isn’t the same as guilt. Guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says, I am something wrong. Guilt can push you to repair. Shame convinces you you’re not worth the repair. And when you believe that deep down, in your bones no checklist can save you. You can stack achievements to the ceiling and still wake up under water.

Even after I got sober, shame found new shapes. I had two more children. At work break time chatter, at the pediatrician, at birthday parties, someone would ask about my kids, and I’d feel the hot flush in my neck. To explain felt like betraying myself. To not explain felt like betraying her. Shame framed every option as the wrong one.

I wish I could tell you there was a single turning point. There wasn’t. There was instead a long, ordinary apprenticeship to telling the truth out loud, to myself, and gently to others. It looked like this:

1) Naming what happened, not what it means about me.
2) Letting love be specific.
3) Learning boundaries that aren’t punishments.
4) Rehearsing the hard answer.
5) Letting grief have its chair at the table.

Over time, these small practices did what shame said nothing could: they moved me. Not all at once. Not even in a straight line. But enough that when the old stories start, I have new sentences to answer with.

Speaking to All of Us

My story might look different than yours, but shame wears many disguises. Maybe yours sounds like the parent who’s never enough, the child who can’t live up, the worker who hides the mess behind the smile. Shame doesn’t care what the reason is, it only cares that you stay small.

As mothers, as fathers, and as children, we all carry shame for different reasons: not being enough, being too much, having parents who struggled, grappling with illness, feeling like we never meet our own standards. Shame keeps us silent. It isolates us. It convinces us that we must hide our stories to avoid judgment when the opposite is true. When we speak our mistakes and pain out loud, we reclaim the narrative. In sharing our flaws, we take away people’s ability to shame us, because they can only reflect back what we refuse to acknowledge.

If shame is a mirror, we choose what it reflects. Let’s retire the scripts that turn differences into scarlet letters and replace them with truer ones in our homes, schools, and workplaces so the next time someone reaches for help or dares to try, they hear You belong here instead of Who do you think you are? Naming the pattern isn’t excusing harm; it’s what makes repair possible.

Now, I have a great relationship with my sister and with my eldest daughter. We rebuilt it not through perfection but through honesty, forgiveness, and remembering that we are all human, doing the best we can with the experiences, tools, and support we have.

If you are carrying your own ledger of not-enough whether it’s about addiction, your body, your family, your past this is what I want to offer you, neighbor to neighbor:

- You are the person who kept going.
- Progress that doesn’t “count” still changes you.
- Other people’s feelings matter. They do not get to pilot your recovery.
- You do not owe strangers your whole story.
- Shame cannot survive sustained truth-telling.

I still have days when the question catches me off guard. I still have nights when I hear her voice and the ache is fresh. Recovery did not erase what happened; it taught me how to carry it without breaking myself to bits.

When I think about my “highest self” now, she is not polished or perfect. She does not have a spotless record or an explanation that satisfies everyone. My highest self is steady. She tells the truth. She treats her past like a place she learned from, not a prison she lives in. She steadies the younger parts of me the girl who learned to scan rooms, the young mother who wanted so badly to get it right, the woman who slipped and paid dearly and she says, We’re going forward together.

So when someone asks how many children I have, I take a breath. I count each of them one by one, by name, by love and I answer. Sometimes with a sentence, sometimes with a smile. Either way, I refuse to let shame be the loudest voice in my mouth. I lived too much life under its gravity to let it write my future.

Healing didn’t make me perfect; it made me real. And real is enough for me, for my children, and for anyone still learning to forgive themselves.

I am not the worst thing I’ve done. I am not the sum of what I couldn’t hold on to. I am the person who keeps walking. And that is enough.