I Should Be Over This

On Being Damaged & Why Art Matters

Today I got shown a reel. Me and roughly 2.3 million other people. Randomly. Happened while mindlessly doomscrolling. It was a recording of Florence Welch on stage introducing Buckle, talking about how the song almost didn’t make the album because she was embarrassed to still be writing songs about people not texting her back.

And I swear to god something in my brain physically halted.

Because that specific flavour of shame? I know it intimately.

That feeling of looking at your own emotions and thinking: surely this is too much. Surely I should be more evolved than this by now. Less affected. Less attached. Less obvious.

"'Cause I’m stupid and I’m damaged and you’re a disaster," she sings.

And yes. To all of that. No notes.

That’s basically it.

A while back, I took down all my feralscripts.

I felt exposed. Vulnerable. Humiliated by how much of myself they revealed.

I looked at them and suddenly could only see myself through the eyes of shame.

And shame is ruthless.

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Shame, My Old Companion

Not only is shame ruthless, it is also persistent. Familiar. An old companion I have dragged through most of my life.

Because the feeling of being too much has never really left me.

Too loud. Too emotional. Too attached. Too sensitive. Too intense. Too needy. Too sincere.

I have always felt things at a volume other people seem incapable of surviving.

I fall in love quickly. I care deeply. I stay too long.

I want the impossible, embarrassing things.

The grand declarations. The loyalty. The “I would cross oceans for you” kind of love.

Not just romantically either. In friendships. In music. In art. In all of it.

I want people in the devastating way novels teach you to want them.

And life has taught me, repeatedly, that most people do not function like that.

Some get overwhelmed. Some retreat.

Some like being adored until the weight of it asks them to be equally honest in return.

And some simply cannot bear to be seen that clearly.

So eventually, after enough people pull away from you, you start assuming the problem must be you.

Not your timing. Not incompatibility. Not circumstance.

You. Faulty by design.

So I wrote.

Because writing was the only place those feelings could go.

The only way to let them out before they rotted inside me. Before they festered. Before they turned poisonous.

I have been writing for survival for most of my life.

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There’s No Fool Like An Old Fool

And I thought I’d learned my lesson.

But life, apparently, disagreed.

It happened again.

And suddenly I couldn’t write anymore.

Every time I looked at the feralscripts, something in me recoiled.

I could suddenly only read them through the lens of humiliation.

They became proof of everything in the last year that had slowly broken me down again.

Proof of every feeling I should have kept hidden.

Every attachment I should have controlled.

Every hope I should have strangled before it ever had the chance to become visible.

Because that’s the real shame, isn’t it?

Not simply being hurt, but realising how much of yourself you handed over willingly.

All those feelings. All that loyalty. All that emotional investment.

Nobody asked for it.

And if you keep placing your heart onto silver platters, eventually you start feeling ridiculous for acting shocked when someone drops it. Or steps over it. Or leaves it there untouched.

I cried so much.

God, I cried so much.

The kind of crying that makes time stop functioning properly.

Days dissolving into thought spirals.

Conversations replaying themselves until they become self-harm.

Every memory turning acidic in retrospect.

I felt ashamed. Exposed. Abandoned.

And I could not bear the thought of those feelings still existing publicly in the form of the feralscripts.

So I took them down.

All of them.

I hid everything.

Pretended none of it had ever happened.

Pretended to harden. Pretended to become reasonable.

Detached. Normal.

Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?

Heal quietly. Move on gracefully. Learn the lesson. Take the hint. Stop being so fucking affected.

And at first, people understand. Your friends listen. They comfort you. They sit with you in the wreckage for a while.

But eventually something changes.

Because grief has an expiration date socially. Emotional intensity does too.

At some point, people stop asking how you are because surely you should be getting better by now.

Surely you should be over it.

And if you aren’t—if you’re still carrying it weeks or months later, still writing about it, still hurting, still unable to neatly package the experience into a "lesson learned"—then the shame comes back even harder.

I think that’s one of the loneliest feelings a person can experience. 

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I Refuse to Be Ashamed Anymore

I've been ashamed of myself so heavily recently that it changed me.

And it was a stupid reel presented to me by the Instagram algorithm that shook me out of it.

Florence Welch on a stage in front of thousands of people admitting she almost buried a song because she was embarrassed by how human it made her look.

Because it revealed need. Longing. Attachment.

The humiliating reality of still wanting someone who cannot meet you where you are.

And it made me realise something that should probably have been obvious all along:

We are all carrying this. Maybe not in the same shape. Maybe not at the same intensity. But nobody gets through life untouched by longing and shame and grief and emotional absurdity.

Nobody.

I am not uniquely broken because I feel deeply. I am not defective because I love too hard, attach too fast, or want sincerity so badly it sometimes tears me apart. Life is messy. Relationships are messy. People are complicated and frightened and overwhelmed and lonely and trying their best while simultaneously hurting each other constantly.

That’s being alive.

And this is where art matters.

Whether it comes as a song, a poem, or paint dragged across a canvas is almost irrelevant.

As long as it’s honest.

As long as it says the ugly thing out loud.

I am hurt.

I am ashamed.

I loved too much.

I wanted more than I was given.

I still do.

Because the moment nobody says those things anymore, shame wins completely.

Silence grows around all the messy, human parts of us until everybody starts believing they are the only person failing this badly at being alive.

But we are all winging it.

Every single one of us.

Some maybe with slightly better coping mechanisms. At least I sincerely hope so.

Am I healed? No.

Am I over it? Absolutely not.

Do I still flinch reading some of those poems? Yes.

But I am done being ashamed of them.

So I brought the feralscripts back.

Every single one.

They are honest. They are real. They came from a version of me trying very hard to survive her own feelings.

If even one person reads them and feels less alone—less monstrous, less excessive, less impossible to love—then they did what art is supposed to do.

And I am fine with putting my heart out there.

I won't stop. I won't be bludgeoned into submission by a world that tells us detachment is better than sincerity.

I will keep hurting, yes.

But at least I am not lying.