Inherited Shame

When I look back on my life, it is often with a sense of shame. A quiet, persistent feeling that no matter when, where, or who—it was always me. I was the common denominator. I was the one to blame.

Inspired by a song of the Pet Shop Boys it's a sin. Music often speaks deeply to one's soul,  reflecting truths and emotions that remain buried in the subconscious until you recognise yourself within the lyrics. Another song that inspired this is Losing my religion by R.E.M. 

Anthropology is the study of humans—how we live, think, evolve, and relate to each other across time and cultures. Music is one of form of art (also poetry and visual arts, that transcends across the human experience bringing emotional weight to otherwise plain lives.

For a long time, I understood my life through that lens. Especially when I realised I was queer.

I never chose this—this attraction to men. And it felt, for years, like something that set my life on a harder path than it needed to be. I imagined an easier version of myself. One without guilt. Without shame. Without the weight of judgement or the exhausting cycle of self-denial.

If it had been a simple choice—something I could pray away, like a switch I could turn off—I would have done it. Without hesitation.

But it doesn’t work like that.

You don’t get to rewrite yourself so easily. Instead, you struggle. You question. You confront not only who you are, but the systems that taught you to fear that truth—social norms, expectations, and the quiet authority of religion.

I was told—like so many are, in ways both direct and implied—that I was wrong. That I was something to be corrected. Even, at times, that I was an abomination.

But that never fully made sense to me.

How could the same God who created me, who knew me before I knew myself, also reject me for being exactly as I am?

That question didn’t give me answers—but it changed the way I asked them.

Over time, I moved away from certainty and into something less defined. Less rigid. I stopped trying to force belief into a structure that had no space for me. I began to question the narrative itself.

I started to see that what I had carried as something deeply personal had been shaped long before me—by culture, by belief, by stories repeated until they felt like truth.

And in that questioning, something shifted.

Life started to feel bigger than the frameworks I had been given. Bigger than the rules I had tried—and failed—to follow. Bigger than the fear of saying too much, or not saying enough.

Yet the world hasn’t shifted as easily.

We still live within systems that are quick to judge and slow to understand. There is something deeply human in our fear of difference—something instinctive, perhaps—but also something learned, reinforced, repeated across generations.

And so the tension remains.

Between who I am and what I was taught to be.

Between acceptance and expectation.

Between stepping into the light and feeling, still, like I am standing slightly outside of it.

But maybe the shame was never mine to carry.

Maybe it belonged to the stories I was given—stories older than me, carried through generations, and rarely questioned. Stories I am now, slowly, learning to rewrite.