Stay ConnectedSHAMEBOOTH is a podcast about getting proud.
Through recordings from our art installation, interviews with brave people doing brilliant things and chock full of other sneaky peaks and goodies, we help you answer the question what if? What if I was enough, what if I could feel proud even about the things I thought were mistakes, and what if I did it with playfulness and joy. What if? Come on, what’s the story you want to tell about yourself to yourself. Here’s your chance to flip the script.
It’s PRIDE. Millions of people, literally, are descending on to New York for the 50th Anniversary of Pride, and people around the world are taking to the streets to shed their shame and get proud about who they are and who they desire. It’s powerful. It was powerful 50 years ago and, to be honest, it’s just as potent today, if not more so! We are all about pride, here at SHAMEBOOTH, and in celebration, we brought on our dear friend, author and advocate Matthew Clark Davison to share his story of coming out to his family, moving to California as a teen looking for a refuge and creating a safe space for others to be themselves and take a load of shame off. Get proud, people, not just this month but for a lifetime.
Death. It’s the one thing that is absolutely inevitable in our lives. And yet, it’s the thing we try and escape the most. Until we get ill, or tragedy strikes, and it becomes all too real. That’s what happened with BJ Miller. A stunning, athletic young man at Princeton, he was climbing the top of a train and 11,000 volts of electricity pulsated through his body. He lost both legs and half of his arm. Rather than be shrouded in shame, he turned this tragedy into a strength. Now he is a palliative-care doctor working to help patients ease into one of the most powerful moments of their lives: their death. We spoke about his accident, death, and the way to prepare for it with love.
Eva Hagberg is a journalist, professor, and author. She has a Ph.D. in Visual and Narrative Culture from UC Berkeley and has written for the leading publications: NY Times, Tin House and countless others. So yeah, she’s a badass. And for a long time, she carried a lot of shame, buried it in alcohol and drugs, and it wasn’t until she got sober and, later, became sick that she found a path to loving others and, in so doing, loving herself. She wrote a memoir about it, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship and the book is getting rave reviews. She came to SHAMEBOOTH during her national book tour.
When we see the word shame, it pricks up our ears. We want to know more and we want to understand what people are saying, and doing, about it. Because guess what? We want to eradicate shame. Let’s do it! Wait, wait, what’s that you say? There are some good things about shame too? We never thought of it that way, not until we had author and psychotherapist Joseph Burgo on the show. He had some exceptional insights about shame, a topic he has been exploring for over a decade now, culminating in his book, Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem. We met in Palm Springs and spoke about shame, Trump, Louis CK, and how shame can be a path to pride. We had fun, enjoy.
Do you remember the first time you thought there was something different about your body? Maybe it happened before you were even verbal. You noticed you were taller, or your fingers were longer, your hair was curlier. And, as a toddler, you were fascinated by this difference, certainly not having any judgment about it. And then, as a youth, even before you turned 10 years old, someone made a comment—a classmate, a parent, a friend— about your body, something that didn’t feel so great, and a pang of discomfort came, that soon to be familiar sense of shame about who you are and how you look. It was EARLY in life and it would set the foundation for many of those feelings to continue. But what if you were given the tools to nip that in the bud, to question, to understand, to feel proud. That’s what About-Face, a San Francisco based organization is doing and we spoke with the Executive Director, Jen Berger, about empowering kids to feel proud about themselves and their bodies, for the rest of their lives.
Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir has been hailed as “a tapestry of heart and heartache” (Boston Globe), “raw, cathartic” (O Magazine), “staggering” (Elle.com), “stunningly honest” (The Atlantic) and “a refined, warm, generously poetic library work.” (Entertainment Weekly). Written as an elegy to his mother, with whom Kiese had a complicated and deep relationship, Kiese speaks about body shame, gambling, violence, blackness and so much more. It’s honest and real and deeply powerful. In this episode, we speak with author and professor Kiese Laymon when he was in San Francisco on his whirlwind book tour. When reading Heavy, you discover not only the power of words, memories, and love but also the consequences of generational trauma, leading to addiction and needing to hide-to disappear. Through this book and the exceptional work Kiese has done unpacking his trauma, he finds freedom, and, as readers, so do we. We love you, Kiese. Thank you.
You are born in the south, raised moving from small town to small town because your father is a minister in the church, you’re gay and you know it but you can’t come out, and all you hear from your family is how homosexuality is a sin, an abomination. You’re stuck, at least it feels that way. So you get married, your wife knows that you have sexual inclinations towards the same sex and she loves you so she’s open to it. But ultimately that’s not enough, love can’t overcome your intrinsic character. So you escape your life in the south, your family, your upbringing and you come to California, adopt a new name, create your true identity and help others do the same. That’s the story, in a nutshell, of Finn Deerhart who moved out to California to find out who he is. Today, Finn helps men face the shame they carry inside around their sexuality and dispel it so that they can accept themselves and have healthy, sexy, long-lasting relationships. He’s in this to get people to feel proud of who they are and what they want. Guess what, so are we.
We all know that child abuse is shitty, and we all know that it exists. If awareness is part of the answer, then why does it continue to be a local and national epidemic? How do we care for the abused, and YES, the ABUSER so that the cycle can be broken? As one interviewee observes, it must be spoken about. In this episode of SHAMEBOOTH Podcast, Founder Paula Williams speaks with Katie Albright, JD and CEO of Safe and Sound, formerly known as San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center, and gets real about her personal experiences with childhood abuse, how slippery the slope can be, and how bringing the shame around it into the light can affect change.
Let’s face it- we’re all recovering from something. Do you hide away in the kitchen feeding that chocolate addiction, do you need to get high to make love, is there something that you are compelled to do that keeps you away from being free? There are all sorts of addictions and every day we are recovering from one kind or another.
Be it our own journey or the journey of a loved one, recovery from addiction of any kind is something that carries an air of social stigma. Something we do in private. Uh, NEWS FLASH! Bringing it into the light, shedding the shame you may carry around it, feeling proud and recovering out loud is empowering and liberating. It’s what we’re all about. It’s also what Dawn Nickel of She Recovers is about.
In this episode of SHAMEBOOTH, we speak with kindred spirit Dawn Nickel, co-founder of She Recovers exploring addiction, recovery and the power of sharing and healing because when we heal, our families and communities heal as well. Boom.
We also hear from other women the advice they would give themselves early in their recovery. It’s some powerful shit.
In this episode of SHAMEBOOTH Podcast we follow one artist’s journey out of shame and silence into unrepentant, uncompromising, balls-to-the-wall self-honesty. Her generational anthem “Quiet” went viral at the Women’s March January 27, 2017 receiving 14 million views in 48 hours. A survivor of abuse, anorexia, and depression, Quiet is her thesis on her journey as a woman, an Asian American, a Feminist and as a Human Being. Quiet is about helping people who have been silenced reclaim their power. #icantkeepquiet and neither will we.
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