Column
By Valerie Kennan
Step 1: Drive a Subaru Crosstrek.
Step 2: Take the scenic route. The one without gas stations and billboards to light your way home. Start at 6 PM, forgetting the sun will set halfway home.
Step 3: Listen to someone you love tell you what to do if a deer runs into the road.
“Don’t brake hard and don’t swerve—otherwise you’ll end up in oncoming traffic.”
“So… just drive through it?”
Talk about something else and forget the answer to your question. Instead, talk about whether shame is a useful tool for behavior change.
Step 4: Make the distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt communicates, “What I did is not okay,” whereas shame suggests, “Who I am is not okay.” Shame is useless. It’s a cop-out. If who I am isn’t okay to begin with, it doesn’t matter if I’m cruel to the server— it’s what I do, I’m a bad person. Guilt holds responsibility. If I am a good person (or at least trying to be) and I do something bad, I feel a pang in my gut that tells me I don’t live up to my own standards. Sure, I can ignore it, but the thing gnaws at me like flies on a deer carcass.
Step 5: Drive too fast. Treat the speed limit like a minimum with a five mile-per hour margin.
Step 6: Hit a deer. The two brown legs appeared precipitously, like the thing dropped out of the sky. Clash memory and instinct. Hit the brakes and strain to remember what you learned when you were supposed to be paying attention.
If two teenage boys come to check on you, wait in the car while someone you love relays the incident. In Montana, teenage boys keep guns in the car. They understand that when a deer is hurt, love isn’t nursing it back to health. Love is the elimination of suffering. In this scenario, love was two gunshots to the jugular.
Step 7: Stare at the steering wheel, shaking, then cry. You love deer, you always have—they terrorize your grandmother’s garden, but get spooked by their own shadow. A tug in your stomach says you’d regret leaving without looking. As if leaving without looking is a selfish punishment.
Step 8: Change your mind. Get out of the car, still shaking. Tell the person you love that this is the difference between guilt and shame: you feel horrible for hitting it, but you don’t believe that you are horrible. Ask for a moment alone with the animal.
Step 9: Kneel. Tell God you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. Acknowledge that you are not more valuable to the universe than the deer. Stay a few yards away, rationalizing that it might have diseases. Don’t tell anyone (when you’re telling this story in the future) that you couldn’t bear to make eye contact with the life you cut short. Absorb the full moon and black sky and understand that this is the human experience.
When the person you love asks, “Should we throw it in the back?”
Say, “Absolutely not.”
“Why not? If we’re gonna take its life we might as well. We need to honor it, otherwise this is a waste.”
“I don’t want a dead bloody deer in the back of my car.”
He is a hunter, but you are a hippie. And no hippie in their right mind would put that kind of murder juju into the universe. A hippie would drive a Subaru Crosstrek.
Hunters and hippies have a lot in common—they both appreciate nature, being present, getting quiet, identifying with their animalistic roots—but they come to an inevitable fork in the road when the term “appreciate” separates into its varying definitions.
Step 10: Drive home with a dented bumper. Be grateful for your life and the minuscule damage to your car. Continue debating the uselessness of shame, but this time, bring religion into it—this will ensure the conversation remains lighthearted.
According to that person you love, shame brings people closer to God. He tells you about tribes in Africa who mock hunters returning with impressive game. Their shame ensures humility and keeps them striving for greatness. This is an argument for why children should be shamed into faith.
In kindergarten, you played goalie in soccer. You would revel in getting to watch your own knee reach up to block the ball, like a separate member of the team attached to your body. One day, a teammate said, “We need a new goalie.” You didn’t sign up for the team in first grade.
It is imperative, during this conversation, to remain ignorant to the following: shame is not the problem. The problem is reacting to it with avoidance.
Step 11: Break up with the person you love. After all, his future wife would have put the deer in the back.