Shameless...
“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
That proverb hits a little different when you have actually been that kid. Or that grown man who never really stopped being that kid.
Let me say the quiet part out loud right at the beginning. For a lot of us who ended up in the system, shame was not the problem. The problem was the complete absence of it.
People love to talk about shame like it is this toxic force that needs to be eliminated. And sure, there is a version of shame that crushes people. The kind that says you are nothing, you are garbage, you are beyond repair. That kind of shame does not build anything. It buries people.
But there is another kind. A different kind. The kind that only shows up when you actually belong to something.
And for a lot of us, that came much later. If it came at all.
No community, no shame
Before incarceration, before college, before any of the stuff that looks respectable on paper, my “community” was pretty limited.
It was whoever I was getting high with. Whoever I was running around with. Whoever was involved in the same nonsense I was involved in.
That is not really community. That is proximity.
Nobody in those spaces was holding anyone accountable in any meaningful way. You do not get shamed for screwing up when everybody around you is screwing up too. If anything, you get normalized.
Mess up bad enough and someone might laugh. Or say you went too far. But there is no deeper consequence because there is nothing deeper connecting you.
And here is the key piece. You cannot feel shame in a space where you do not believe you matter.
If you think nobody cares about you, then go ahead and shame me. What are you going to take from me? What reputation am I protecting? What standing am I afraid of losing?
There is nothing to lose.
That is where a lot of crime lives. Not in calculated decisions or rational thinking, but in a kind of emotional emptiness. A disconnect. A feeling that you are not part of anything that would even notice your absence.
So you do what you do.
And sometimes you push it further than you should. Not because you are fearless, but because you are trying to feel something. Heat, attention, consequence, anything.
That proverb is not poetic. It is literal.
The myth that shame causes crime
We have this backwards a lot of the time.
We assume that people commit crime because they feel shame. Because they feel bad about themselves. Because they are trying to escape that feeling.
Sometimes that is true. But more often, especially in the spaces I came from, the issue was the opposite.
We felt disconnected. Unseen. Unimportant.
There is no shame in that space because there is no audience that matters.
You can get arrested. You can hurt people. You can burn relationships to the ground. And it barely registers because you are not anchored to anything that reflects back who you are.
That is what people mean when they talk about “nothing to lose.” It is not just about money or opportunity. It is about identity.
If you are not part of something, you cannot betray it.
If you do not belong, you cannot fall short of expectations.
So there is no shame.
The shift: becoming part of something
Things start to change the moment you become connected to something bigger than yourself.
For me, that started in education.
Not because school magically fixed anything. It did not. But it put me in rooms where people expected something different from me.
Professors who took me seriously. Classmates who treated me like I had something to contribute. Spaces where I was not just tolerated, but actually seen.
That is when something uncomfortable started creeping in.
I started caring.
I started caring about what people thought. About how I showed up. About whether I followed through.
And with that came something new.
Shame.
Not the crushing kind. The functional kind.
The kind that says, you said you were going to do this, so why did you not do it?
The kind that makes you think twice before you act because you know someone will notice.
The kind that makes you uncomfortable in the best possible way.
Shame as a signal of belonging
Here is the argument most people do not want to make.
Shame, in the right context, is evidence that you are connected.
You only feel embarrassed when you care about how you are perceived by people who matter to you.
You only feel that internal check when you have internalized some set of expectations that you believe you should live up to.
That is not weakness. That is social integration.
It is easy to say “I do not care what anyone thinks.” That sounds tough. Independent. Untouchable.
It is also a pretty good indicator that you are floating.
Because the reality is, if you are part of a healthy community, you do care.
You care about letting people down. You care about your reputation. You care about being someone others can rely on.
That caring is what creates the space for desistance.
Reputation starts to matter
At some point, I realized something that would have meant nothing to me years earlier.
I had a reputation.
People knew me as something other than the worst thing I had done.
They knew me as a student. As someone who showed up. As someone who contributed.
And suddenly, I did not want to lose that.
Not because I was afraid of punishment, but because I had something to protect.
That is where shame becomes powerful.
It is no longer about being judged by some abstract system. It is about how your actions reflect on the identity you have built within a community.
You start asking different questions.
Not “will I get caught?” but “who does this make me?”
Not “what is the consequence?” but “what does this do to how people see me, and how I see myself?”
That shift is everything.
The difference between toxic shame and functional shame
Let me be clear. Not all shame is good.
Toxic shame says:
You are the problem
You are broken
You cannot change
Functional shame says:
That action was not aligned with who you are trying to be
You can do better
People expect more from you because you matter
One isolates. The other integrates.
One pushes you further out. The other pulls you back in.
The difference is community.
Without community, shame becomes destructive. With community, it becomes corrective.
Why “go ahead and shame me” used to work
There was a time where you could have stood in front of me and tried to shame me all day.
It would not have worked.
Because I did not believe I mattered. And I did not believe you mattered.
There was no relationship there. No connection. No shared expectations.
So go ahead. Say whatever you want.
That is not resilience. That is disconnection.
Now, that same statement does not land the same way.
Because now there are people whose opinions I actually value.
There are spaces where I have invested time, energy, and identity.
There are expectations I have agreed to, whether explicitly or not.
So yeah, now I care.
Now I feel it when I fall short.
Now shame actually has somewhere to land.
Desistance is not just about stopping behavior
We talk about desistance like it is just about stopping crime.
It is not.
It is about becoming someone who has something to lose.
Something real. Something social. Something relational.
It is about building connections that create accountability.
It is about being part of something where your absence would be noticed, and your behavior actually matters.
Shame is not the driver. It is the indicator.
When you start to feel it, it usually means something has shifted.
You are no longer outside the village.
You are inside it.
Final thought
That proverb about the child burning the village is not just about anger or attention.
It is about belonging.
If you are not embraced, you will create heat however you can.
But once you are embraced, once you are part of something, the game changes.
Now you do not want to burn anything down.
Because now you live there.
And once you live there, shame is not something you run from.
It is something that reminds you that you finally have a place worth protecting.