Unfinished and Heavy: Living With Humiliation

Facing Humiliation

Humiliation is a thief. It doesn’t just take pieces of you. It drags you into the dirt, forces you to look at everything you’re ashamed of, and dares you to get back up. It tells you that this is who you are – are small, exposed, broken. It doesn’t just wound you. It rewrites the way you see yourself.

It’s quiet, too. That’s the worst part. It doesn’t scream in your face. It whispers in the back of your mind. It’s the voice that says, “You deserved this. You earned this.” It convinces you that you’re weak, powerless, unworthy. And when you believe it, humiliation doesn’t just happen to you. It becomes part of you.

Humiliation makes you its accomplice. It makes you lie, hide, stay small, sabotage what matters most, all to avoid feeling its sting again. But it’s never enough. The fear of exposure, the weight of shame, it follows you. You can’t outrun it.

And you know what’s worse? Humiliation isn’t always wrong. Sometimes it points to the things you did, the mistakes you made, the harm you caused. It makes you look at the mess and say, “Yeah, I did that.” And that’s where it hooks you. Because now, it’s not just about what others think. It’s about what you think of yourself.

What Humiliation Leaves Behind

Humiliation didn’t just hurt me. It reshaped me. It planted seeds of doubt, shame, and guilt that grew into decisions I carried for years.

Taking her back after she chose him over me.

It wasn’t about that, though. It was my jealousy. My anger. That was the problem. At least, that’s how it was framed. Accepting that? Humiliating. Maybe even more humiliating than her choosing him, because look where she ended up.

But somehow, she made it about me. Somehow, I became the problem. She became the judge. She became the gold standard.

Paying penance. Living in silence. Being at fault. Being the one who messed it all up. Not being enough. Never being enough, no matter how much I tried. No matter how much I did.

Humiliation teaches you to live in pieces. To hide the parts of yourself you’re ashamed of. To bury the truth so deep, you start believing the lie instead.

And it comes with a cost. It steals your voice. It steals your worth. It makes you carry the weight of your mistakes as if they’re the whole story of who you are.

The Truth About Humiliation

Humiliation isn’t just a wound. It's a liar. A liar that stays, embedded, always threatening to rise to the surface, to be seen again. 

It convinces you it owns you. It tells you your mistakes, your flaws, your failures are who you are. It makes you believe that your worst moments are all anyone will ever see.

It makes you afraid to face yourself, afraid to admit how deeply you’ve been hurt, afraid to even try to let it go. And it stays with you, feeding on that silence, growing heavier with every passing year.

Humiliation forces you to look at the parts of yourself you don’t want to see. The choices you made. The mistakes. The cracks in the foundation. And the truth is, it doesn’t let you turn away. That’s the weight of it. That’s the heaviness.

Humiliation doesn’t end. It doesn’t disappear. You don’t beat it. You carry it. Some days it’s quieter, but it’s always there. Not as proof of what’s wrong with you, but as a reminder of what you’ve been through. Of what’s broken, and what’s still standing.

Because that’s what this is. Heavy, messy, unfinished.

Humiliation doesn’t leave. It lingers. And the only way through it is to stop running from it, to stop hiding from the weight of it, and to keep carrying it, one step at a time.

What Comes Next

Humiliation doesn’t end you. But it doesn’t let go of you either. It stays. It lingers. It becomes part of you, woven into the way you see yourself and the choices you make.

Scars remind you of what you’ve been through, of what broke, of what you couldn’t fix. But they also remind you that you’re still here. That somehow, through all of it, you’ve carried the weight and kept moving.

So no, I’m not free of it. I’m not healed, not unscarred, not untouched. But I’m still here. And maybe that’s the only truth that matters.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know what “letting go” looks like, or if that’s even possible.

I was humiliated as a kid. So humiliated. I was humiliated by the girl I loved, over and over again, a never-ending cycle of judgment, even years after it was over. Which was years after it should have been over.

And I still carry the humiliation of how I handled her betrayal.

It’s present. Always present. The mere weight of the word. A word I hadn’t said.

A blog that had gone unwritten.

A week that was going to pass without a blog.

Because I had nothing to say.

And that would have been humiliating.