It Wasn’t Courage I Was Missing

There’s a line from one of the stories that stuck with me while I was writing it, and it’s still there, months later: maybe what I’d been missing all along wasn’t the nerve to undress, it was someone in front of whom I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want to be seen.

I wrote it for one specific character, in one specific scene. Got away from me pretty fast, honestly. Started explaining things that had nothing much to do with that scene at all.

Shame as an obstacle (the wrong framing)

We tend to talk about shame like it’s an obstacle, something you push through or shake off before you get to the good part. Courage, nerve, boldness — all that vocabulary we use for desire sounds like a gym, like effort, like a wall you clear in one jump. I’ve been thinking for a while now that the framing’s off. At least for what I’m actually interested in writing.

Because shame almost never leaves because someone got brave. I don’t know many genuinely brave people who stopped caring what others might think of their desire. What I have seen, what I keep trying to put into these stories, is that shame changes shape once the right person shows up. It doesn’t disappear. It turns into something that sits differently.

What changes when the right person shows up

That’s the part that gets me, I think. The character doesn’t suddenly turn brave, not all at once and not gradually either. They just find someone in front of whom pretending stops making sense, and that’s a lot rarer than courage. Courage you can manufacture — grit your teeth and do it anyway. This isn’t that. It’s either there or it isn’t, no shortcut around it.

Characters who arrive undone, not armored

That’s why most of my characters walk into the central scene already undone on the inside. No armor on. Shame running at full strength, and it’s exactly there, with nothing to hide behind, that desire starts getting interesting to me as a writer. A character with nothing left to fear doesn’t give me much. One who’s afraid and keeps going anyway — that’s the one I want. That’s where the psychological cost begins to matter.

The strange part, the one that rarely gets said out loud, is that being truly seen sometimes scares people more than whatever happens physically afterward. You can do almost anything with your eyes closed. What’s hard is doing it knowing someone’s actually watching, taking in every second, without the courtesy of looking away.

That’s what I care about putting down on the page, in the end. Someone who stays looking anyway. Not because they miss the other person’s shame. They see it fine. They stay regardless, and that staying is the part that matters to me.

If you want to read a story built around that gaze, you can read Through His Eyes for free.