Fifty Books Project 2023

An Apprenticeship in the School of Anxiety

By Jerry Januszewski

To say human beings feel “bad” about shame is a vast understatement.  Shame is agonizing and fear of exposure leads us to expend enormous mental and emotional energy to keep shame well hidden, even defending its foul existence with declarations like, “I will never forgive myself” or “I will always feel this way>’. When shame is exerting its power, we hide – and human connection is lost. Shame brings isolation, alienation, and loneliness.  One cannot begin to measure the sum of human misery in the world attributable to this.

This is a book of short essays written by one of my college roommates.  In it, he takes on a variety of subjects – drinking and alcoholism, living in the moment, competition, pornography, humor and several others. The essays are short, the writing is clean and straightforward:  Januszewski is not showing off or working for style points.  He says what he has to say and then stops.  This allows his points to accumulate, so that while each essay stands on its own, reading straight through as a book allows them to accumulate. 

The largest and most important accumulation is around the idea of shame.  Januszewski is not interested in shame as a verb – there is no talk of shaming others or of being shamed by others.  His concern is shame as a noun, a condition we all live in.  Januszeski sees shame as central to the human experience. It is how we punish ourselves for our weakness, shortcomings and mistakes:  we become ashamed of them.  His concern is how ineffective shame is as a punishment – it mires us in our weaknesses rather than purging us of any experience of them.  Januszewski is nothing if not modest and he aims much of this analysis at himself.  The book acts as a bit of a spiritual memoir and we learn a good deal about his own striving for a deeper and more peaceful life.  That striving is wound up in facing his shortcomings and there are some interesting confessions here.  However, there is little beyond that striving for peace that could be seen as conventionally religious.

One of the more interesting twists to all this comes in the form of a story in the essay “Beasts-Angels Among Us,” which includes the story of a session of alcoholics anonymous in which a woman wallows in her shame as a way of defending herself from facing the true source of that shame.  Januszewski is a professional addiction counselor and the anti-alcohol messages here are pretty direct, though generally non-judgmental.  What is most interesting about this story is the twist it introduces to the concept of shame Januszewski is developing:  that shame is both our awareness of our weakness and the mechanism we use to avoid facing them.  Shame is a legitimate response to our shortcomings and the symptom that allows us to avoid facing the disease.  

He expounds on this idea without resort to Freudian concepts of the unconscious or any psychological language.   In fact, his avoidance of buzz words or any language associated with psychology, counseling, self-help or religion is one of the book’s great strengths.  While he manages to make clear that there is great learning behind these essays (references to Socrates, Epictetus, Jung, Blake, Yeats and others are slipped in) he never lets the education that led him to these thoughts to get in the way of the thoughts themselves.  While there are decades of study and experience behind these essays, they present themselves as simply the thoughts of one concerned man.  

In the final essay, “Spiritual But Not Religious,” Januszewski ties his various concerns together with an explicit call recognizing that the attempt to lead a good life – and good here is read to include integrity, happiness, pleasure and striving – is an inherently religious quest.  Again, he does this without resort to much in the way of religious vocabulary and in a tone about as far from preaching as one can imagine in an essay of this title. There is a light patina of disdain for the title’s promise of enlightenment without the commitment or community implied by religion, but even here the tone is more unconvinced than judgmental.

The work around shame here – and its dual role as engine and excuse for our pain – seems to just open the discussion, but the volume in general promises that the author is still thinking about all of this and may have more to say.  Januszewski confesses in the introduction that he writes slowly and has spent years putting this slim volume together, so for the foreseeable future we may be thinking about Januszewski’s ideas on our own.