Grace meets you where shame thought it had buried you.

Shame tells you the story is finished and you are the ending. Grace is the experience of being addressed anyway, of finding that the place where you had written yourself off is not where the account actually stops. What makes it startling is that it does not require you to have already fixed anything.

If there is something you have decided disqualifies you, try saying it to one safe person out loud. Shame survives mostly on being unspeakable. It rarely holds the same weight once it has been said and met without horror.