Consider the following comments on shame.
Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It is the fear that we are not good enough.
Anonymous
Guilt says I did something bad; shame says I am bad.
Anonymous
A sense of shame is the beginning of integrity.
Proverb
We mistake the blush of shame for a conscience, when often it is only the fear of being seen.
The thing we are most ashamed of is usually the thing that most needs to be spoken.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Reflect on shame as a double edged feeling that can either tether us to the standards of others or sharpen our own sense of who we want to be. You might open with a private memory of shame and examine whether it taught you something true or merely taught you to hide. Move between the view that shame is a corrosive sense of being fundamentally flawed and the rival idea that the capacity for shame is part of what makes a person decent. A reflective turn could separate shame that is borrowed, imposed by other people's judgements, from shame that is earned by one's own conscience. Caution: avoid concluding either that shame should be abolished or that it should be embraced, since the more interesting honesty lies in noticing how hard it is to tell the useful kind from the destructive kind.