Shame and VetMed
Inspired by the way Shame and Medicine hold lived experience with care and simplicity, I want to share a story that took me years to name properly.
For a long time I called it "underconfidence". I called it "imposter syndrome". I called it "needing to be more resilient". What I did not call it, until much later, was shame.
I came to vet school from a background that I would describe as less privileged than many of my peers. I want to say this carefully, because I am also aware of the privilege I did have. I was safe. I had love. I had opportunities many people do not. I was not the poorest person in the world. And I do not share this as a competition in hardship or a way to invalidate anyone else's story.
But I also was not from what I believed was the "typical" demographic of vet school.
I was the first person in my family to do A-levels, and the first to go to university, let alone to veterinary school. At school I had educational support allowance. Money was not abundant. There was no quiet confidence that university was "what people like us do", because there was no map for it in my family. There was just me, trying hard, feeling grateful, and quietly terrified that at any moment someone would realise I did not belong.
And what I did not realise at the time is that shame is not always loud. Sometimes it is not a dramatic story. Sometimes it is just the constant internal calculation of: How do I make sure nobody sees the bit of me that feels different?
When I arrived at vet school, one of the first things I noticed was not what people were saying. It was the ease. The vocabulary. The exposure. The things people assumed were normal. I remember sitting in conversations and feeling like everyone else had read a book I had never even heard of. The references to skiing trips, horse shows, family friends in the industry, the kind of casual confidence that comes from growing up around certain spaces. The ability to speak without scanning the room first for whether you sound "right".
I found myself doing this odd thing where I would enter a conversation already bracing for the moment I would have nothing to say.
Not because I did not have thoughts, or curiosity, or intelligence. But because I was scared that if I spoke, I would reveal something. That I would use the wrong word. That I would not know the reference. That I would expose my background in a way that would make people see me as less than.
That is what shame does, isn't it? It does not just make you feel bad. It makes you feel at risk of being seen.
There were small behaviours that, at the time, I thought were just quirks. Looking back, they were shame strategies.
I used to park my car in the far corner of the car park. I did not have a fancy car. It was perfectly functional. It got me where I needed to go. But I worried about it being compared, noticed, judged. The far corner felt safer, like I could soften the chance of being "read".
Nights out were another thing. Not because I did not want to connect. I did. But I worried about what I was going to wear, what the unspoken rules were, how you are meant to "do" this kind of socialising. As a teenager I did not spend a lot of time going out. So when drinking culture and nights out felt like a big part of the social rhythm, I felt behind. Everyone else seemed to know the norms, the codes, the choreography. I felt like I was constantly trying to catch up without letting on that I was catching up.
And then there was the equine piece. I had visited a riding school, yes. I had enough familiarity to be interested. But I did not grow up in the equine industry. I did not have years of horsey knowledge woven into my everyday life. I noticed how easily other people spoke about horses, tack, events, breeding, the culture around it all. I felt a quiet shame that I did not know what they knew, and I translated that into a story about myself: I am behind. I am not as "proper" as them. I am not the kind of person vet school was designed for.
This is what I think shame does best. It takes a difference and turns it into a defect.
For a while, I honestly believed that if I could just become more confident, the feelings would stop. I thought confidence was the missing ingredient. But confidence is not always the 'antidote' to shame. Sometimes confidence just becomes another performance, another layer of armour. Another way of trying to look like you belong.
The shift for me came when I started to understand shame as a universal emotion. A human one. One that makes complete sense in the context of belonging, identity, and the fear of rejection. When I learned that shame often shows up where something matters deeply, it softened the story I was telling about myself.
It did not erase the challenges. It did not magically make those social spaces easy. But it gave me a new frame: maybe there is nothing wrong with me. Maybe I am having a very understandable response to being in a world that has norms and assumptions I did not grow up with.
And once I could name it, I could meet it with compassion rather than criticism.
I began to realise something else too: the background I came from was not just something to hide. It was also a lens.
It gave me a sensitivity to what it feels like to enter a room and not know the rules. It helped me understand clients who feel embarrassed, overwhelmed, or scared of being judged. It helped me recognise the quiet ways shame can show up in conversations, like defensiveness, avoidance, silence, over-explaining, or trying to please.
It also helped me build a sense of self that is not anchored in the material things I used to think I needed to "prove" I belonged. Through therapy and coaching, I worked on self-esteem built on values, character, and how I treat people, rather than on clothes, cars, or perceived status.
This story is not about blaming people who come from more wealthy backgrounds. It is not about making anyone wrong. Many of my peers were kind. Many would have had no idea what I was carrying. And many people with privilege also carry their own forms of shame.
This is simply an invitation to notice how quietly shame can shape our behaviour, and how easy it is to mislabel it as "confidence issues" or "being too sensitive". Sometimes it is not that you are underconfident. Sometimes you are protecting yourself from the fear of not belonging.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, I hope the kindest takeaway is this: the parts of you that feel different are not automatically evidence that you do not belong. They may also be the parts of you that expand what belonging can look like.
And maybe, in naming shame, we make a little more room for more kinds of people to feel at home in this profession.