Unmasking the Prodigal Daughter

How an act of love unmasked my shame and empowered me to value openness, honesty, and confession.

Welcome to Letters From Heidi, a refuge for truth seekers, deep-feelers, and the homesick searching for Eternity.

I am Heidi, an Asian-Australian woman who writes stories and essays on life, faith, pop culture, and the immigrant family experience. If you are a new reader, you can learn the story behind Letters From Heidi here, or subscribe to never miss a post!

---

Dear friend,

This month I am offering another preview of my writing project, covering a theme that I am passionate about: God’s unfailing love for the lost. You will get insight into my heart as a Prodigal Daughter who ran away from the church out of fear and shame. Likewise, you will learn how the gospel of grace unmasked my shame and empowered me to value openness, honesty, and confession.

As this letter contains book ideas, it will be free to access for 4 weeks. From the 7th March 2025 this post will go behind a paywall. If you’re a free subscriber, make sure to read and share this post before the month ends. If you value my writing and have the means to enable my work, please consider becoming a patron today.

“Heidi Tai is one of my favorite young writers. Not only is she an exceptionally gifted wordsmith, but she also skillfully combines theological acumen with cultural reflection.”

Tim Challies, Author & Blogger at Challies.com and ‘Letters From Heidi’ Founding Member

Unmasking the Prodigal Daughter

For the longest time, I was uncomfortable with sustained eye-contact. I found the gaze of others exposing and uncomfortable—as though if they looked long enough they would see too much, and be repelled by what was there. My earliest experiences with rejection taught me that proximity was too revealing of my humanity, and that my truest self—with all my baggage and hurt—had no safe place to go.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash.

Laughing loud and partying hard, I learned to hold people at arm’s length. The Class Clown and social butterfly, I jumped from one relationship to another—learning to cover my tracks with masks and white lies. As my secrets began to build, I became convinced that if my true self was ever exposed, I would be completely abandoned.

I remember the morning I rocked up to school with eyes swollen and bruised from the tears shed in private the night before. I didn’t want to be at school, but I also had nowhere else to go. My friends showed concern, but I couldn’t bear to be honest. I turned my pain into a joke, telling a watching world that I was suffering an allergic reaction from a piece of fruit. We laughed about it.

I didn’t know it back then, but I grew up fearing vulnerability more than death itself. The combination of my Honour-Shame culture, an immigrant upbringing, and being the eldest daughter meant that I was conditioned to repress and hide; be strong and survive. Instead of honest confession and confronting the truth in love, I learned to sweep what was ugly and unacceptable under the rug (along with my ancestor’s secrets). After all, we had appearances to maintain—the soil in which my shame was birthed.

In his book Shame Interrupted, Ed Welch describes shame as:

“the deep sense that you are unacceptable because of something you did, something done to you, or something associated with you. You feel exposed and humiliated…you are disgraced because you acted less than human, you were treated as if you were less than human, or you were associated with something less than human, and there are witnesses.”

I once saw life as a game of hide and seek because shame holds power. Research Professor Brené Brown, explains there is a difference between guilt and shame. According to Brown, guilt is a helpful emotion which enables us to identify and correct bad behaviour, while shame is a harmful emotion which convinces us to identify with it. In essence, you didn’t do bad; you are bad. You didn’t make a mistake; you are one. So while feelings of guilt empowers repentance and reconciliation, feelings of shame can be destructive and debilitating. After all, if ‘bad’ is who we are—how can we possibly change?