September 11, 2008
Dear Clusterflock: Shame?
Are you ashamed of something? Some things? Things that bubble up when you least expect? I’m not asking for confessions, here. I don’t spend many of my days, for large part, regretting, but there are at times, niggling pasts that surface. (Some are big, weighty and obvious, but sometimes the smallest ones work into my consciousness and chip away.)
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8 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock: Shame?”
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Yes. I am. Some small things that I have done, and other things that I have known about and done nothing about.
I feel shame (or potential shame) a lot of the time. Not big “oh I killed my brother and nobody knows about it”, but more the “oh, did I push into a line there?” kind of thing.
One of the great shames is the poor rep that shame has garnered. It can be quite useful in getting people to live together in peace. Of course, it can get a bit silly (stark moral guidelines rooted in superstition, for example), but for the life of me I can’t figure out how many people just go about their day doing the most selfish of things and don’t seem to feel shame about it.
Mary Jo Harding. I went to elementary school and high school with her. I always found her annoying and tried to keep my distance from her. She did everything her parents told her to do and seemingly felt no self-consciousness about doing things like nominating herself for school offices, repeating her parents’ very uncool views, wearing clothes that her mother picked out for her. In our junior year of high school, she felt no qualms about expressing her interest in my boyfriend. I was unkind to her on several occasions–never in a directly mean way, but by excluding her and being obvious in my disdain.
A couple of years out of high school, Mary Jo’s mother died of breast cancer. Mary Jo had found a boyfriend and was probably happy for the first time in her life, and, although I had lost track of her, I heard through mutual acquaintances that she was trying to make a life for herself. Her father committed suicide soon after her mother’s death, and the extended family blamed Mary Jo for not being there for him. Mary Jo killed herself soon after.
What I feel isn’t so much shame as a deep pain for humankind. We are never kind enough to one another. I was not kind enough to Mary Jo.
yes, the weaker ones we picked on. the pure delight in someone’s incapacity.
When I was a kid I vandalized a golf course. I literally tore up the greens with another kid. I really don’t know why we did it. I got in trouble and had to work the whole summer at the golf course, pulling weeds, etc. for punishment. Plus my dad whipped me real good.
I could name dozens of things, RIck, and they strike me at the strangest of times.
With Andrew on this, but oftentimes I mix guilt with the shame or vice versa.
Like the stupid Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials. I got my shame in my guilt and hey, there’s guilt in my shame.
Crunchy Guilt cups with a creamy Shame middle topped with rich, delicious Conflict.
I’m mostly ashamed of things I can’t help. Like that time I fell in love with a lesbian.