Perspective

Chapter Fifty Nine.

"If I had a box just for wishes

And dreams that had never come true

The box would be empty

Except for the memory

Of how they were answered by you"

Song: Time in a bottle - Jim Croce

***

Shame.

It's a wretched hell of a thing.

It's that internal disfigurement you pray no one discovers but swear everyone can see.

The secrets and internal indisputable truths we chant to ourselves that you try to conceal because if you were to show it to the world, we fear the disgust and rejection that would surely follow - whether true or not.

Even though their disgust could never match the one we carry towards ourselves.

Shame is the inescapable feeling that everything you were created as, is defective. There's an incurable flaw. You. Your existence is wrong.

The most heartbreaking thing about shame that I've realized is it isn't something we are born with but something we all feel. It always planted in us from the outside. It is not meant to have a home in us, and yet someone has let it break inside your soul and bury itself as deep as it could go.

Young children at first have no shame.

They're like shameless little alcoholics. Shitting themselves as it suits them, vomiting everywhere, crying and screaming whenever they feel like it; saying whatever they want in total honesty with not a care about how they look or what others may think. There is no shame in their bodies - they would walk butt naked through a crowd of strangers like it's the most natural thing in the world.

... And then at some point, maybe they're two, maybe they're eight or maybe a teenager, at some point someone, or several someone's did something to instill shame in them. Something happens that triggers that first feeling of humiliation. The first internalizing that something about them is incorrect.

Maybe it's the mother that shames her daughter's body, constantly comments on it's weight or shape.

Maybe it's the father that ridicules his son for preferring dolls over dirt bikes, or because he cries when he's upset.

Maybe it's the kids at school that mock the child that struggles with a stutter, or the one whose skin is simply a different shade. Mocking something natural that they deem as 'different', and then different becomes synonymous with 'wrong'.

Variety becomes vilified instead of celebrated.

None of these things are ever something to feel ashamed of, and yet the world can plant the most damaging, self loathing torment inside of you over it. You're convinced your existence is a sickness you can't cure yourself of.

The main thing that breeds shame is the secrecy, the feeling that 'no one can know' . Don't talk about it. Hide it at all costs. Never ever show your shame.

The irony in all of it, is the only way to rid shame is to shine light to it. Share it.

The world is the one that planted that pain inside of you to carry alone, and once you realize that, you have the choice to dig it out of yourself and hand it back to them - it can't control you.