For Shame

“You cannot escape shame except by shame,” St. John of The Ladder

“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.” - George W. Bush

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is called Baskets which only has 4 seasons. Zach Galifianakis plays a depressed rodeo clown who desperately wants to become a professional clown, but failed in clowning school. Ethan and I quote it all the time.

The whole show portrays shame in such a brilliant way, from start to finish. I highly, highly recommend.

My sweet old mom taught me how to be a proud fool; she instilled in me the virtue of shame. It’s okay if you are laughed at if you are naked, because everyone is naked. She would say, “Let your care fall away like water on a duck’s back,”

That woman has been apologizing since she was born. She was extremely emotionally abused as a child and she takes on the blame for everyone's mistakes. It's the complete opposite of narcissism, which is probably why she married a narcissist.

I hate her constant apologizing, it's triggers me so. Isn't that awful of me?

It's because I do it, too, just not as much.

The other day I tripped in front of someone and apologized to them instantly.

She taught me: don’t be afraid of looking like an idiot, laugh at yourself because you ARE an idiot. But I still can’t not care like my mom can, I've got too much of my father’s pride.

I can get aggressive when someone makes me feel small, even though they’re not really doing it on purpose. I guess that’s because I think everything is about me all the fucking time. The world revolves around my life and what people think of me. Right?

One of my favorite poets Andrea Gibson says in her poem ‘Truce,’

“This here is my shame on a silver plate.

I know it is the one meal that all of us share.”

That’s heavy good.

We should talk about shame more, and where it mostly lives: the past.

You must be thinking, “Damn, Al. Get a therapist, sweetie!”

I’ve had five therapists, Fam.

FIVE.

One of them hardcore tried to set me up with her son and then blocked me when neither of us were into it.

I’m still not sure if I should be flattered that this woman heard all my worst shit and still thought, “I want this bitch to marry my son!”

Ethan and I had a conversation recently. He said, “What word would you use to describe yourself?”

I answered, “Weird.”

“That’s crazy. You cried when I called you weird, remember?”

I absolutely cried. It was early in our relationship and I thought that meant he didn't think I was cool anymore; my facade was over.

Why do we automatically equate ‘weird’ with ‘bad’?

I used to not feel so ashamed to be weird. I remember the days of my innocence when that was a compliment and that had meant I was doing something right, being different.

Honestly, it was my two year stint with internet “fame” that ruined me for good.

I quite literally played a clown.

It’s not a natural thing for a human being to receive so much praise along with a plethora of straight up cruelty every single day.

I understand why celebrities kill themselves; fame is the deadliest drug. I don't think it's a coincidence that 'fame' and 'shame' are such close sounding words.

During those two years, I felt utterly consumed and thrown back up all at once, all the time.

I had many opportunities to sell even more of my dignity and go deeper into that strange world but I’m glad I stopped when I did.

Still, a small part of me looks back and salivates at all the attention I received, like the tender love letters from strangers that I still get every once in a while. And it felt surreal to get words of affirmation from people I had been a fan of for a long time.

The entire experience felt like an epic, medicated dream. I can’t believe that was a life I once lived.

If I could go back in a time machine, I’m really not sure if I would do it again. It didn’t feel worth the loss of my sanity, but also what a wild ride it all was.

I wish I had focused more on school rather than dreaming of becoming ultra wealthy and adored by everyone. I'm glad I wasn't awarded that vapid dream of mine.

It truly gave me scrambled expectations for love for the longest time. When you suddenly have thousands of people all over the planet telling you how much they adore you, will anything less ever suffice?

The answer is yes.

It only took my love life beating the ever living dog snot out of me for five years to finally humble my ass real good and break my trust into tiny shards.

Here are some true stories related to shame:

Family Sex (Talk)

One of the first times bringing Ethan over to meet my family, I had to warn him that my family would be very inappropriate and most likely talk about sex quite a lot.

My family loves to talk about sex, especially my grandparents. My Pop will cop a feel on my grandmother, especially if you’re snapping a photo. Go off, King.

Ethan’s family is wacky but not at quite the extent that my folks are. Like, you won’t hear the word “Pussy” on Thanksgiving at the Taylor residence but may hear it a few times at Christmas at the Helms homestead, and it’ll 100% come out of my grandmother’s mouth.

After we left, Ethan said, “Wow, you weren’t joking about how much your family talks about sex.”

When I meet someone who had a normal childhood and family, I feel intense shame and jealousy. It's like a spotlight is suddenly beaming on me and has revealed that I am an ugly, matted mutt who digs through the garbage and shits on the carpet.

I hear how other people grew up in a clean home with gentle, mature parents, who got along well with their siblings, made good grades in school, never drank or drugged too much, and only ever fucked like two people they genuinely loved, or just the person they married.

Man, what I wouldn’t give for that type of ease and mental peace. No one is perfect but people with normal upbringings don’t seem to have the same type of brain rot.

Homeschooling

Don’t get me wrong, I mostly embrace my unusual childhood. I’m always trying to get back there to uncover more of myself so I can be a better wife and mom.

Growing up I was completely free to be myself.

But we did have social outings. My brothers went all the way to Eagle in The Boy Scouts. I was a cheerleader for a small basketball team for two years until I decided it was stupid, plus girls are mean, including myself.

Another observation I have made is when you tell people you were home schooled for your entire life, people automatically assume you lived a holy sheltered life, as if you grew up Amish.

It’s true that my mom was five years behind technologically and while CDs were all the rage we were still listening to cassette tapes… But we were allowed to watch SpongeBob

Squarepants and Harry Potter, which was pretty much equal to pornography in most southern Evangelical households.

I know plenty of families who never said 'fuck' or 'jerk', didn’t watch TV, eat fast food, or let their women wear pants…

But the majority of the sheltered kids I knew were just as feral as we were.

Funnily enough, we undomesticated house kids judged the “saintly” ones for being too square, socially inept, and possibly autistic.

But the truth was, every single one of us were considered mouth breathers on the very bottom of the social totem pole. At top were the kids who went to public school because that's all we saw on the TV.

We took ourselves way too seriously.

The class system is all so very silly.

We were also involved in 4-H for years, which was a wild ride. I vividly remember our first meeting: I don’t know why everyone was standing around outside under a type a car port, but someone had a goat out there and that thing shit all over the place, I’m not even exaggerating. You couldn't walk and not step in it. There were so many farm kids in 4-H.

We worked the Corn Crib at the Delta Fair for a few years and I hated it with a passion; I was always sneaking away. It was too hot in way too small of a space, and we had to give a loud sales pitch for everyone who passed by, using a microphone. My literal nightmare. My brother Ben was good at that part, though, because he’s really funny.

Forestry was another activity we were forced to participate in. At the time, I was in my little-shit era and complained non-stop about having to learn about leaves and bark and what a Boll Weevil was. It all felt so lame, I was too good for any of it. There were competitions for it in which we had to know each part of a particular tree and its specific genera. I didn’t study and definitely helped make our team lose.

Now, I wish I had paid attention because it’s cool to be an adult who knows the names of some trees. That’s pretty dope.

Adolescence is a back bending, shoulder shrinking time for self esteem; teenagers reek of shame. Everything feels uncomfortable and I wouldn’t go back to that time for the world.

Blood stains

This story isn’t as much about shame as it is just a really odd story.

Right after I started my cleaning business, it took off quickly than I anticipated. I had to learn very quickly that not all business is worth the dollar; going into people’s homes and cleaning is an extremely intimate thing.

I deal with people's shame over their homes all the time, because I literally interact with human sweat, blood, shit, and piss on a weekly basis. It's a dirty job but that's why it's such good money. And to be honest, it's helped me not be so intimidated by people.

Every single walk-through I've ever done, I've had to reassure the customer that I have in fact, "seent it all," that their homes are fine and normal. Of course, there has been the rare case of the lost cause, in which their home is some of the 'all' I've seent.

One particular couple scared the hell out of me:

They were my parents age, in their fifties. I noticed that certain rooms were filled with so much junk you could barely walk in but a few feet.

After the walk-through a week later, I arrived to clean. The wife was gone and the husband was home, and he looked really flustered. He warned me that his wife had Alzheimer’s and was in a bad mood that day; she was also on her way home soon.

I cleaned and when I was done, the wife was home while the husband was out picking up their dog.

She was just sitting in the living room staring at the wall, but when I started dusting in there, she struck up a conversation with me.

She had long, thick dark hair and she had a look that reminded me of one of my best friend’s mothers, which brought me comfort. I told her hair was pretty because I like to compliment people’s beauty wherever I can.

That made her so elated to hear, that she stood up and began to prattle on about the hair of her ancestors. I was done cleaning and getting ready to leave, but I did engage with her more because it was interesting and she had a sort of childlike demeanor.

Then she was talking about how she had a daughter at forty; the daughter was sixteen now, but they didn’t have a room for her in the house so that didn’t make sense. I wondered if maybe this was her Alzheimer's showing itself, or maybe their daughter was taken away.

When I came back inside for my last piece of equipment, that had come home and was calling me into the kitchen. He was pointing at a spot on the floor that I thought were nail marks in the old wood- so many old houses have those and these particular marks were everywhere. I looked closer and saw that the nail marks were actually old, dried blood splatters. I looked up at him and he was not happy. He was towering over me, standing incredibly close.

“The dog had her period a few months ago and bled all over the floor,” he said.

And they had just left the blood on the floor for months, and they were everywhere.

If blood is left alone on hardwood floors for a long period of time, it becomes a permanent stain.

I didn’t know this at the time and apologized for missing the spots. I did make the case that it might take a lot more than just mopping to remove all the blood stains.

I could tell this guy was getting angrier and the woman started to sense it too. “Oh, but you did a wonderful job! It really looks great in here!” She exclaimed, trying to protect me.

The man didn’t say anything else, just walked over to a closet, grabbed their mop and started to aggressively scrub that one stain over and over again with the worst look on his face.

He was really pissed and I was really scared, because I didn't know these people, and their vibes were so incredibly OFF.

I apologized again, bowing my head, and turned to leave. Then the woman was at my heals, already talking about her ancestors hair again. She followed me out to my car and waved as I drove away, so childlike.

I felt really sorry for her, she seemed so sweet and he was obviously not a nice person.

I never went back.

Big Shame

I wasn’t an anti-social kid, I wanted to learn more about people so I could one day live among them without the shame of being socially inept.

I made friends easily, especially with boys. I was chubby and unattractive enough for them to feel comfortable being themselves around me and we could joke around as much as wanted. I loved that.

I wanted to be a boy so bad for so long. I liked to play freely with them without it being weird because I was a girl. (I’ll share more about my early struggles with gender soon)

The only romantic male attention I wanted was from my oldest brother’s friend Zach. He had black hair and black eyes and he was mean as a snake. I would just long for him from far away and never say a word to him unless he spoke to me first, which he never did unless it was to be mean to me. Isn't that hot?

But one particular friend of my brother and Zach was a boy named Addison. He was so kind to me even though I was a weird little kid dressed in dirty oversized T-shirts, running around barefoot in the mud, and fishing for tadpoles in the neighbors pond so I could watch them turn into bull frogs.

One summer, our grandparent’s huge back yard flooded after a massive storm (We moved in there when I was eleven to take care of my dying grandmother)

The drainage was awful on the land so when it flooded that year, all of the crawdads got washed out of their mud holes. We all ran out into the yard with Addison and collected a huge pot full of crawdads to boil and eat. They tasted like straight up shit and mud but it was so much fun.

I was twelve, he was seventeen.

That day was one of my favorite memories for a long time.

I didn’t have a crush on him, I just thought he was the kindest, coolest person in the world. I looked up to him as if he were one of my brothers. I felt safe around him.

On my 16th birthday, my dad had him kiss me on the cheek after I blew out my candles.

Seven years from the crawdad memory, he raped me.

I had still been a virgin.

I’ll end this chapter on shame with a piece I wrote on anger and hatred back in September 2019:

I seemed to inherit my father’s cursing tongue and quick temper. I want to repent for not behaving like the Christian I used to have pride in being. I used to wear Jesus around my neck like a sacred stone, now I cut off family members like dead branches of a tree.

I am angrier these days, angry at everyone. Angry at the people I chose as companions that ended up being more human than I had fantasied, and let me down in more ways than one.

Angry at myself, angry at God. Angry at strangers on the street, especially men. Angry at co-workers, angry at family. Angry at objects, angry at substances.

It’s an anger that I can swallow and hide deep down inside me until the smallest inconvenience, but I cannot mask the stench of the venom that mists the air in an unconscious effort to blind my victim.

I have so much anger boiling in the pit of my core. It used to be sadness and pity, but over the years it has evolved into a deep, violent hate that has no active mind, only reacting to whatever triggers me.

I have felt hate and in the moment it tastes sweet, natural and euphoric, only for it to later turn into rot and ash in-between my teeth.

Anger and hate. All self-inflicted, or at least I am to blame for welcoming its viper's strike.