mervin

i wish i could get with you on the shame thing. i'm there intellectually, but emotionally i know i still give power away to other people, to allow them to control my emotions to some degree. this giving away power is alledgedly a choice. doesn't always feel that way!

but naked before god . . . yeah, doesn't phase me, no need to disclaim.

I'm a shame-based creature in almost every respect, and I goddamn sure don't choose it. I only cope with shame, overcompensate for it, on a good day. I don't even need other living people to kindle it. I have plenty of ghosts in my heart who can stike the flint. Like my drunk-ass dad who drank himself to death after promising me he wouldn't because he loved me. Somehow that made his death my fault = not lovable enough. Now l do "know" better, but memory burns in the gullet, sublimating the voice box and the neocortex.

Also, when I was a child I was born with crossed eyes. Because I had to wear a patch over my eye for years, no child in nursery school would so much as hold my hand when we went double-file down steep stairs to recess. I spent every fucking recess hiding in a huge pipe, a conduit to nothing but future construction that luckily never came. It was full of spiders I feared. My teacher found me hiding one day and taught me how to hold the spiders and not be afraid of them. It was preferable to people, and she seemed to know it, too. Only the teachers were ever nonvenomous humans, which is I guess the reason I went to school to become a teacher.

You can really fuck people up forever when they are children. By the way, there's no pill for that. I checked.