shame literally isn't real.
okay so i was about 15 or 16 when i watched a video of olivia gatwood perform one of her poems and she prefaced it by saying something along the lines of, “shame isn’t real. it’s not an emotion like all the others, not naturally produced by the body. it’s something that is given to you.” it looks like a gift and sometimes performs like a gift but it’s actually more of a burden. when i say that, i mean shame functions a lot like traffic lights do, where the green light represents the absence of shame and the red one represents living in the totality of its appearance. most of us (if not all) live our lives at the yellow light - in the possibility of evoking shame within ourselves or others, or (if we’re cursed with an acute sense of self-awareness) both. and it hinders how we interact with the world - with people and animals and other sentient creatures of nature - out of fear of looking stupid because of a past experience we had that bears resemblance to the one we then happen to get ourselves into. and i think that’s where the distinction between shame and other emotions come from. it’s that shame is something that’s primarily induced by memory, by our imperfect perception of the world in which we live whereas happiness, sadness, anger etc spring from the reality of our surroundings. so, the next time you feel like you’re about to do something embarrassing, the next time you feel like you’re at that yellow light remember you don’t have to wait till it’s red and then green again. sometimes you can just speed up and keep going your way.
