Oh, I like this word.

The internet has become the House of Shame lately. Every day I am confronted with another reason I should/would be ashamed for being born as I am and living as I do. Every thing that is naturally occurring — agrestial — about me and my existence is not only wrong, it is “what’s wrong.” Do something = wrong. Do nothing = wrong. Write = wrong. The script is flipped. I am representative of the worst thing one can be now. Everything is the fault of people like me. Whatever we didn’t make happen, we allowed to happen. Shame, shame, shame.

I got maybe four hours of sleep last night. Maybe. In that voodoo hour wherein I mysteriously fell asleep just before the alarm, I dreamed all this unwellness in the form of a poisonous lizard in my bed. I had gone so mad with unwellness no one would listen to me about the lizard. But just before I was pulled back to waking, someone come forward to give me a dream hug. I felt the desire to know the identity of my hugger but the hug itself was so medicinal I wouldn’t break the embrace for a greeting. It felt familiar and homing, like a touchstone. Like an anchor. Like I could drop my weight and rest. I held. I clung.

I suppose I am self-soothing. I long to feel at home in the world again. I long for permission to occupy and thrive again without being a scourge. Everything I read online screams shame at me. I don’t wish to avoid conflict if there can be productive discourse but a person can’t live on a steady of diet of shame and do anything productive. I have a lot of experience with shame. Too much experience, really. I know it is a shackle. It doesn’t motivate people, it cripples them. It immobilizes them. It inhibits growth. It fractures any perspective that isn’t shame-based, which makes change more daunting for all the venom-filled “awareness” foisted upon the shamed. It doesn’t help. It only hinders.

I’ll try to stay anchored in that reminder today.

— Mercy