I was a caregiver for my mom, Loretta Lynn, after she had a stroke five years before she died in 2022 at 90. The process exhausted me, and I had to step back and reevaluate after she passed.
In middle school, I was the textbook definition of awkward: braces, acne, a bad perm, and a body I didn't know how to dress or love. I was uncomfortable in my skin, and I'm sure everyone noticed. One afternoon in the hallway, a boy looked directly at me and said, loudly and confidently, that I was the "ugliest thing" he had ever seen.
A hard smart under hot wash of coffee. Beneath the pulped swell of winter citrus or a sharp draw of winter air. Not delicately, Dr. Wayne tested each molar etched through. In sleep I will fit one to another and scrape. What gnaws at me: my own mouth, now hindered and harbored by this night guard. In the day, set aside, its plastic holds a phantom jaw.
To read Frederic Gros's A Philosophy of Shame is to be reminded of how vulnerable we are to the emotion's inhibitions and agonies. We shame, we are ashamed, and we expend significant energy imagining shameful situations so we might avoid them. Shame makes us vulnerable to humiliation and ruin, and provides a method by which we can humiliate and ruin others. The cycle is often self-perpetuating: shame begets shaming.
