There’s a tool inside all of us. It knows what you know. Including what you avoid, what you bury, and what you hide from predatory eyes.
If you choose to activate it and command your vessel to still
While rejecting the illusion of pain that pulls your attention away from your most joyous activities,
You’ll discover: An inner knowing That’s been beside you the entire time.
A lifetime of memories filed in your neurons, Waiting to be recalled by: Shame.
The shame of shame is that it’s a beautiful tool for reconnection, once metabolized, healed, and reintegrated.
The more shame you process, the more you, you connect to. The less shame you digest, the less you, you become.
Instead, you become a programmable object in the societal machine.
Homo sapiens sapiens is recent. The species has only just begun naming itself. But our kind has walked this Earth for millions of years, and most of that time was spent in peace, before the conquest by the sapiens.
We live in the aftermath. The survivor bias of a species hell-bent on self-destruction, even if it takes the whole planet down with it.
Personally, it’s not my kink.
I call myself homo sapi& now. To make it clear that I am far removed from my species, culture, and fellow alleged man. So far that I don’t identify with them biologically. I am different.
&
What makes me different, I do believe, is shame.
How I process it.
How I perceive it internally.
How I interpret it externally.
And how I transmute society’s compass of shame into my JOYSTICK.
Let me know if you’re interested. This framework will keep expanding.
I’m developing a new model based on Tomkins and Nathanson’s “Shame and Pride.” Where Nathanson postulated shame is a compass of scripts, I postulate that integrated shame is a JOYSTICK operated by your inner wisdom, not your cognitive brain.
This difference is crucial. Because our society could not exist if everyone processed shame properly. If everyone woke up, processed their shame, and acted from inner knowing, this whole construct would collapse.
Society has a vested interest in shame remaining disordered. Because once shame becomes integrated, it stops controlling you. It starts guiding you.
Shame isn’t something to avoid. It’s something to cultivate. To grow. To celebrate.
Shame feels painful.
But that pain is cultural, not biological. If shame is your inner compass in a society that demands you externalize,
then no shit it hurts
when your true self taps you on the shoulder.
It’s not shame that hurts. It’s the anticipation of pain. It’s the lie that what’s underneath is worse than the egoic balancing act we do atop generations of metabolically disordered shame.
By the way, this is fun for me.
My JOYSTICK likes this work.
Earlier in 2025, I was on an intuitive walk, feeling the internal rumble like a glitchy video game character with no obvious trigger. I found the book Shame and Pride by Donald Nathanson.
It wasn’t the book that changed me. It was the decision to trust my rumble. To pick it up. To go deeper.
Now I am different. Permanently.
Shame is why people shame me when I display pride. THEIR shame. Not mine.
Nathanson was cautious. So was Wurmser. Both danced around how shame permeates everything.
I do not.
I take no care the way Pocaterra crafted his 16th-century play about shame. I’m doing a deep dive on my site because my JOYSTICK is into it.
Shame IS, to me:
- Neutral and painless when processed properly
- A biological response not inherently negative
- A tool of inner knowing where your deepest powers live
- A JOYSTICK of pride scripts when healed
- Intergenerationally accumulated (the collective unconscious IS shame)
- Processable and maturable by many in this lifetime
- Weaponized selectively (especially on females) to create gendered social objects
- A tactic of control that future sapiens and sapi& may no longer tolerate
I was young when I started developing my JOYSTICK. My first pride came from self-chosen actions aligned with my inner voice.
I was punished for it.
Punished by binary society. Punished by my species and culture.
But my stick stayed joyous. It led me away from pain and into places of self-preservation.
Turns out, my safety bubble became my exile.
Isolation was the price I paid to not be eaten alive.
So I created my own path: My own gender. My own politics. My own desires. My own requirements.
I’ve lived alone, in a curated bubble of what keeps me afloat in this hellscape of a society.
Turns out, doing that is what isolated me in the first place.
Now I choose to share. So others can heal their shame. So we can live beside other homo sapi&.
Where we dismantle this shameless society. Not because it lacks shame, but because it uses shame to avoid processing shame.
So it is made of shame, & yet appears shameless on the surface.
Does that make sense?
I will continue to rant this PRIDE. Because that’s how I celebrate:
By starting flames in hearts
to thaw the frozen thoughts feared to be voiced for centuries.
Time to warm your throat.
If you are interested in development of this framework with me, please email me at ampersand @ JOYTOBEWILD.COM
