Some would say, “It makes you a faggot.”
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Others would say, “It makes you free.”
What a difference 30 or so years can make on letters strung up into identity.
You tip toe and press them push the buttons of updating your precious pronouns
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Deny others the ability to pronounce their lived experience less it tickles your temper
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the queerest amongst us all?
Is it the gays, or is it the dolls? Or is it the survivors after the fall?
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I’ve had an interesting life long experience regarding pride and shame, so on an intuitive walk earlier this year, I found a book titled, “Shame and Pride.” by Donald Nathanson, so I read it. It hurt, but also confirmed my discernment on the behaviors I’ve seen in myself and others but could never explain. He calls shame actually a compass of scripts in 4 quadrants; attack self, attack other, withdrawl, avoidance.
He theoirzes that when someone feels shame, which is the affect that casts your eyes down to disconnect eye contact, slouches your posture and sends a blush to the face, that compass comes up and the person MUST pick a script and perform it. This happens in deeply subtle ways, in insidiously small behaviors
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is deeply interwoven into every cell in your body.
To undo the performance installed into you, you must undo it in your body.
A task most will not want to undergo.
So instead they carry this compass of shame with all of its violent scripts and bring it into queer spaces and continue the work of the patriarchy.
But that compass CAN be removed.
Because it was never supposed to be there.
Society hijacked shame, an innate affect that is the ‘painful withdrawl of attention from something that was previously enjoyable-and still is.’ into nearly every single feature of humanity as social scripts that we unconsciously perform….until we become conscious
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Aware
Of who we are
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What was done to us
I go a step further than Nathanson, to say Shame is not a compass of scripts, but the patriarchy sure did turn it into that. It is, in my theory, supposed to be the compass of your inner self. Your novelization of the novelty of life, neatly repackaged and ready to go to assert yourself. The product of healthy shame development is
Pride
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I am constantly shamed for mine
People will instantly tell you I am shaming them
Mirror, mirror, tell me again, who is the queerest queer amongst us again?
The ones carrying these scripts
or
the ones who never had the ability to pick them up in the first place?
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So to further clarify my point on shame. I see it as a powerful, pro-social, but pro-self development emotion. It’s your time management script where you learn to modulate your interest versus the needs of your community and environment. It got seriously hijacked by patriarchal conditioning. First shaming child bearers for not being strong enough, thousands of years of subjugation turned some humans into women and some into people with power in the system they designed for themselves.
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That system of abuse abused everyone until it took over the entire planet.
This is not a new problem.
But we are smart enough in this day and age to stop participating in patriarchal performances.
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Yet
Those who benefit from their ability to perform do not want to unlearn their skills
So they continue the patriarchal scripts and shame those who cannot do what they can all without a single second of regard for another person. Their inner shame guiding their external performance constantly.
Shame is in every little detail of your life.
The faucet of fascism is a slow drip of shame onto your name.
Until you can no longer take the pain
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You break
or
You break “free”
And carry its message, like a virus, to your fellow ‘free’ freaks.
-&
If you enjoyed this writing, please let me know. If it upset you, good! If you want to continue to discuss the deconditioning of shame, please contact me. These issues are systemic, let’s continue our focus on that. I will not be shamed for my pride of not being able to form social scripts in the ways others have been successful at. My ‘disability’ has given me an amazing capacity to see this system from the outisde of it and see how it has infected other spaces.
Patriarchal people who refuse to decondition continue to spread its mission. Like a virus. This must end.
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