I'm Back!

But who knows for how long.

First of all, I cannot imagine why this website gets any visitors at all. Like, who is reading this fluff? Why?

Second, I've been itching to write again, thanks to (unsurprisingly) a TV show involving the same actor I'd mentioned in the previous post. I say unsurprisingly because he seems to do and say strange things a lot of times - strange enough to make me ponder about completely different areas of my own life. Help T_T

Anyway, this time, it was an episode of a reality show, where they broadcast the everyday lives of a bunch of folks in the entertainment industry, in a manner that completely annihilates any concept of privacy you might be acquainted with. Honestly, if I were a public figure, I would never allow anyone with a camera through my front door, much less an entire cast and crew for a (staged?) reality show. This phenomenon needs its own series of posts, though.

To summarise without spoiling...actually, let me skip the summary and get straight to my musings, hopefully nobody recognises which show and which people I'm talking about (because privacy matters, damnit! Even when it comes to those who've willingly laid bare their private lives in front of the camera).

What struck me the most was the deep sense of personal shame his mother confessed to have had at her existence, simply because of the circumstances she grew up in. (What struck me also is that she seemed to be an emotional, possibly temperamental, person, so any feelings would be quite exaggerated in the inner world). And I know from experience that such shame invariably passes on to the children. And it takes a long time for these children to identify the root cause of their own internal mortification and struggles with self-worth and identity, if they ever do.

I would not be surprised if the actor himself had to struggle with feelings of shame - he certainly seems to have carried on some of her own hang ups regarding poverty and such (any more elaboration, and I think it will be obvious to anyone familiar with the entertainment industry in that part of the world as to who this is -_-).

And that got me wondering about something known well but probably not spoken out loud - that we beget children (or should I say, are blessed with them) to carry forward our own legacies, to watch them fulfill our own unaccomplished desires, even if it's all subconscious. Of course, on this side of the globe, acceptance of the theory of Karma is quite widespread and weaves into this aspect of the continuation of lives as well, but that's not something I know much about beyond the layman's perspective, so I will stop that digression here.

In any case, I hope he's overcome his own internal battles, if any (unlikely that there were none, though, unless he's superhuman).

On the topic of shame, I can relate. My father is pretty much a textbook case of whatever the taller Columbine school shooter had probably, but without a diagnosis. Hollow as can be. My mother...is weird and has similar issues but has also endured much textbook-abuse in the marriage in possibly the strangest ways I've read or heard about. Sometimes I'm curious what her internal world is like. Sometimes I feel it must not be very different from my father's.

All I know is there's a deep sense of shame in her, too, even if she is incapable of acknowledging it to herself. And I know this not because I have some intense, intuitive connection with her or anything; I know it because I've picked up a lot of her hang-ups growing up. None of them were about poverty though - she grew up fairly well-off and was reduced to a poverty-stricken life after marriage, but that never bothered her. Material wealth, or a lack of it, never bothered her. Plus, she has these magic-fingers that somehow allowed us all to live comfortable lives growing up, without ever realising how piss-poor we actually were, bless her.

No, I know she has some sense of shame about...something...simply because she's made me feel like garbage for simply being myself at times. Not in any overt ways, but little things that give away an underlying sense of feeling "less-than", mostly expressed through envy (directed at her own daughter, no less), emotional coldness and cruelty, none of which I feel like elaborating on in a public post lel

I've always been somewhat of a hermit, though. I've lived in my own inner world for the most part, and never relied on external feedback to define my inner self. Or so I thought. It's difficult to grow a strong sense of self-identity at all in a home where the primary caregiver gives you mixed signals about you and your "role" in the family. I believe that weak identity turned out to be a blessing for me, after all this time, but that rant is for another post.

I've been fortunate enough to have met many good people growing up, to have spent time with my grandparents every summer, to have had exactly the kind of friends I needed at different stages of my life, to provide a much-needed counterbalance to my mother's perception of me. I've always fundamentally rebelled against who she described me to be.

Bit by bit, over many years of inner turmoil and rumination, it became easier to sieve reality from projection, to tie back irrational beliefs to specific patterns of behaviours from people around me (and of their behaviours towards me, too) that had introduced these beliefs into my awareness to begin with. And the joke of a nebulous sense of self I always had, it too, collapsed, deeply enough for me to recognise the shame within myself.

And oh boy did it make absolutely no sense for the shame to be there. At all.

No, really, nothing about my circumstances growing up, not even the overly controlling nature of my mother and the effects it would have had on me, could explain away feeling ashamed of being alive. Of existing. They did explain the outer layers of that core of shame - seen best in my erstwhile self-deprecating humour and "shyness" and what not, but not what I felt then.

My mind couldn't find anything concrete as it traversed backwards in memory to connect that feeling to lived experience. I'm stating a matter of fact here, not waxing poetic.

And, this may sound strange, that is when I knew that this shame was not mine.

Took a long number of months to overcome this in funky ways (I'm not a fan of therapy or counselling, I like to think I'm smart enough to counsel myself...and I indeed am), but I bypassed it. I know I'm "over it" at a fundamental level of awareness, but I don't know if it'll ever crawl back up over my skin again. Keyword here is awareness.

I have many, many mostly nameless or pseudonymous people to thank for that, and they know who they are :) Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I get in my life, especially when it comes to meeting the right people at the right time (and yes, I can finally feel gratitude without the subsequent anxiety :D)

So when I heard the lady on TV talk about how she felt ashamed of herself for reasons she explained on the show, I could understand. And then I realised that I could even relate to what she was saying, but only in memory. I've never understood why people identify themselves or others with their external situations (again, I feel another post in the offing, because boy, have I got some stuff to say about the retarded European enlightenment-era "doctrine of improvement" ), but I get it, I get it, I can see how people think that way - a consequence of the societies we live in, largely. I was just immensely grateful to realise the feeling of shame itself was something I could only relate to in memory.

I hope that never changes.

P.S.: if this may help you in any way - what worked for me was Yoga and meditation, specifically the Inner Engineering program. I happen to be ordinarily inclined towards spiritual and religious practices, so this route made sense for me. Although, I did not think of addressing any of my identity and self-worth issues when I signed up for the program :D I just gravitate towards such teachings naturally, and this, out of all the curated programs I've ever tried, was the one that worked for me really well.