The concept of shame keeps bursting forth into my consciousness at the slightest provocation, and so I thought that for tonight, I would play around with the idea and see what it has to offer.

First, the personal part. I have felt like disgusting filth since I don’t know when. It is one of the most virulent and sharp-edged facets of my self-loathing, and I have carried this burden, this sense of my own awfulness, for decades.

But it wasn’t an issue I could really grapple with. It was not suitable for rational analysis, no matter how sophisticated and well informed. It’s a deep down feeling of being absolutely, completely, entirely awful, and you can’t analyze that without feeling the taint of it infect your mind.

And that is a very bad feeling.

Purity is always tied to the concept of contamination. To touch the impure is to become impure yourself. I have spent decades feeling like any who touched me would be poisoned by me, like I was toxic waste. Radioactive. Like I can only hurt people by getting close to them.

So I keep people at arm’s length, terrified of hurting them. I cover it with a convincing (even to me) illusion of friendliness and good nature, but deep down I feel like I am a horrible, horrible thing.

And for decades, I felt that purity could not possibly ever apply to me, because there is no such thing as a clean turd. You cannot be cleansed of impurities if you are an impurity.All you can do is keep away from people and carry around a very, very deep sense of permanent shame.

Ashamed of being filth, ashamed of being so repulsive, ashamed of even being alive. I keep telling myself that I had nothing to be ashamed of, and for years I kind of believed it. After all, I don’t have the usual sorts of sexual or toilet hangups caused by a repressive upbringing. I’ve never done anything particularly evil. When I have hurt people, it has almost always been by accident, and do to social cluelessness rather than any kind of malice.

I’m a nice person. People like me. So why should I be ashamed?

But as I have said before, the scales fell from my eyes when I just thought the thought “I have nothing to be ashamed of” and felt an enormous reaction from the rest of my psyche that said otherwise.

It was only then that I realized that I actually felt extremely ashamed of everything. I felt ashamed to even be alive. My lack of the usual, obvious sources of shame (like, say, Catholicism) did nothing to protect me from the deep down sense of shame that I developed all by myself.

It is possible that this sense of shame and vulnerability started all the way back when my father molested me. A lot of survivors of sexual abuse have this sense of being permanently soiled. I naively thought that I was somehow immune from that feeling because I was so smart and sensitive and intellectually rugged.

Ha ha ha. Shame is not a social construct, it exists on one of the deepest if not the deepest level of our social programming. Shame, on the primal plane, is the sense that your tribe does not approve of you, and when in its proper place, drives the individual to seek to redress the cause of the shame via right action.

That can be as simple as an apology or as complicated as a life driven by the need to make up for something you did, something you feel terrible about.

Thus, shame, in a simple social setup, leads to righting wrongs. But even more importantly, the fear of shame acts as our ethical nature’s first line of defense outside of its own sense of right and wrong.

The fear of how ashamed of your actions you would be if anyone found out (thus making society disapprove of you) is the second most powerful force in our moral makeup. The only more powerful force is simple empathy. Seeing others in pain causes us pain over the empathic channel. Even babies are distressed by the sound of other babies crying.

My shame, then, is a deep down feeling that I am repulsive in the eyes of my society. I know that is not how people actually view me, but that doesn’t matter. Our sense of self comes ultimately from ourselves. Outer validation can never over-ride internal evaluation, at least not for very long. Information contrary to your inner sense of yourself simply gets neutralized and disregarded as a matter of course.

I can see now how smoothly this sense of shame interfaces with my social phobia. No wonder I feel like total strangers are judging me and hating me when I am out and about all alone.

I feel like they can see right through me to how awful I am.

I will carry this burden of shame for a while longer. Now that I have identified it, I feel I stand a better chance of getting rid of it over time. That vast inner wound of mine produces a lot of nasty stuff and it will take a while to clean the wound and get it wrapped up in a bandage, ready to heal.

It is a long and painstaking process. It’s not just that the wound exists, but that it has been left untreated for most of my time alive on Planet Earth, and that creates a lot of complications.

Sometimes I wonder if I would recover faster if I was in hospital somewhere. Some peaceful, quiet place with daily individual and group therapy, and supportive and understanding staff all around me.

That does sound nice. But my big fear is that it would be so nice, I would never leave.

And having “written while committed to a mental institution” on the dust jacket of my books would probably limit sales.

Oh well. See you tomorrow, folks!