How to Fail as a Human Being without Even Trying

I'm wildly awake, and it's time to write (and by write, I mean subject you to literature I deem important).

If you get a call in the middle of the day while on your way out to leave for the gym, and the call is wildly important and the person on the other end of the line needs nothing more than your comforting words and your kind listening ear, and all you can think about is how uncomfortably cold and heartless you feel, then you are a horrible human being.

That however is the necessary consequence of using up a person while telling her lies about how much you care about her. There are many who cover up their shame at all costs.

"Alfred, likewise, had shown his faith in her by taking her at face value: by declining to pry behind the front that she presented. She'd felt happiest with him when she was publicly vindicating his faith in her: when she got straight A's; when her restaurants succeeded; when reviewers loved her.
She understood, better than she would have liked to, what a disaster it had been for him to wet the bed in front of her. Lying on a stain of fast-cooling urine was not the way he wished to be with her. They only had one good way of being together, and it wasn't going to work much longer.
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. She undertood this better than Chip and Gary did, and so she felt a particular responsibility for him."

-- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

When you guard your shame so well, why not expect nothing but the same from those that you love? But why, most importantly, would you let your shame be fully known to someone that cannot love you at all? Some people are so patient, and so unwavering in their belief that others are more deserving of sympathy and good, that they seem almost masochistic in their ability to take punishment and plod on happily indespite of it. One day, you look up and realize that you've unwittingly turned someone into that masochist, and you feel for that person because you know fully well how painful it is to break from that cycle. At that point, the truth seems so unbearable, but you need to do deal that severing blow to bring the quick release from the torment you have inflicted without really even meaning to.

For living a life of convenience, you will be doomed by the weight and gravity of a much greater inconvenience than you have ever known. You sit around and hope that life will be karmic in that matter. Going out and making the effort to allow the knowledge of your shame to be known to another is not reconciliation enough. It's better to think that you'll get yours in the end. You'll get what you deserve and will have to grin and bear it. Hopefully you will be aware enough, when the time is right, to know when the severing blow has been dealt to you.

Clearly, there are times for reflection and times for living. I refuse to go on living like that though. What a tough way to learn the true value of honesty.

"Well, I'm damned," said the Ghost. "I wouldn't have believed it. It's a fair knock-out. It isn't right, Len, you know. What about poor Jack, eh? You look pretty pleased with yourself, but what I say is, What about poor Jack?"

"He is here," said the other. "You will meet him soon, if you stay."

"But you murdered him."

"Of course I did. It is all right now."

"All right, is it? All right for you, you mean. But what about the poor chap himself, laying cold and dead?"

"But he isn't. I have told you, you will meet him soon. He sent his love."

"What I'd like to understand," said the Ghost, "is what you're here for, as pleased as Punch, you, a bloody murderer, while I've been walking the streets down there and living in a place like a pigstye all these years."

"That is a little hard to understand at first. But it is all over now. You will be pleased about it presently. Till then there is no need to bother about it."

"No need to bother about it? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

"No, Not as you mean. I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began."

-- The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Forgiveness is tricky like that. Some people hold onto their shame like it is their last possession on this earth. When you refuse to let go of yourself and your shame, your understanding of what is real will be severely limited. You must be concerned with matters of the heart, and not those of consequence to understand what is real...and I'm afraid I've worried about consequence my entire life. "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly," and all that junk. Don't be a tyrant over your guilt and shame.

Don't stop looking at this article until giving some thought to the irony that an article about the ills of shame has this title.

Thank You and Gig 'em.