Friday, October 13, 2017

I'm running late, but I can make it, and then I'll go to work and then the week will be over.  So, off to therapy.  Tired, but I get up, I shower, a cup of yesterday's green tea from the fridge, load up, and out on the bike.  And soon enough I am heading down 19th Street, weaving my way through the backed up traffic, cars, fed ex, trucks, lincoln navigators, delivery vans, construction pylons, crossing M, and pulling up at the corner at L Street across from the food trucks, into the building and up to the fifth floor.  The office building canyons.

So, what do we talk about today...  Where did we leave off.  Always makes me nervous.Dr. H opens the door just as I come into the reception area.  Ahh, here we are.

Acknowledge how hard it was...  shame is not successful as a motivating force...  a challenging mental space back then, a lot of emotions flying to the surface... the let downs, Amherst English Department...  what messaging did I receive about what being an adult is like...  rebellion is another form of tie to the control of adults, the opposite of being authentic...  Do not underestimate what a difficult time you were going through, college days, things coming apart a bit.

She observes that, in the wake of the visit from the boss, the big chef from overseas, that I refer to myself as a boy.  Well, a boy in the sense of being the guy waiting on everyone as they talk away as adults.  I'm a boy, not an adult, as I roll down 19th on my bike, not in a car, coming down reluctant and anxious into the bright light, the sounds, the heat, the strutting...  And I am tired, being the last guy there at the restaurant to the late night social life of the boss along with his peccadilloes for the last two weeks of shifts.  He's my friend.  He is family.  Huge respect for him, he respects me.  I love his visits.  I learn some history of the restaurant and of hopes for where it might be headed in positive directions.  It's a great place.  The problem is the level of engagement, and I do my best to engage the customers who come through.

So, she asks me somewhat rhetorically, where does shame come up now, in what situation...  Is shame related to a pattern I am relying upon as a sort of mode.

At the bar, the spotlight is on me in a particular role, but the real person is only partially seen.  Do I feel like I have to hide my real self, the content behind what is seen.

I need to develop a tolerance for the uncomfortable feeling of the shame that is related to, somehow, the emotions that occurred when adults let me down at a particular important juncture of life.  That shame is not the best of motivations lets me in on the idea that it wasn't all my fault.

Shame.

And then the Harvey Weinstein news.  That had come out, days before.  I mentioned it to her in passing.  Because I had been accused of the very same thing, "sexual harassment."  But Harvey, now that's some real harassment, not the sort of awkward bring a girl flowers and have her reject you sort. Blowing up an squirrel with an atomic bomb, I sort of thought.  And then there's that guy, the big bully, the fast talking creep, the power guy, big old Harvey doing all that stuff, and finally they come out of the woodwork, emboldened.  Everyone knew it, the cynical professional says.  The journalists had too much to lose back then, so they thought, thinking of individual gain, in those days before the online social media sites we all visit took the advertising money away from print journals.  Magazine articles optioned, to be turned into Miramax film productions and Oscars.  Advertising dollars for the old print glossies.  Oscar parties.

But we are, if we are perpetrators, to some extent, victims as well.  And a stressful childhood can make you vulnerable to being vulnerable enough to land in the kind of situations which are set up for the continuing of sexual harassment.  Age difference, power difference, vulnerability as far as career, security, etc.  Shame is the motivator, shame is the strange flavor tasted on a daily basis.  Remembered and lived on in all our interactions.  Am I acting like a creep if...  Should I send her an email...  Is it okay now having met her that I follow up...  Every time I go through that in my mind, which does not help my self-confidence, this looking over my own shoulder...

There's something perpetuating about it, perpetuating.  Shame leads to more shame.  Silence leads to hidden life.


You have to reach a point of stillness and quiet in order to write.  Writing is the only way of thinking, at least if we live a life alone.

Reflections on the Weinstein abuse pattern...  The (desperate) attempt of the perpetrator to cover himself with normalcy....  To make the raising of a charge against him difficult, loaded with threats of loss.  Silence is primary.  And so the threats that you are caught out talking behind their backs, and that this will upset the status quo....

Remember, it's not your fault.  The steady innuendo from the other parties is their thing, not yours.  Fear, anxiety, the feeling of guilt and shame.

It's been a long week at work.  The boss tells me it's been the worst summer ever.  "Worse than bad," he tells me and the veteran busboy.  The next few weeks will tell if there is life still in The Dying Gaul.  Fortunately the night was busy.  It's not just us.  Everyone's numbers are down, all across the town.

Coming out of the office building after my forty five minute session, a good one, productive, I take the stair well and out through the lobby into the bright light.   I order a lamb gyro from a food truck, and wait, taking a small amount of refuge in a dawn redwood tree in its little tree box area, soft limbs, sort evergreen fronds.  A helicopter circles overhead and then comes back again.


So, why the shame, that feeling that has been so steady over all the years since high school, a constant.  The shame leaves me vulnerable.  I don't know what else to say.  And I sense I should have been doing things with my life a long time ago.  But I came to D.C.


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