The Shame I Feel

I don't want to share this poem with anyone—and yet.

And yet.

Shame really does grow in the dark.

Ten times a day, at least, it surfaces—

what did I say, how could I have said that, what will he, she, they think of me now?

I live in my head most days. Not enough in my legs.

***

My parents' first rule of thumb was humiliation into submission.

It worked. I don't blame them anymore.

But it lives in me still, coiled in the nervous system like wire,

emerging as obsession, as worry that won't sleep, as the sound of a whip

that needed no reason—

anything a child would naturally do was cause enough.

I didn't deserve it. I didn't not deserve it. I just was. And that was already

too much.

I couldn't simply be me.

***

I wish those moments weren't the ones that defined me.

If I could be unscathed—just that. Just once.

To not carry it in my body

like a town I never chose but cannot leave.

***

Now I write. I publish. I live in America where Shame is a mascot.

Wide open for rejection, humiliation, invalidation—

all the old familiar schoolboy jousts.

But they are out there. I am here.

Learning, slowly, to feel my legs. To stand in them. To trust the ground.

***

I need a break from this deluge—

this thinking, this drowning in feeling ashamed.

So let me ask, quietly, with everything I have:

Can I share this with at least one of you?