Shame

Something I've been working on with tumultuous regularity, but maintains a constant flame singeing the corners of my mind is a collection of stories. I'm still not certain how I'd like them to be structured, if they'll end up as plays, stories, or scripts, but a collection nevertheless of people dealing with shame.

Shame is a curious emotion that eats at our insides, makes our cheeks burn, and coils our stomachs. It's a human experience to deal with shame, and I am very interested in what causes us to feel it, why we feel it, how we respond to it, deal with it and manage it. For some, living with shame and guilt is a daily task that they've learned to deal with, for others, it consumes and makes it impossible to concentrate on anything else.

When setting out to begin this project I asked myself what made me feel ashamed and I came up with a surprisingly long laundry list of shames that plague me on a daily basis. However, I opened it up to some friends and followers from a different blog, asking them what they were ashamed of. The results were surprising and vast.

I wondered how much of the shame we feel comes from us feeling as though we're doing something wrong by someone else's standards instead of our own.

There are a few situations and characters that have started blossoming in my mind surrounding this project, but this is also a project that I won't be talking about very much outwardly until it is finished, so for now I ask, what are you ashamed of?