I am up late having a rather obnoxious battle with insomnia. This literally never happens to me. I always sleep. I have a regular appointment to keep with my dreams. But tonight I’m being eaten alive and my eyes won’t even shut.
You ever think much about humiliation? About that red hot flush you feel at first when it dawns on you that you’re at the short end of a stick of some kind, and how your heart pounds for hours and hours as you go over every detail of the stupid things you did? You relive them again and again in silent horror, turning each one over and over in your head like a stone smoothed by current. You ever think much about how fucked up it is to have this cryptographer-type organ knocking around in your skull, meting out all this information to you as it untangles it? But how sometimes really awful stuff slips right past and goes undeciphered, but once your cryptographer organ friend gets all that info cobbled together and notices a Really Unfortunate Pattern, it dumps this flood of adrenaline into your veins and peaces out (sayonara, reason!) and you have to sit there feeling like a lion is pacing around you even though the only thing that has changed is your understanding of the context in which you were previously living?
Humiliation is a toxin and you have to sweat it out. Except the sweat is existential and it physically hurts as it exits your body. You can feel it in your chest, in your bones, down low in your gut, where it throbs a bit. You can also feel it in your brain — the pesky little guy who allowed it to set in to begin with.
Spend long enough sweating it and that humiliation might calcify parts of you.
If you are like me, you might welcome that. So that maybe next time you won’t feel it as much.