Edition #56: Weaving Webs and Turning Over Stones
Creating The Webbd Wheel: Shame
Shame is defined by Oxford Online Dictionary as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”
Sometimes we do boneheaded things and feel ashamed about them.
Toxic shame, the chronic feeling we’re bad and wrong, is nothing but destructive.
Chronic shame makes us small. It disconnects us from ourselves and those around us. It acts as a merciless jailer who keeps us in solitary confinement, unable or unwilling to communicate our truth. We never find out we are not alone. We never discover many people would understand our struggles and secrets without judgement.
I’ve lately realized one of the greatest injuries shame inflicts is the inability to heal old trauma. If we cannot or will not be honest about our wounds because of our shame around our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, we cannot heal.
Our sexuality (and the results of it) is, for many of us, a source of shame. This is inevitable in rape culture. Our cultural preoccupation with sex is equaled only by the determination of certain people to control sexual expression entirely, force it into the shadows of capitalist or authoritarian control, or hold it to ridiculously rigid “moral” standards which inevitably fail.
I’ve pushed back against sexual shaming since I was a preteen, when I myself began to be shamed for being a “prick teaser,” and a “slut.” I was not old enough to request precise definitions of those terms, though I certainly understood the implications. Even at that age, I realized the adult shaming me was expressing their own sexual pain, rage, and wounds rather than making any meaningful statements about me.
Nonetheless, it hurt and certainly made me want to hide my sexuality. At the same time it made me want to be more open and more sensual. I am unable to intellectually come up with any reason why we should refuse to fully inhabit our bodies and the pleasure they are designed to give us. As long as sexual expression is consensual, why would we ever try to destroy it?
Nowhere in my life is this rebellion more evident than in my writing. As I’ve worked on The Webbd Wheel over the years, I’ve been aware of tension within myself as I follow the natural cycles and seasons of life and death and throw restraint to the wind.
As readers know, I write from the heart and the body in spite of the tension. For me, sex is a sacred expression of the cycle of life, including death. Without its power and presence, life would die without renewal. Imagine a world with no quickening seed or ovum in it, and weep.
Weaving Webs
Life is complex. In spite of our insistence on a false us-and-them construct, all life is connected. Science continually enlarges our insight into the interplay between plants, fungi, microbes, and animals. Additionally, water, air, solar energy, and earth provide a matrix which nourishes all life.
Therefore, The Webbd Wheel series is peopled not only by humans, animals, and characters who are hybrids and shapeshifters, but the planet itself is a character, as are its trees, its fungi, its water, its earth, its air, and the sun and moons lighting it. In the books ahead, even Webbd’s constellations become characters.
Real life is not sanitized, perfumed, and guaranteed to offend nobody.
Real life means real death, real procreation, real pleasure, real rot and decay, real feelings. Honest mud and blood. Honest bodily functions and waste matter. Honest lust.
Turning Over Stones
Questions:
Does reading sexually explicit material make you uncomfortable? Why?
Were you sexually shamed as a young person? How?
Which physical realities of life offend you?
Do you understand yourself and all other life as part of a global (or larger) web or do you feel life is categorized into separate pieces?
Leave a comment below!