#can i just applaud these two for having NO SHAME when they're literally having an affair lol absolutely no remorse i love it asdflkjdslk

[lesbianjamies]

I want to stay like this forever.

[congregamus]

Easter Monday

Yesterday was not easy. On Saturday night, I decided to pretend like I could really hold my liquor. (I'm honest enough to admit that I put away my fair share of booze when I do, but lately, it's usually beer.) I decided I wanted Kentucky Corn Mash, and my tolerance is much lower for whiskey than it was when I used to socialize.

Consequently, it was all but impossible to get started yesterday. Luckily, I didn't have a headache — just a serious case of the drags. Which was unfortunate, because my sous chef skills were required. I made it through, and with some dignity, but I was at least half as slow as I usually am, and I kept judging myself for not being able to be as helpful as usual, and that triggered another, different shame-storm. (I was already feeling ashamed of the fact that I over-imbibed, because dammit, I know better, so by 1 PM, I was fighting a battle on two fronts.)

I am no stranger to shame. You don't grow up getting told that literally every manifestation of your personality is cringe-inducing — that is, except when they're applauding the dancing monkey — without figuring out how to work with shame simply to function, or else just letting it crush you.

Shame may never really entirely go away, but in dealing with it, a person can significantly neutralize its debilitating effects enough to where there may be long periods where it's easy to forget. Yesterday, shame came back, brought friends, and dirtied up the house.

I was not successful in working with my shame yesterday. I felt pretty gross and raw emotionally all day until I called it early to restore my body with rest.

Easter Monday is the first "regular" day of a new creation. I lean towards meaning-making, so I am tempted to poeticize the quotidian here. Instead, I'll be honest.

Just as the "Resurrection" is a complicated victory, so too is daily life in the wake of ongoing trauma. It is difficult to see "the spirit at work" right now. I guess that means that we've finally arrived where it's too dark for me to see.

I talk a big talk about how I used to run days that would break other people in half; how I have endured and survived emotionally and physically abusive situations that, on a being of lesser constituency, would be enough to institutionalize with orders for ongoing heavy sedation.

On the one hand? I stay pretty heavily sedated in an ongoing way, so maybe that's not the flex I think it is.

On the other, it's clear that we've all survived heavy battering, one way or another, and that what didn't kill you might very well have done me in. It's no victory to admit that none has been spared, or that the imagination of evil is so thorough.

Easter Monday is for invoices and taxes and getting out of "sacred time" (which I honored unsuccessfully with secularized intensity) and back into the mode of the quotidian. If we read between the lines, the first thing the Resurrected One did was fold laundry. I can't remember where I read that, but I think it's a nice expression of what it might mean to awaken into Easter.