shamed ovenbird Shame and fear burn memories into the brain (even small shames, even small fears). When I was four my parents brought me to visit some friends of theirs. I’d never been to their house. At some point I had to pee. I was told where the bathroom was, but I got turned around, or confused, and couldn’t find it. It felt impossible to ask again. They had given me the instructions so if I was too stupid to follow them that was my own fault, right? I couldn’t reveal my own failure to complete such a simple task. It felt like a humiliation too large to face. But desperation was setting in. I had waited so long to even ask about the bathroom that things were poised on the brink of an emergency. I did the only thing that felt possible in that moment, I found a closet full of coats and boots and peed in the back of it. Then went about the rest of the day pretending nothing had happened. I haven’t told a single person about the incident until this very moment, almost forty years later. I still think about it. I can still feel the weight of my terror and the weight of my bladder and the humming knowledge of my own ineptitude. I was a wounded dog, creeping into a dark corner to evade an imagined punishment. And I still don’t know where the fear came from, because if I had asked an adult they would have escorted me to the bathroom without question. I’m sure of that now. But then…then I thought they would see all my weaknesses and mock me mercilessly. In retrospect it seems the only thing out to get me was my own assortment of interior voices, the ones that still rattle around with the moth balls in the steamer trunk of my mind. 260220 what's it to you? who go blather from