Cynthia Harrison
Novelist
Tag: shame
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Gummies
When I first moved to Florida, I fell in the new house a few times and bruised myself. I have since quit drinking wine but that’s a different story. Pain is not my friend. Neither are pain pills. So I tried gummies, which are legal. The guy in the store said I absolutely would not…
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How to Be a Better Human
Someone older and supposedly wiser once told me a long time ago that guilt was a useless emotion. I remember feeling very defensive about this. I didn’t want to accept it. I very much wanted this person to feel guilty for all the horrible things they had done to me. That would mean at least…
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Sex and the Shadow
Shadows are where danger lurks. Shame is in the shadow of every single life. And sex includes shame for so many of us. Makes sense, then, that one of my problems as a writer has always been with sex. Open the door or keep it closed? Those who throw the door wide and step right through…
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Surrender to the Words
Shame. Dammit. There it is again. I feel it burning in my chest. Surrender, don’t suppress. Sure enough it dissipates, even sooner than I’d thought possible. I’ve been surrendering to my uncomfortable and negative feelings for months now, simply sitting with the pain as it moves through me. When I first began doing this as…
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Worth It
Brene Brown spent her life researching shame, never suspecting until one crystalline moment that under her need to excel was a perfectionism that kept her mired in guilt, judgment and blame. It took her awhile to assimilate her years of research with her newfound self-awareness and the result has been TED talks, new books, and television interviews…