When I was little, I thought I could never get married.
I knew that getting married required a visit to the jewelry store where the girl tried on rings in front of her future groom.
And there was no way I could ever participate in that romantic exercise.
I had short, pudgy fingers. Had 'em from birth. Some folks are long digit-wise. Some are thin. I'm digitally pudgy and short.
Now, some exceptional men have thought my hands to be cute. But I'm pretty sure they just meant that my hands were fleshy and small like a child's. Or, at the very least, not girlish and sexy.
As a little girl, it never occurred to me that a man who wants to marry you loves you for more than your fingers. I didn't know that by the point of marriage, the guy's seen a lot more than the girl's pudgy digits. It was only decades later that I appreciated how much two people can know of each other. And how much too people can actually see of each other.
It was only later that I realized how much a man can enjoy looking at parts of the girl that even the girl doesn't prefer. It was only much much later that I realized how much one can learn about another if the two people spend enough time together.
But I was just a little girl. And MTV didn't exist. In my little girl world, boys and girls met. Then they smiled that knowing smile. And then they went to a store where the boy watched the girl try on beautiful dreamy rings. And in my little girl world, the ring always fit.
Unless, of course, it was the beginning of the movie...in which case the ring didn't fit and there was a horrible foreboding that ultimately preempted the marriage plans and fueled the real story. The real story almost always involved a different girl whose long, slim fingers welcomed the original ring as if it were coming home.
Already, as a little girl, I had serious baggage. Of course it would be years before I hated my arms and hated my nose and hated my smile. But early on, I had identified a body part which would stand before me and a normal life.
Fortunately or unfortunately, my baggage changed over the years. I later came to accept my fingers. And eventually I came to actually like my fingers because they were mine. And because of all the wonderful things they helped me to accomplish.
My fingers were really good at typing and at giving hypnotic massages and at fingering the lips of someone whose lips I loved. My fingers were expert at twisting my hair into a knot that stayed all day only with the assistance of a tiny wood stick. My fingers were expert at finding the little space between Boo's ears and skull. The space that could put Boo to sleep in a minute if rubbed in a special rhythym.
There even came a day when my fingers provided that critical angle that makes a stroke in the water economical instead of ineffective.
And thus, my finger baggage disappeared. Along with my arms baggage...and nose baggage...and smile baggage.
And room was made for other baggage.
For a long time, my baggage was primarily intellectual and emotional. I carried my low self-esteem everywhere. I carried a matching set of luggage containing an intense insecurity regarding what I thought I liked, what I though I wanted and what I thought I needed.
Later, my baggage became more palpable. My baggage took the shape of the secrets I stored.
Not any really horrid secrets, mind you. No bodies hidden in the attic. No obsessions with men I just couldn't leave alone. No tattoos I had to cover with turtle necks and scarves.
No, my secrets were just the basic facts of my life that I didn't want broadcast to the world.
I didn't want the world to know I had received a ticket for a moving violation. Having gone through life without police intervention, I was paralyzed with embarassment that a cop thought poorly enough of me to stop my car. I was embarassed that really bad people were out there committing assaults and thefts and frauds...and yet this officer couldn't attend to them because I had disrupted the quiet of the world through my questionable driving.
I was more embarassed at how much time I devoted to replaying the incident in my mind and convincing myself that it was a conspiracy. I was sure that the officer must have had a ticket-writing quota. Why else would he have gone so far to manufacture a supposed violation?
It was a secret that I had lost a library book.
It was a secret that I had accepted a well-intentioned gift without sending a follow-up thank you.
It was a secret that I had thrown away perfectly good t-shirts instead of donating them to a local shelter or charity.
Granted, there may have been a few bigger secrets.
But I was comfortable in the knowledge that everybody has secrets. Comfortable that secrets are part and parcel of the human condition.
Unfortunately, I was only comfortable in that knowledge some of the time.
Because even though it's common knowledge that everyone has secrets and everyone has baggage, I kept coming back to the same fear:
"What if there are folks who don't have any baggage or secrets? "
"What if there are folks who did everything pretty much correctly?
"What if there are folks who made it through life without amassing secrets or scars or negative entries on their driving record?"
Even though I knew in my head that everybody has secrets and everybody has baggage, I just couldn't keep from wondering:
"What if I'm the only one who fucked up?"
The thing is, I knew for sure that everybody has ghosts and scars and regrets and stuff they wish they could eliminate all evidence of. I had practiced law for enough years to see how people getinto things and out of things and completely bogged down by the intricacies of making things happen or making things stop.
I had witnessed the regularity of people getting into situations that seem to gather momentum solely by the passage of time...regardless of whether people took the right action, the wrong action or no action.
And I knew that the intimates in my own life were no different than the people who visited my law office and the offices of the lawyers throughout the building. Whether I looked at family, colleagues or friends, there was always something the person was running from, avoiding, hiding, trying to fix or just regretting.
I completely understood that embarassment and shame were common bonds. And I also understood that my own embarassments and shames were often small relative to the transgressions of others.
But I felt deep down that the precipitating circumstances of my shame were only circumstantial and that I deserved to feel the utmost degree of shame even if the particular transgressions were relatively insignificant.
I felt that the punishment should fit any crimes which I may have committed had circumstance not stepped in the way and limited my crimes to their relative smallness.
And I had varying responses to other peoples' shames.
There were shames I poo poo'ed...as if they didn't rise to a level that matched my own shame.
There were shames I couldn't understand...especially when I wasn't sure how the owner of the shame slept at night if lesser shames kept me tossing and turning.
And there were shames I found deplorable. Not because they were so awfully, terribly bad. But because I didn't want to go near them. I didn't want to even consider those shames lest they become an accepted part of my life and tolerance. Lest they become my shames.
In my current life, there's a place for shame. It's a place I try not to go too often. And a place I go out of my way to avoid when I know I'm tired or vulnerable. I just focus mainly on not adding to the shame collection. I figure there's enough shame there to last a lifetime should I ever find shame useful or helpful.
But I'm fully prepared for the addition of shame to the collection.
Not because I know I'll fuck up, but because I know I can't live in a vacuum.
I'm not sure, but I think it's probably true that taking risks increases the odds of things happening.
Good things, bad things and all sorts of other things.
And I'm pretty sure there's a word for that dynamic. Perhaps a physics term. A term that describes how being out there naturally encourages the happening of events and incidents that in turn cause other events and incidents to happen.
I suppose the term's related to causation, although I'd like to imagine that the occurrence of events in response to other events could be completely and utterly random. Kind of like bumper cars out of control.
I'm pretty sure that each step I take opens me up to a world of events big and small, all of which threaten at once to either enhance or destroy or some combination of both.
And once in a while I crave a life of safety. Once in a while I make a contract with myself that I'll only stay in safe physical and emotional places and I'll only interact with safe people whose every action I can anticipate and anticipatorily accept as acceptable.
And once in a while, I'm deluded momentarily into thinking I've reached a place or created an environment where no unpleasant action could possibly enter my life since I've drawn the boundaries close and established the parameters of protection.
But life - at least my life - eventually requires that I venture outside the moat of control. And once again the cycle of interaction begins. And once again, interaction breeds that annoying ratio of good experience to bad.
I wondered today about compassion. I wondered how I could judge someone else's shame and rank it as if it were a contestant on American Idol. It wasn't a 'how could you' type of inquiry. It was more an inquiry regarding the actual process of assessing someone else's regrets.
I wondered how enforcing my own convictions of right and wrong could be reconciled with the sense that one's shames can really only be understood in light of their whole life. I wondered the extent to which time mitigates. I wondered whether there comes a point where shame is diluted to a mere state of complication and annoyance.
I wondered today if the pattern of my reactions could somehow be analyzed and a manual of principles gleaned. Perhaps I judge the actions of others in accordance with a personal code....a body of inner rules.
And I wondered how one turns away involvement in or knowledge of another's shames without implying disapproval or intolerance.
And for a short time today, I considered retreating back within the safety net of my moat. Because today was one of those days where someone else's shame made me think of my own.
But I know that the moat's not the answer. Especially since my own place of shame's on the wrong side of the water.