TASK #28: HUMBLE PIE
“Life is a long lesson in humility.” J.M. Barrie
Ahh, humiliation, my old friend…by definition, humiliation is a loss of pride; to feel inferior, or helpless; to experience a deep wound to the psyche. And I’ve experienced it all.
I’ve had to swallow my pride. I’ve been humiliated. I’ve felt inferior. I’ve been helpless…
I realized that 99% of the incidents were pretty petty, and in retrospect, pretty insignificant… the only two examples that still piss me off I can deal with them now.
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And you know how I dealt with every miserable debasement? In public I smiled tightly and absorb it; in private I raged and/or cried. Then one day I sat down in from of my notebook and I started to list every incident that made me feel ashamed, or humiliated, or slighted.
It was a long list. And it went back a long way, to when I was about 11. My parents couldn’t join the country club in our town, but I managed to get a summer job as a caddy at the club’s eighteen hole course, and it was not a summer I remember fondly. I schlepped those heavy bags around for the catty, cheap-ass, two-glasses of chardonnay at each hole, bitches and their miserable, racist, fat-ass husbands. And they tossed their clubs at me, and made me look for their errant balls in the woods, and rarely tipped me. Plus, when I was done at the end of the day, I wasn’t allowed to swim in the club pool, so I would trudge past my wealthier peers as they frolicked in the pool…
You could say I was bitter. But that wasn’t my main beef, my top humiliation–that happened in high school. My dad was a janitor at the rival high school, and when we went to play them in basketball on night, I warmed up on the court with my teammates and the opposing team as my father swept the basketball court.
That was humiliating. And as I was writing them down I realize what my M.O. was, humiliation-wise: I would shrug them off, put it in my mental strong-box, lock the box and never think about them again.
So writing them down helped a lot. And I realized that 99% of the incidents were pretty petty, and in retrospect, pretty insignificant. As a matter of fact, the only two examples that still piss me off are the ones I mentioned above, and I can deal with them now.
TASK:
Get by yourself, open your notebook and write down the times in your life when you felt humiliated, abased, belittled, ashamed, helpless. Try to reenact them in your mind. Feel the pain. Then close the notebook.
Photos by Sean MacEntee and Joe Doe