I Was Embarrassed
6-28-15
I realized when I was in High School that I never got embarrassed, rather my girl friend noticed it. I think it bothered her, I remember her telling me one night after leaving a restaurant that she almost got up during dinner and in a loud voice stood up and said something about her being pregnant hopping to embarrass me. But she realized that it probably would not work so she didn’t. I don’t remember exactly what she was going to say, I just remember thinking “How was that supposed to embarrass me?”
I did not dwell on it but I did think about it some and I could never come up with anything that might embarrass me.
Then one day some time later, I have no idea how long, I was on a camping trip with her family at the coast. I had gone fishing in a pond and caught a small catfish. When it came time to clean the fish, there was a guy at the fish cleaning station cleaning the fish he had caught in the ocean. So I decided to go to the creek to clean my fish. But when I got to the creek I decided to go up stream a little, than a little more, than a little more until I was in a tunnel. It was then that I realized, I was embarrassed.
I was embarrassed. There was no other reason why I could not have cleaned my small fish right next to the guy cleaning his many much bigger fish. This was the first time I remembered feeling embarrassed about anything.
It was many many years later, more than thirty, I went through the Landmark Forum. During the forum I remembered getting in trouble as a child for “acting like a baby”. I don’t remember what I did or how old I was, but I remember being told “if you are going to act like a baby you are going to be treated like a baby”.
My punishment was to be put in a diaper, paraded around out front and then put into a crib, then all the neighborhood kids were invited in to see me and laugh at me… But I was not alone, my best friend also suffered the same punishment.
I learned from Landmark that there are times in our life, as we grow up, when things happen to us that hurt us we make decisions about who we are that affect us the rest of our lives. I may have just done a horrible explanation of what they teach, but that is my interpretation. Any way I think I made the decision that I was never going to be embarrassed again, and so I wasn’t.
I also think that out of this experience I have a need to help anyone who is being picked on.