[AKN #93] Shame Grows In Silence
LAUGH: Weekend Update With Stefon, LOVE: Cal Newport On Twitter
Sup homies?
Just got back from another weekend of wedding adjacent celebrations.
2022 is hitting me hard and fast with weddings, bachelor parties, and all kinds of nuptial shenanigans.
I would love to sit here and complain about it to you, but honestly they are so fun.
So rather than do the low hanging fruit jokes about how I’m getting too old for this or how I can’t wait to spend a weekend at home, I’m instead going to mention that it warms my heart to be participating in all of these activities.
Huge moments for my friends and I enjoy every single moment of it.
Also yes, I think I’m better than you.
Now that I’ve overwhelmed you with this diatribe about how in touch I am with my emotions, let me tell you a little bit about my emotional evolution over the last couple months.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Shame Grows In Silence
I always thought emotions were bullshit.
This construct used by Hallmark to sell greeting cards and Hollywood to build compelling plots for Adam Sandler movies.
In my mental model of the world, everything could be solved with a spreadsheet, equations, and analysis.
Emotion had no place in the real world….
And honestly, I still feel like that is mostly true.
Let’s get one thing straight, this isn’t going to be another Medium post about how some tall white guy in tech wholesale abandons his logical reasoning and through all the faux adversity attends a $2,000 cultural festival and learns to love again.
HOWEVER, it will be a post about how learning to bring shame out from the depths of my subconscious was the most powerful thing I learned last fiscal quarter.
You see, I have a well established brand.
I’m a brash, witty New Yorker who cleverly skirts by dealing with his emotional baggage by receding into a world of comedic snark and blaming everyone else for his problems.
But now here’s the kicker.
Sometimes all the pain and suffering I’m going through is due to my inability to work through that emotional baggage.
Who would have guessed!
Nowhere is this more prevalent than around the subject of shame.
Whenever I feel shame around something, I build up this story about how painful it will be to share it.
I inflate the pain to such a comical degree in my head that I cannot imagine sharing it with anyone….so I don’t.
But recently, rather than hold onto shame indefinitely, I’ve chosen to share it and I’m thrilled to inform you that the pain is nowhere near as painful as I imagined.
It has instead resulted in removing these huge invisible chains latched around my mind and helped me feel less anxious, more social, and happier.
It ends up that holding onto this shame only resulted in arresting any progress I would make towards advancing forward emotionally as I remained frozen in time thanks to shame’s icy grip around my life.
In the future, I will elaborate on exactly what I’ve been sharing, but today I don’t have that in me. This is already quite a vulnerable post! Making it more personal will only lead to more second guesses about whether or not I should hit send.
So instead of remaining in a state of perpetual rumination as I try to get the details of my deepest darkest secrets communicated clearly and accurately to you, I will instead leave you with one of those thought boy sign offs to help you remember the overarching lesson from my post:
Shame grows in silence and it dies in the light.
LAUGH: Weekend Update With Stefon
This is one of my favorite recurring skits on SNL.
Bill Hader comes on and plays a New York City correspondent who is giving you a cultural update on New York’s hottest clubs.
The best part about the skit is how Bill Hader can never make it through without breaking character to laugh at how absurd what he just said was.
I lost it on his descriptions of Teddy Graham People and Human Fire Hydrants.
LOVE: Cal Newport On Twitter
I loved this article about “Our Misguided Obsession with Twitter” where Newport describes how “the social-media platform has become a spectacle driven by a narrow and unrepresentative group of élites.”
It is fascinating to think about how a small group of extremely loud, bombastic, and insane people were able to use this service as a way to bolster their power and spread their insanity — a phenomenon which hit its apex during the pandemic.
But who knows, maybe change is coming. Because like Newport says:
A subtext in last week’s news cycles was that many people who are currently transfixed by Twitter also dislike Musk, meaning that his takeover of the service might lead a large subset of its most active users, in an act of protest, to stop tweeting. This is arguably the best possible outcome for our broader society. In the official statement announcing the acquisition, Musk said that he was going to make the digital town square “better than ever.” If he accidentally reduces Twitter’s popularity among those who prop up its significance, he might end up succeeding in accomplishing exactly this goal.
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
K.Rapp