quote:

A little over a year ago, I became obsessed with the concept of shame.

For me, beginning to think about (and talk about) shame as an emotion was like searching for a word that’s been on the tip of your tongue for ages and then comes to you like a thunderbolt in the middle of washing dishes or when you’re nodding off to an X-Files rerun. Exploring it was simultaneously deeply cathartic and like sticking my hand in an emotional meat grinder.

Over a series of months, a perfect storm of books, lectures and wee-small-hours conversations revealed to me—like peeling back the layers of an onion (weepy eyes and all)—that the feeling I had called so many other things (embarrassment, pigheadedness, discomfort, willfulness) was shame at its core.

It also became clear fairly quickly that a lot of my shame coalesced around one thing: my relationship with Diet Mountain Dew.

...

For me, that argument continues to manifest itself on both a personal and interpersonal level. For my mountain home, shame surrounding Mountain Dew has become a rhetorical touchstone that’s somehow come to shape the country’s perception of life in modern day Appalachia. In both cases, it’s a prickly briar patch of fact and lore jumbled together.

...

In the kitchen that day, Mountain Dew was used as a stand in for a harder conversation about our waning relationship that we had been dancing around for months. In more national conversations, it often seems to take up this stunt double role, particularly when addressing rural poverty.

Jimson posted:

im permabanned poster MTN.DEWCREW48. i first started feeling shame when i was about 12. by 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of "shame" and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like "Mtn. Dew Mouth" and "i love mtn. Dew more than life" in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start feeling shame in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia. im now on antipsychotics. i always wondered what the kind of "shame" style of Mtn. Dew was all about; i think it's the unconscious leaking in to the conscious, what jungian theory considered to be the cause of schizophrenic and schizotypal syptoms. i would advise all people who "drink" mtn dew to be careful because that likely means you have a predisposition to a mental illness. peace.

Office Commando posted:

Four Score posted:

niggerstomper58 rewrites will never get old