Name Me Some Famous Dead Scapegoats
Building tiny bridges to a few kindred souls. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch
Follow me here for my thoughts on how to recover, find your badass, kick ass, and align with your true Self.
First, indulge me: the more people who watch, the better chance we survivors have that ABC and ABC Correspondent Kyra Phillips will make another episode (or several) covering this secretive cult that has flown under the radar for a hundred years. Here’s a link to watch the ABC Nightline investigation SECRETS OF THE 2x2 CHURCH about the high control group I was born and raised in:
https://www.hulu.com/series/af1993c5-df67-4d5d-b1e9-85e56676e2f9
I’m writing about scapegoats, outsiders, and misfits, and I hope to publish the first essay soon. Stay tuned!
As a teaser, here is a Ted Talk by the queen of misfits, Lidia Yuknavitch, who saw me and believed me (it’s a long story I’ll tell one day) and saved my misfit soul:
The beauty of being a misfit | Lidia Yuknavitch
She also wrote this book about it:
As I noted in a recent Note, Name Me Some Famous Dead Scapegoats, too many of us die, like:
Amy Winehouse, Sylvia Plath, Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, and Janice Joplin, to name a few,
Which brings me to today’s post. Here are some thoughts I’ve had on SHAME:
The gift of the program and the twelve steps, I realized, is myself. Flawed, alcoholic, and deeply human, the gift, I finally learned, is self-acceptance.
Failure is necessary.
But I understand today that it is shame, not alcohol, that will kill me.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss, my favorite contemporary poet, is doing a series of generative prompts called Summer Songs on Wednesdays. I was so inspired by the first one, which included a poem about loneliness by Eduardo C. Corral, that I wrote a poem. Check out Corral’s poem Lines Written During My Second Pandemic if you like poetry, if you want to write poems, if you don’t, if you like to read, or just because it’s so good.
Diane’s prompt is genius because she is genius, period. She might be a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but she is one of us, and so, when she won that prize, it was like we all won. When I read Diane’s words, I feel like I wrote them. Check out her latest book, Modern Poetry, and you’ll see what I mean, especially if you’re not fancy, from the Midwest, and have a working-class background. (No offense to the Ivy League.)
So, anyway, I wrote this. Maybe because I’m writing about outsiders, misfits, and about being a family scapegoat and stuff like that (I’m hypothesizing that misfits and outsiders are always scapegoated), and also maybe because we are all in this boat of apocalypse, the crazy news cycle, climate change, and facing our collective shadow, I wrote this poem around SHAME in response to Diane’s prompt:
Lines Written During the End of Democracy in America
(title suggestions welcome! I used a title similar to Corral’s poem title since his poem inspired mine)
Shame creeps like an orphan looking for home.
Shadows are the cliche shame latches onto at the height of day.
Persephone, queen of the underworld, ate three seeds of shame and swallowed.
On the 4th of July, we pass shame like sparklers from hand to hand.
Shame is a hot potato.
Beryl’s hurricane-force winds blow and shame leaks from the gutters of Texas.
Mothers like Alice Munro decompose, turn over in the soil of their shame graves.
A weather meme on Facebook says enjoy the last cool shame of your lives beneath the heat dome.
Shame is the warm, then cold, dead spread through the addict’s hunger.
In the aisles of grocery stores, shame lurks between the milk and the bread.
Shame is the black curl of the dog’s tail downward.
In hearts of honeycomb, shame stops the blood.
Like an infestation of ants on steroids, shame on sugar.
Shame is the apple, the woman, the body, the Bible.
I hope you like it. As I learned from Lidia, we all have shame stories, and I’m still letting mine go. I think I’m getting somewhere. The HULU documentary helped me tremendously with that.
Watch for my essay to come out soon (I hope!) Gonna dive deep.
And if you are one of us? A misfit, outsider, a scapegoat?
Let’s choose LIFE this week.
As my brilliant friend, Jen Pastiloff, says, I GOT YA. Follow her here. She opened up worlds to me I only dreamed of in my wildest dreams and heart of hearts, and she will for you too:
Proof of Life with Jen Pastiloff | Jennifer Pastiloff | Substack
She is the master On Being Human, truly. Jen is teaching me how to listen, and I’m working hard. I’ve learned to hear the still small voice within, but I want to learn to hear YOU.
Tell me anything.
Back soon,
Kelly
I just adore you. Thank you for the gifts I got today from reading this. I've known about Lidia Yuknavitch for years and I'm embarrassed to say that I've never read her. I just watched her Ted Talk. Definitely the best thing about today so far, and it's been a pretty good day. Ordered The Chronology of Water and will definitely be watching The Secrets of the 2x2 Church. Thank you. From one happy misfit to another. xoxo
Heading over to watch on Hulu now.