Microscopic Amputations
Eventually, disgust wins.
If you genuinely respected yourself, you wouldn’t put up with half of the things you do.
That’s the ugly arithmetic.
Every insult you pretend not to notice. Every boundary you negotiate downward. Every room you leave with that peculiar acid in your stomach, as though somewhere inside you a small animal spent the evening chewing electrical wires.
You call it patience.
Your nervous system calls it evidence.
The body is a witness the mind keeps trying to bribe.
It’s strange how cheaply we sell ourselves. Not for kingdoms. Not for impossible love. Usually for social convenience. To avoid fifteen uncomfortable seconds. To preserve the illusion that everyone is “getting along.” Entire personalities disappear this way. Not with an explosion—with a thousand microscopic amputations. No blood. Just less of you each year.
People imagine self-respect arrives like a lion.
It doesn’t.
It arrives like mold.
One day you notice you’ve begun speaking more quietly around certain people. You explain yourself before you’ve been accused. You laugh a fraction too hard at jokes that somehow always require your dignity as payment. The mold has reached the beams by then. The house still stands. It simply belongs to something else.
I’ve often wondered whether shame has a smell. Damp plaster, perhaps. Coins warmed by another man’s pocket. The inside of a borrowed suit.
We become connoisseurs of our own degradation. We rank humiliations. *That one wasn’t so bad.* *At least they didn’t mean it.* *I’ve survived worse.* Listen to yourself long enough and you’ll discover that the most persuasive lawyer you’ll ever meet lives behind your own eyes. He hasn’t won a single noble case. He specializes in plea bargains.
Then something curious happens.
One day your disgust outweighs your fear.
Not courage. Disgust.
You’d rather be alone than accompanied incorrectly. Rather lose the invitation than keep performing at your own execution. It’s almost funny how little changes on the outside. The same streets. The same people. The same weather.
Only now the parasites have to find another host.
More soon.
I've always imagined shame as the damp mustiness of mould that develops into rot, which eventually overpowers the senses and becomes self-justifying, lingering in the mind as the perfume of death is wont to do.
It seems we’ve arrived at the same address. No longer hosts. How refreshing x