The sense of a private interior mental space that we're all taught as being the bedrock of modern Western philosophical thought, comes from shame. The experience of having thoughts and feelings that need to be hidden and protected from all sides, comes from shame.

For me, when I have repressed parts of myself it has been by banishing fantasies to faraway times and places or by blocking sensations from my thoughts about who I am, like being wide eyed staring at a boy, but not reflecting on what that might mean.

Meditating the other day, as I became more aware of my body I became more aware of tension in my shoulders, lower back, legs, neck and more. As I listened to a dharma talk about a zen Buddhist monk from a walled city, who when asked who are you, replied “North Gate, East Gate, South Gate, West Gate.”

I realised I have an underlying sense of a protective boundary, or shield a few centimeters from my skin. It comes from tension, but I think this sense of an imagined ever present protective boundary around my body, is a good way of describing how we imagine a fixed self. It's not having a guard up that's a problem, but having the same fixed guard set up in the background at all times is very

Thoughts, feelings and memories can come and go from my awareness, without the need for them to be in a separate space. No need to separate mental space from the space I experience in my everyday life, So both for how I act, but also how I think, I can protect myself better by moving freely and skillfully than I can by trying to armour plate myself.

Shame lives in and around my spine like a virus, no doubt sprawling down and out to my lymph nodes and surrounding area. I feel where people shaming me as a boy and a teenager for fancying caroline and moving/seeming gay, has taken viral form and gone deep into my body and stayed there.

But, most of the time that's triggered, like an electric charge shocking me from the inside, the triggering isn't mine. Its other peoples shame, pushed out and projected onto me. More so when it's unspoken, caught and manifest through people acting to protect and defend against my doing whatever it is they're projecting on to me. A lot of the time these two things can strike each other and completely jarr me. When someone says something directly it feels easier to deal with. Indirect unspoken endemic shaming feels more difficult to fend off, more like the wallpaper than the table centrepiece everyone is disagreeing about. It's unspoken gestures, body language, expressions and unspoken agreements not to see or support certain ways of being. This is really hard to represent, it's easy to describe obvious criticisms and judgements, but harder to represent a lack. Maybe as well as aggressive defensiveness, I need to find ways to capture and represent images of care and support a character needed that were absent.

I can take a breath and find the gap between these things. It's not a continuous conductive ocean of shame. My shame is in me and can be soothed. Their shaming is a projection of their shame - I dont have to take it in.

Im ony just realising how much we project our shame, fear, sadness, meanness, cruelty and anxiety onto each other.