Step 83: Cope with Shame Boomerangs
I spent all of today with a Shame Boomerang. For the unfamiliar, here’s how that process works:
Inciting shame incident → bad feelings → forgetting and/or getting distracted for a little while → shame boomerang returns → bad feelings THE SEQUEL, etc., all fucking day.
In today’s case, my Inciting Shame Incident was making an irritatingly careless error in the newspaper that I must print a correction for. This is the very worst thing about working for a newspaper. You can’t make an error for just one person; it is repeated thousands of times to thousands of people. But Inciting Shame Incident could also be a hookup that shouldn’t have happened, or getting too drunk at a work function, or any number of drunk-dialing scenarios.
SB, and its attendant stomachache, returned every 45 minutes or so. I do not know what the coping mechanism for SB is. But if you do, please, by all means, share.
