Shell

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

What is wrong with me? “Moral injury” is one thing, as recently explained to me by an article in the New York Times. The Times notes,  “the deep distress that can emerge when you feel that your values have been violated, either by yourself or someone else. The resulting feelings of powerlessness, guilt and shame can lead to mental health problems”.

Students experiencing unfairness, teachers experiencing unfairness. My first really long writing project was an ur-novel called “It’s Just Not Fair,” and that explains anything a new therapist would need to know about me. Have I used my sense of moral outrage for good? I think so. Can I sit through a meeting this week where well-meaning people are shamed and criticized? With medication, perhaps.

What it’s like to grow up an affluent white girl: I thought the natural state of things was neatness, cleanliness, justice, reason.

I thought this because my mom stayed at home when I was growing up, thus providing time for her to do all the household things that I never noticed she did. And because the servant class in our area was well-concealed. People largely mowed their own lawns.

It pains me, it leads to literal headaches, and shoulder crunchiness, when people are treated with disrespect.

Both because I am sympathetic, and because I think I know how the world should be run.

I left the fancy suburbs, which always felt somewhat oppressive, and sometimes felt very oppressive. Living in the city as an adult, I saw how decay and chaos were the default. IF no one picked up trash on the street, the street got trashier. If no one called the Department of Family Services, kids would continue to get the shit beaten out of them. If no one visited small day cares around the city, a child would sit in his car seat just inside the door for hours. People would get up to all kinds of atrophy and abuse if their little home pools were never stirred into the larger body of water.

I’ve been musing on another school meeting years ago, when the principal asked the school secretary to talk to us about how many Fs the teachers were “giving” to the kids.

I am obsessed by how the world operates at large.

Middle age: knowing what’s wrong, knowing it probably can’t be fixed, and taking a shower anyway.

Humpty-Dumpty, like many nursery rhymes, has some historical origin stories that are unlikely. The king, Protestantism, a cannon from 1648. I dislike all of them. One beautiful facet of nursery rhymes is that they highlight the human impulse toward absurdity.

He’s an egg. It was a riddle.

It’s hollow inside!

Aren’t we all!

All the king’s horses/and all the king’s men

Lewis Carroll uses Humpty Dumpty as a character in Through the Looking-Glass. That Humpty struggles to recognize people: “‘Your face is the same as everybody has—the two eyes,—’ (marking their places in the air with his thumb) ‘nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be some help.'”

I know there are things inside.

A colleague recently gave me two dozen quail eggs.

Her father raises quail, and she brought in maybe 10 dozen eggs, hoping for takers. I excitedly took my two dozen. I took one across the street to a friend, and set the other dozen on my dining room table, where they have remained, pretty spotted babies, smooth, and turning rotten any minute.