self-pity

When I got polio as an infant in 1953, just before the vaccine was developed, my parents were instructed by the doctors and the therapists that the very worst thing that could happen was for me to wallow in self-pity, and to never let me go there. Maybe they all thought that if no one ever talked about the huge assault of this life-changing trauma, it would never occur to me to think about it, and so I'd never end up in the Self-Pity Mudpuddle. So what was modeled to me, and which I dutifully followed, was a constant response of denial.

I’m not a doormat.

But I have lived like one.  I’ve stayed put in situations where I know I should leave. Stood silently when people have spoken out of hatred and discrimination.

I have let people slander, falsely accuse, and violate me; their words like slung mud on my back.

I have acquiesced to going places and doing things in I had absolutely no interest.

I have smiled while men shared misogynistic rancor thinly veiled as jokes.

That’s doormat behavior.