Do These Embarassing Facts Make Me Unworthy?

Brene Brown defines shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging."  In her Ted Talks as well in her book The Gifts of Imperfection she making a compelling case for the need we each have for vulnerability, worthiness, and wholehearted living.  She also discusses what prevents us from getting there: shame.

Dr. Brown goes further to say that what gives shame its ultimate power is silence.  We are afraid that if people know certain things about us that they will not care for us or believe in us anymore.  We feel that what we have done, thought, or felt will make us unworthy to those from whom we crave worthiness.

This entire blog experiment is an exercise in trying to be vulnerable and live without shame.  I thought it would be fun to conduct a mini experiment and list some interesting things about me here that only some people know.  In the past the items below have resulted in some feelings of shame.  I would like to think I am completely beyond these feelings, but as I started to generate a list of possible items and tried to decide what would make the cut the echos of shame could still be felt for a few items.  Will I still be worthy of your acceptance after you read the items below?  I guess we will find out.

With no further ado, here are three fun and interesting nuggets about me that have resulted in some level of shame in the past and now live on as pure entertainment...

• I once had a crush on Tanya Harding that started just after she became a global pariah.  It began after an unexpected and exceptionally realistic dream about her and I being a couple.  I woke up remembering all of the emotions I felt in the dream (which rarely happens to me).  I had no real interest in being in a relationship with Tanya, but I did enjoy a weird crush from afar for a short period of time.
• Until my last year of graduate school I did not own cologne.  If I had a special occasion requiring that I smell especially good (I have always been a regular shower and deodorant person) I would just use a cologne ad from inside a magazine.  This was corrected when female members of my student staff informed me that men needed a distinctively positive smell to be associated with them and they took me to the mall to help me pick out mine.
• I am a long time fan of professional wrestling.  I use to watch it religiously as a child and then found it again for a few years after I finished my undergraduate degree.  I have not watched it much over the last decade, but when flipping channels on a Monday night I have been known stay a while when I come across wrestlers active from the time when I followed it more closely.  Part of why I stopped watching it regularly is that I despise the sexism, racism, and homophobia in wrestling just as I do in some reality television and scripted shows, but like I do with those shows I will sometimes watch it anyways.