Shameless: Interactive Blog Action 2.2

If we happen to be Facebook friends, you might recall that month I spent spamming your wall with other people’s YouTube videos. Er, I mean… that month when I very productively and respectably committed to completing the 30 Day Song Challenge.  Even if we aren’t FB friends, you might have caught on by now that I like a good project, particularly one with its own built-in expiration date.  And you might recall a few weeks ago, when I asked you to weigh in on experiences of shame and shamelessness.  Or maybe, somehow, the following announcement will strike you as completely out of the blue.  That’s cool, too.  Because- regardless?  It’s made of awesome.

Drumroll, please.

Presenting, the 30 Days of Shamelessness, a collection of 30 prompts for all your radical-self-acceptance needs.  (Or at least, y’know, 30 of them.)  These 30 prompts directly stem from the comments you all gave on that mystery post, so thanks bunches to everyone who weighed in about shame and shamelessness.  (No seriously. Massive snaps, props, and glomps to all of you.  You’re heroic.)  Thanks are also due to Kendra at Embrace Self Love, who’s partnering with me to put this together, and also to Jaclyn of Courage-Hope-Strength. who designed the rad graphic below, which is available (in various color schemes!) for all your Twibbon and blog-badging needs.

What’s that you say?  The graphic is pretty, but you don’t totally understand how this works? That’s all right. If it’s confusing, it’s only because it’s so simple that it defies your attempts to make it complicated.

So: there’s a FB page. On that FB page are 30 anti-shame prompts. This, mathematically speaking, means you can do a prompt a day for 30 days. You can miss days (because this is not about perfection.) You can start now, or tomorrow, or a month from now.  None of this matters.

How do you respond? That’s one of the many things that’s up to you.  Your response might be a status update, a tweet, a blog or vlog. It might be simple one day and elaborate the next.  Basically, the whole thing is like eating a Reese’s peanut butter cup. There is no wrong way to go about it.

Of course, it’d help if you liked the FB page.  (Spoiler alert: when we hit 25 fans, I’ll post my response to the first challenge. Which — if you have signfiicant investment in knowing about my favorite bad television shows — might matter to you.)  Once you’ve liked the page, you can “tag” anything you post by typing “@30 Days of Shamelessness” (sans quotation marks) and selecting our page from the dropdown menu.  You can also tag posts on Twitter with the hashtag #30dos.

Now, you want to keep in mind that this is a project about stepping outside your comfort zone.  It’s about the notion that shame intensifies when we hide it and convinces us that safe risks aren’t safe.  Defying our instinct to hide things we find shameful can be a powerful step toward letting go of the shame, fear, and insecurity we carry. That said, it’s important to keep in mind that some of the challenges are more difficult than others, so it’s always a good idea to think about the best way that you — with your specific safety, sanity, and privacy needs — might respond to each challenge.  Most of the challenges are open to interpretation, so you can always find a way to respond that’s ultimately safe — if a tad uncomfortable — for you personally.

Admit it. By now you’re curious.  What are the challenges, you wonder? Are they silly? Serious? Is this something you’re going to want in on? 

Well, cupcake, there is one good way to answer all these questions.  Investigate the source.