. . . the time you peed your pants at school.

In my elementary school there was a toilet in each classroom. It was behind a door, but across the bottom half of the door there were wooden slats for ventilation. The class could hear when people were blowing their noses, the rumble of the paper on the roll, the thwack of the toilet seat being dropped when some boy left it up again, and worst of all the sound of urine hitting the water. My fear of being heard doing my business was so great that I never used that toilet. Thankfully, I lived a block from school, so I waited to pee until I walked home for lunch. To keep from wetting my pants on that short walk, I sat on the heel of my foot and pretended to tie my shoe. Once I made it to my front stoop, I could just reach our doorbell while sitting on my foot again. When my mom opened the door and found me down there, I would bolt for the bathroom, urine soaking my underwear and running down my legs.

One time I must have eaten a sack lunch at school, because I was at recess, and I hadn't used the toilet all day. I was in line for the slide when I realized how badly I had to go. The slide was eight or nine feet tall and made of metal. It burnt your bare legs in the summer and was covered with ice in the winter. I was ascending the ladder when I realized the urgency of my situation. Rather than ask those behind me to climb down and let me off, I decided to hold it, but when I got to the top of the slide, I realized I could not. As I sat down, the pee ran in a stream down the length of the mirrored surface. My first impulse was to hide this humiliation, so I slid down behind my urine stream to sop up the mess with my skirt.

Years later when I ask my students to keep a journal, some claimed it helped if I suggested a topic. It also seemed to help if I got things started by sharing my bucket list or talked about my brush with the supernatural (an alien standing by my bed that happened to be my bed sheets humped up in front of my face).  Sometimes we spent entire class periods piggybacking off one another’s stories. But the day I asked them to write about a time they peed their pants, I was met with an uncomfortable silence. Even after I told my story hoping that it would begin a cascade of admissions, “That’s hilarious . . . me too.” Come to find out, they didn’t think my story was hilarious, just sad.

Brene´Brown, turns out you can be too vulnerable.