I just clicked on Steve's diary page from Willa's diary listing. I was interested after reading the quote she has there:

from http://www.willa.com/more3.htm

Monday, April 29, 1996
...Someone (a stranger) sent me an e-mail last week and asked me how I could "put my whole life" out on the net for everyone to read. Isn't it embarrassing, he asked? I hadn't really thought about it before. I answered and told him that I was just a big ham and this was my way of being on stage all the time....

...

This caught my attention because I just got CPR/Heimlich recertified. The instructor spent some time talking about why people die of heart failure, and why some people choke to death. Oftimes it's embarrassment. People, especially women, are embarrassed to go to their doctors and complain of what they think is probably indigestion, or a little extra weight making them feel short of breath, or whatever. And people choking on food in restaurants run to the rest room where noone will see them, and die there where noone can help them.

And perhaps the guy who died in nearby Methuen Mass, just this past month... 40 years old and dead from choking on a piece of steak... perhaps he would have lived if someone in the restaurant had not been too embarrassed to get involved. We'll never know if someone there could have helped and didn't. But it's a good bet that the fear of embarrassment is strong enough to affect people this much. People even commit suicide so they won't have to face others finding out embarrassing things about them.

I was thinking of how debilitating embarrassment is, and why we so often succumb to it. How it keeps perfectly wonderful performers offstage. How it keeps people from getting out of dangerous situations, or miserable ones, or simply dull ones. And how misery in your life, or living a life of boredom, is actually dangerous since you're killing your potential.

I don't know if it's religion... the concept of shame? or if it's true for most people except those somehow escape it -- the rebels, the simple, the willful, perhaps the lucky.