Embarrassment
As teenagers, we mostly live in a state of mortification - some of us, at least. In my teens, I couldn't bear to have people stare at me when things were going wrong. To my mind, they always were. But I also agonized if no one noticed me.
In tenth grade at Sidwell Friends, I correctly used the quip "How gauche" in a sarcastic conversation. Unfortunately, I had learned the word from reading, not from hearing it, so I pronounced it "gow-chee." This is how I said it to the son of a diplomat who was already in third year French. He burst into laughter, pointed at me, and called over other students of French and everyone else nearby so he could tell them how I'd mispronounced it.
In retrospect, I sympathize. It’s still sort of funny, even to me. But the fact that I remember the incident is an indication of the emotion behind my teenaged self-reminders of Just Shut Up And Here's Why. Everything I said or did seemed horribly wrong in some way.
Later, in a different school, I took theater classes, where I did embarrassing things because they were required. And I found I could do them in character, which somehow made it better.
In my early college years, I came to a decision to let go of my desires (a process that took around three years, starting at sixteen, or seven years starting when I read Siddhartha at age twelve, or one year when I decided to really get serious about my practice). At around the age of nineteen, my bouts of severe embarrassment faded along with my desires. Then came dropping back into college, where my friends hated my lack of desires and said so, repeatedly. I considered deliberate reattachment. And with reattachment to the reasons for suffering came troubled emotions.
This time, though, I could choose to let go of them. It was interesting, a trick I tried to share in my conversations with friends. No one wanted to hear about it. The benefit remained mostly private. I continued to let go of attachments selectively.
And I chose to lean into the embarrassment. And to enjoy it. Because I could.
In my early twenties, I stood in the parking lot outside a popular bar. I was talking to a young woman who had invited me out. And now she was turning me down. She had changed her mind three or four times during the night. Yes, then no, then yes, then no. She was the sort of person who did that, and who didn't like doing anything at all if she wasn't sure about it. This was the type of romantic experience I had once shied away from. But I leaned in.
"I know this must be confusing for you," she said.
"It's okay."
“Well, it’s even more confusing for me!” She wailed. And I realized that although I was enjoying the embarrassment of the situation, she was agonized by it even though she was the one calling the shots, or so I thought. (Eventually, and not in any parking lot, she explained the traumatic events that seemed to leave her so conflicted about everything.)
In college, I found myself confronted by a writing professor.
"I wouldn't have accepted you if I knew you wrote science fiction."
He talked about how my writing was worthwhile but my liking science fiction was not. I needed to have more appropriate tastes, ones that rose to the proper level of a college intellect. I immediately agreed I would not turn in any science fiction in his class, which should have made him happy. That’s what he said he wanted. Instead, in the face of my acquiescence, he got increasingly embarrassed and defensive - although he eventually accepted me on those terms.
And of course I ran into many more confrontations, more situations that should have seemed embarrassing for me but my leaning into it had gotten so fast, so reflexive, that I might have seemed like I was seeking out the situations.
Of course, sometimes people would confront me with the idea of shaming me about something they thought was embarrassing, most often about sex, and I would just sort of lean into the conversation and make the issue bigger and bigger, so that everyone around us felt the tension. Even the person who initially approached me would realize the situation had gotten weird and, somehow, extra confrontational.
It was always sort of funny, always sort of fun. Even now, it makes me laugh. Because I used to run away from embarrassment so hard. And at some point, I learned to lean in. It made so much difference.
If I had written about this in my twenties I would have stopped there. But after a while, I also stopped leaning into making things more embarrassing because, as it turns out, that’s just a bit mean and there’s no need. Unless someone is trying to be cruel, of course, and they're usually not, very much.
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