I tend to embarrass myself – a lot. I’m not sure if it’s part of my nature or something that has grown within me throughout the years. At any rate, it can certainly be humbling from time to time. In fact, my husband may or may not have been embarrassed to be seen with me in public on an occasion or two because walking a straight line can be challenging for me. I tend to run into people, or walls.
In your teens, embarrassing yourself in public is just about the worst thing that can happen. I remember trying really hard to not say anything that sounded stupid or do anything that would make me look “uncool.” Inevitably, there were moments that I failed at this miserably. Like the time I was trying to get that perfect shot in my photography class, so I jumped up on top of the lockers to pose only to, not so gracefully, fall on my face trying to get down. Did I mention it was in front of a boy I liked? Not my smoothest moment.
At the time, you think you will never recover from those moments. They keep you up at night as you replay them over and over in your head. Sometimes, you cringe as you relive a moment that happened 15 or even 20 years ago. But there are life lessons to be learned from these little mishaps if we know how to look at it.
Like my example with the lockers. Maybe if I wasn’t trying so hard to impress a boy, I would have been more graceful getting down off those lockers and spared myself the embarrassment.
Embarrassing moments help create the people we become, as long as we don’t spend too much time dwelling on them. You can really talk yourself into a depressing place if you don’t retrain your brain on how to properly look at those moments.
First, you should take a moment to feel whatever emotion comes to you most naturally. I remember one time when I was about 8 years old, I was staying at a friend’s house and she wanted to go biking. I wasn’t really the strongest biker at the time and I totally biffed it going down a hill. I was so embarrassed I wouldn’t even let my friend’s mom see my skinned-up knees.
I was ashamed I wasn’t as good of a biker as my friend, but I also remember not really dwelling on it for long. Soon enough we were on to playing something else and the skinned knees were barely even noticeable. In fact, we started laughing at how silly my face must have looked as I was about to eat the dirt.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that moment started building me into the person I am today. The person who can laugh at herself when ridiculous things happen. For example, my brain tends to work faster than my mouth. I’m a writing coach at a college and one day I was working with a student of mine who had a breakthrough. I wanted to congratulate them and tell them how proud I was but I was too excited, what came out of my mouth didn’t resemble English. I’m not sure what I said to them but it took us both off guard and the mirrored looks of confusion on both our faces was actually pretty hysterical.
I don’t cringe in embarrassment anymore when I think about these moments; I find the humor in them instead. After all, why torture yourself over something you can’t control? Both the student and I ended up laughing and that moment is way better to think about than feeling mortified.
My embarrassing little mishaps usually end up with me making another person laugh, or at the very least smile, and honestly, we need more of that in our lives anyway.
