Embarrassing Reactions To Embarrassing Situations
If you’re like me, you once wet your pants in front of your first grade class. I very much hope you’re not like me, though. That moment was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life and it haunts me to this day. Embarrassing moments are somewhat unique like that in their ability to last far beyond the original incident. Usually, it’s not even the strangers on the street that keep them alive, but the voices in our heads.
I should pause here and make two disclaimers. 1. I don’t know your particular point of embarrassment and so will use my own experiences and extrapolate from there. I have a hunch that embarrassment has some pretty universal patterns. 2. I’m talking about the embarrassing, not the tragic. Tragic experiences are an entirely different situation. Tragedy and strife have some pretty logical, (if not particularly pleasant,) responses. Embarrassment tends to come from situations where there is no logical course to take and you’re sure if you tried hard enough, you could disappear into your own skull.
When thinking about some of my more embarrassing moments, the commonality seems to be that they all come about because I was wrong, or at least mistaken in some way. I had made a judgement or a decision and it was not the one I should have made. More specifically, I had made a mistake with an audience watching my every move. Whether it was not knowing how to control my 6-year-old bladder, proclaiming the superiority of the wrong team, or giving the wrong password to the king of that secret desert meeting, I was surrounded by witness to my stumbling with no method of escape.
Not that I didn’t try to escape. And that’s my real concern with embarrassment and why I bring it up today.
The first impulse is always to deny. We become 5-year-olds and hope that if we insist hard enough, everyone will forget what just happened. “I didn’t steal this cookie in my hand.” “Clearly, I sat on a water balloon.” “I said the right password. You must have misheard me.” This strategy almost never works because who would be simpleminded enough to believe a lie when counter evidence is right in front of your face.
The next impulse tends to be anger at being caught in the mistake. As it often is, that anger is just the warmup to violence. The number of times I’ve been punched in the face because I happened to spotlighted someone else’s embarrassment is not zero. Think of the last time you were surprised by a moth and how quickly that surprise turns into a hunting party because no way can that moth live to tell its friends what a scaredy-cat you are. If you can’t lie your way out of an embarrassing mistake, maybe you can simply make sure there are no witnesses.
Nobody likes to be wrong or make mistakes and we will sink to some truly base behaviors to pretend like we’re not. If I’m honest with myself, the behaviors that I wish most desperately I could take back are not the embarrassing ones, but the ones I engaged in to cover up my embarrassment, to cover up the fact that I’d been wrong.
The thing to keep in mind is that you’re going to be wrong. You’re going to make a mistake and people will see it happen. You can try to cover it up and live in a world of embarrassed, lying, bullies or accept that it will happen, move on, and maybe even learn from the experience.
