on embarrassment.

A couple years ago, I gave up on embarrassment. I can't remember what served as the catalyst exactly, but I do remember realizing one day how tired I was of being embarrassed. It was, for years, the emotion I was most frightened of--avoiding embarrassment, and by extension, humiliation, was primarily what I dedicated myself to during both high school and college. This may seem like an excellent idea--avoiding embarrassment and humiliation--but you have no idea how boring it was. Think about it: most fun things in life are potentially embarrassing. I avoided all of those things.

The problem, you see, is that along with a fear of embarrassment comes an extremely well-developed sense of pride. Shame, unlike embarrassment, has very little to do with pride; shame has to do with feeling guilty about actual bad behavior. Embarrassment, on the other hand, is just about ego. When you have a very well-developed sense of pride, almost everything is embarrassing--mostly because it's all in your head. It's exhausting, really, because you're constantly on the look-out for the possibility of losing face, when in reality you're obsessing about minutiae that no one in the world sees but you. It's extremely tedious, let me tell you. So, a few years ago, I quit embarrassment. This was just around the time I started this blog, I think, which was also around the time I decided to apply to grad school. Not at all coincidental, I would say.

Why I am bringing this up now? Well, I was at a grad school dinner a few weeks ago where a visiting professor told us (in the midst of making introductions) that his favorite thing to do with his students on the first day of class is to ask them to tell everyone one fact about them no one would know, and one embarrassing story about themselves. Picture it, if you will: this suggestion is made to a handful of graduate students (mostly male) and a handful of middle-aged professors (all male) and someone then says, of course, "Julia, please, why don't you start us off?"

If there was ever a time to be embarrassed, this would have been the moment. And it was embarrassing, but not for the reason you would think. The problem was not that I was asked to start, since, having given up embarrassment, I no longer care that much about telling personal stories to a table full of professors and colleagues. No, the embarrassing part was that I couldn't think of any embarrassing stories. I've got stories, sure--I was mugged at gunpoint once, there was a time when I fainted in an elevator, and I fell into the lake in Central Park when I was little--but none of those stories struck me as really embarrassing. Fainting and getting wet just don't count, as far as I'm concerned, and everyone just gets nervous when I bring up the mugging story. In any case, I just blanked! At the time, I actually considered making something up, but I'm not that good a liar.

Being embarrassed about not having anything to be embarrassed about is a strange payback for a life of pride, I think. Probably serves me right, though.