The clock strikes 12:58 and I’m not paying attention to where I’m going. Rushing as best I can across water slick linoleum floors, I just barely slip into my lecture hall on time. Not bothering to look for familiar faces, I dart to the first open seat I see as my professor starts talking about a quiz.
Woah, back up. What quiz? I look up and see someone who is definitely not my professor. A guest lecturer? It’s the third week of class and our professor said he would have to travel sometimes, so it’s completely possible. But wait, this isn’t my lecture hall! With my skin crawling I shoot to my feet and rush out the door, tripping and nearly eating it on the way out and drawing the attention of everyone in the room.
I’m sure many of you have a story like that. Most of us can still feel all those eyes on us for weeks or even years after it happened. To those of you who can laugh it off, good for you. Tell us your secrets, because the rest of us are suffering under the crippling affliction of embarrassment.
Everyone experiences embarrassment, but the way you know it’s an affliction is when you can’t go a week — or even a day — without experiencing something that makes your brain crash whenever someone brings it up. Because that’s exactly what happens, and it takes you literally hours to reboot it.
I call this the Everything is Embarrassing Disease, and its symptoms go a little something like this.
First, Event Zero occurs and you feel like curling up in a ball and dying. Or at least skinning yourself so that unpleasant crawling feeling goes away. This feeling must last for the next three or more hours to be considered an Event Zero.
After the fallout of Event Zero, you start thinking about how everyone either hates you or thinks you’re an idiot. You don’t know which is worse. These thoughts don’t go away, ever.
The final phase is when you spiral into remembering all the times when something similar happened. About how Sammy Sample still thinks about that time you peed your pants in third grade and laughs every time just as hard as he did ten years ago. Oh, and remember when you left your diary open on your desk and your sister read it? All of a sudden it’s 5:00 am and you haven’t slept all night because you’ve had better things to do, such as reliving all your not-so-proudest moments.
It gets so bad sometimes that I have to skip parts of movies or tv shows or put my head down when I see other people doing dumb things because the secondhand embarrassment is too strong. I get enough of this in my own life, I don’t need to feel it on the behalf of another person!
So what do we do when everything is embarrassing? We’re not necessarily stronger for it because trust me, feeling like you want to go into a coma the instant you make a fool of yourself is not fun. Is the only function of embarrassment to crash our hard drives?
Pretty much, yeah. It’s a universal glitch in everyone’s systems because it is human nature for people to crave the approval of other people. The only thing we can do about that is to strive to be like our good friends who are immune to Everything is Embarrassing Disease. Fake it till you make it, y’all.
