Embrace Embarrassment

We all make mistakes, say things we don’t mean, or have awkward social moments and all of these can result in embarrassment.

Whether you learn at the end of the day you’ve had food in your teeth since your lunchtime salad or you send a scathing email to your boss instead of the co-worker you’d intended to, we all find ourselves in situations we’d rather not.

Embarrassment can result in feeling ashamed, out of place, upset, regretful, or self-conscious.

As a result, we can diminish and hold ourselves back because we are fearful of embarrassing ourselves further.

It can help to remember that in our mortification we are not alone, as everyone has their own personal stories of intense humiliation.

Granted, there are those people who are able to shake off embarrassment more easily than others, and that’s okay.

Most of the time I am one of those people.

Being someone that can, at times, not only be socially awkward but a major klutz, I’ve found myself in numerous moments of shame, and – because of this – I’ve learned to ‘brush off’ these innocent human moments.

Recently I was in a text exchange with two people talking about an upcoming camping trip.

One is a close personal friend, the other I’ll liken to a celebrity crush.

Meaning it’s someone I will admire and pine over from afar, enjoying the swoon.

In the course of these text exchanges, as you’ve probably guessed, I sent a message to my celebrity crush instead of my close friend.

Not only that, but I didn’t even recognize my error until late in the afternoon of the next day.

In my realization, I felt the entirety of my body respond by blushing and I tossed my phone across the room in my horror.

While I can fairly easily brush off my error as an innocent and funny mistake, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t also some pretty intense embarrassment.

A couple of days after the mis-text I was spending time with several girlfriends and shared with them my error. In my telling I one of my friends’ hands went to her face to cover her open mouthed shock, the other’s face turned red in empathy and we all laughed.

Big belly, tears rolling down our faces laughter.

It felt good to laugh at myself, but even better, it felt good to connect.

I shared a very human moment, one in which I was extremely vulnerable, and through that I was able to to share a moment of connection.

This moment was worth the embarrassment…

even though I have yet to hear a response from my celebrity crush in the aftermath of sending the wrong text.

It was worth it.

There is power in embracing these moments of embarrassment and discomfort.

Always,

Your Trusted Friend ❤︎