Yesterday a woman called to offer me two free tickets on a Caribbean cruise if I would just answer a few of her questions. At the time of the call I was sitting in a crowded coffee shop so naturally I hung up on her. It’s always been my dream to set sail on a Caribbean cruise ship, but the idea of random people overhearing my conversation was just too embarrassing. What if the woman asked me something deeply personal like “How do you feel about buffets?” My cheeks were already hot because my phone had vibrated three times on the cafe table before I’d answered it. I could not endure any more public humiliation.
Which got me thinking about embarrassment. I am embarrassed about how many things I’m embarrassed about. And it’s not the stuff you might expect. FOR INSTANCE.
1) When I got all dolled up one night to drive to the Chevrolet sales lot because I’d trusted a newspaper insert saying that I’d won a new car and I thought that when I put the key in the door for the first time someone from Chevy might want to take my picture for promotional reasons, I was not embarrassed.
2) When I got an F in Physics because two weeks into my freshman year of college I simply forgot I was enrolled in Physics and consequently neglected to attend class, do the homework, take the tests, etc., I was not embarrassed.
3) When I blew a snot rocket at the park a couple days ago and it touched down on my sneaker in plain view of all the other joggers stretching their quads, I was not embarrassed.
And that is because I am a grown woman who has read a lot of pop psychology online and who contains enough inner reserves of strength and self-confidence to weather any social mortification. But a few things still manage to get to me. They’ve gotten to me for a long time, but only recently have I identified and tried to come to terms with them. So in the therapeutic interest of revisiting “humiliations past” as World of Psychology recommends, I give you three of the fundamental embarrassments that are currently shaping my life.
1) I didn’t write all the books.
This one comes up a lot because I am a writer of books, and yet all the books on bookstore and library shelves seem to be written by other people. People like Shakespeare and Thomas Pynchon and Virginia Woolf and Jesus. Even if I had written just a few of the books I’ve recently enjoyed—Beloved, Dog of the South, Awakenings—it wouldn’t be enough. That’s not all the books. And my guess is that tomorrow more books will be published and I won’t have written those either. Frankly it makes me want to be a shut-in.
2) I was a particularly ugly child.
Even if I could excuse the grotesque fat rolls that plagued me as a baby and gave me the same tan lines as Jabba the Hutt, I cannot accept the unappealing little girl whom that infant morphed into sometime in the 1980s. There’s a good reason I’ve never had the habit of showing new boyfriends my family’s photo albums. If one of them saw a picture of the five-year-old, gap-toothed Medusa who still lives somewhere inside of me, characterized by her ill-fitting red snowsuit and her herpetic lip blown open like a hotdog in a microwave, he would most likely not want to come anywhere near my reproductive equipment ever again. The shame lives on.
(Is this still healthy? This no longer seems healthy.)
3) I’ve messed up bad and I don’t know the first thing about time travel.
I’m less embarrassed about the messing up bad part and more embarrassed about my failure to do even a fraction of what Bill and Ted can do. I’m told that everyone makes mistakes. Terrific. Those people can accept and learn from their errors. But I am a special case and my mistakes have been egregious and I would much prefer just to get into my time machine and redo some stupid shit I’m still paying for, rather than be seen as someone who only gets to live her life once because she’s too much of an unexceptional dingbat to travel back in time. But here I am, a woman without the phone booth that would render her first kiss a little less awkward. Please just look away.
I could go on. I pick my nose when I’m not turning it into a rocket launcher. I’ve never been to MOMA. I’m not a movie star. I’ve never been the democratically elected president of even the smallest nation. They say that embarrassment is a product of perfectionism. As if being perfect is a bad thing. As if my dream of being an exquisite kindergartner sunning herself on a Royal Caribbean deck while autographing copies of The Divine Comedy and Ulysses is unattainable. I only want to live in harmony with the universe, and the universe wants me to be tan and rich and glorious like the love child of Angelina Jolie and Sir Isaac Newton. The universe will accept nothing less than an A-plus-plus and if I don’t perform to the universe’s exacting standards I’ll have to cower blushing in the corner for another three decades.
There’s no enlightened, elegant, nonironic way to wrap this up. Unless. UNLESS. I accidentally pooped my pants. Goodnight.