Tag Archives: Therapy

An addendum to my roster of embarrassments

November 14, 2014 4:52 pm , 4 Comments ,

Because I always start out trying to be inspirational and end up being discouraging and overly ironic, I thought I would add a little something to my last post and not be so evasive this time.

For a long time I didn’t do my blog. I was embarrassed. I felt ashamed of what I’d already written and of what I might write. Strangers could see me in all my unbearable colors (i.e., earth tones). Worse still, friends and acquaintances could find me and scrutinize me through the aquarium glass of the Internet like I was some scaly, immobile thing in the Reptile House and they had to figure out if I was dead or not.

But that is all in the past. I no longer care what goes up and whether my visitors think I’m such a poor specimen that the snake handlers have forgotten to feed and water me. I am committed to busting loose. Here is what happened:

  • My friend A started an art project. Every day she forced herself to post one item of work online. One picture per day. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re sad or cranky or down on yourself, it’s everything. And now she has this badass portfolio that no one would ever guess she created with a gun to her head.
  • My friend X has kept a LiveJournal since 2006. She doesn’t publicize it, but it’s there and it’s wonderful. She’s been published in lots of prestigious journals, but writing something secret online every day makes her feel less lonely in her art. Right now I find her quiet URL to be the most powerful place on the Internet.
  • I read the book Show Your Work which basically told me to get over myself.
  • I let go of projected opinions. That snobby old writing professor is not looking over my shoulder, judging me for my attempt at online relatability. David Remnick is not sitting in his corner office at Conde Nast thinking, “I’d give her the fiction centerfold in the next issue if she weren’t such a blogger.” Nobody gives a shit. Besides, my mom’s opinion is the only one that matters.
  • I finally found my visitor stats, which indicated that no one was reading my website anyway.
  • Unemployment.
  • My therapist started working with me on being more assertive. Being assertive is not only about saying, “Hey buddy, it’s not okay that you’re stepping on my toes.” It’s also about saying, “Hey buddy, here are my toes tra-la-la-la-la and when I wiggle them the sparkle nail polish catches the light and yes I might have a mild case of athlete’s foot but only angels are immune to fungus.”
  • I realized how unhappy I was not participating in the world, even in a little, whispery way.
  • I’ve changed my mind about so many people. On too many occasions I’ve judged as I’m petrified of being judged myself. And yet I’ve often found my judgments to be wrong—or at least pliable. A writer I thought was a talentless hack eventually wins me over by her unapologetic hackiness. A novelist’s second novel makes me go back and read his first with new eyes. Someone on Facebook whose feeds I once found obnoxious starts posting about whales or something and I’m like, “Hey, this guy’s actually pretty cool.” So even if I annoy the shit out of someone one or one hundred times, there’s always a chance I can redeem myself later. If Gawker.com can eventually come around to Lena Dunham, a handful of people can eventually come around to me. (Gawker hasn’t done this yet but I imagine that one day maybe they will under duress from their advertisers.) The important thing is to keep making people sniff your fungus until they finally realize that they’d miss it if it disappeared. Never stop itching. Never buy the Tinactin.
  • Whatever I put online does not affect the sanctity of my work in progress, which will not see the light of day until it’s absolutely ready. In my novel I can indulge the perfectionism that would make blogging unthinkable. Whether I have a complete mental breakdown if that novel is ever published remains to be seen.

Finally, the only person I hurt when I’m in my hidey hole of embarrassment is myself. I like to write. I like to throw various foods on the wall—Twinkies, spaghetti, whole cabbages—to see what sticks. And in my limited time on this earth I’d like to be the party guest who tries to add to the conversation rather than run to the bathroom where I pretend to wash my hands for an hour. In the long run, being embarrassed is more embarrassing than doing embarrassing things.

Now if I could only stop crapping my pants.

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A fresh roster of embarrassments

November 13, 2014 10:54 pm , Leave a Comment ,

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.

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