everything is embarrassing

the art of aching sincerity by a 12th house capricorn moon

It is hard to look into someone's eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through.

Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason

As a teenager, I attended a large outdoor birthday party for a family friend. It was summer and the sky was bright, a big blue banner billowing over the traditional white marquee prepped for talking, dancing, and a happily unmonitored number of plastic cups of Pimms. As part of the entertainment, a self-proclaimed psychological magician was circulating the tables and freaking guests out with his mind-reading talents. When he stopped at my table, he asked for volunteers to showcase his skills. The trick was as follows: someone should pick a number, tell it to another person at the same table, and the magician would guess the number based on the second person’s reactions to what he said. He could only guess the number once. After he guessed the right number, in the same format, he would move on to guessing colours, objects, and lastly, the hardest level: words.

By the time we reached the word-guessing level, flummoxed and entertained, my family at the table suggested that it should be my turn to have my mind read. The magician gave me a light grimace and told me he had hoped I wouldn’t volunteer. Innocently, I asked him why, although privately I felt sure I knew. He answered that compared to everyone else there that day, I was too difficult to read, and he would have trouble cracking me. My eyes were too guarded. While he probably built up my ineligibility in order to make his talents seem even more incredible when he eventually prevailed, I believe there was truth in what he said. Mid teens at this point, I had learned many years prior that my emotions could always be used against me, that not only should I not express them, but I should not let anyone be able to guess what they were, either. Such a period of emotional repression, that I am still trying to unravel now, led to unbridled detachment, easily and perfunctorily deployed at any moment. To such numbness that often I would even struggle myself to know what I was feeling.

At the crux of my unreadability lies shame. It feels like I was born with shame baked in, something inexorably passed down. Call it epigenetic, call it parasitic, but it was as much a part of me as my tiny nail beds and dodgy circulation. Then, when I was taught to feel shame, when I was made to feel guilty about what I should have felt loved for, I found that it already came to me instinctively. It was only natural that I should feel that way. I thought that shame bettered me, mistook my low self-esteem for humility. I didn’t trust myself and I thought no one in their right mind would trust me either. My interaction with the world was always led by embarrassment. And I thought that that was not only normal, but right.

Because of the casualness with which I treated these feelings of shame, I also found that it made sense that I would not let anyone in – what would be the point in getting to know me? There would certainly be no benefit for the other person; and as for me, I would be exposed as unworthy, I would feel the deepest kind of shame possible: the kind that comes with being seen through.

for years i covered

my ears while i spoke,

afraid of what i might discover if i listened.

nocturnes in the rain, Sarah Fathima Mohammed

Learning two new languages at university presented a challenge in terms of listening and speaking. Reading and writing felt safe – confined and private, any professor feedback would usually come at a later stage, when I was further detached from what I had read and written. It was a more palatable way for me to learn. But oral classes held the danger of immediacy, of being listened to and judged on the basis of what I said. Scary enough in English, I seriously struggled to fight the mental barriers blocking me from expressing myself.

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

This years-long performance of mine, where I tried to take up as little space as a dust mite, apologetic for even that microscopic amount, only served to embed shame more deeply. As I grew up and tried to write off my show the characters I had created for myself to be, something was always missing. I was so afraid to come off insincere, but also so afraid to be sincerely myself and not be liked. Paradoxically, most of the characters I tried to perform were typecast as champions of authenticity. I would be trying to play someone totally genuine, as an actor with no idea how to be herself.

In the end, desperate to hide any real part of me, I would come off aloof, detached. What was ostensibly indolence belied necessary reticence.

I find it so bizarre that I occupy space, and that I am seen by other people. I feel like I am falling through space and Eleanor just threw me a rose. It’s such a sweet, pointless gesture. It would be less devastating to fall through space alone, without someone else falling next to me. Whenever someone does something nice for me, I feel intensely aware of how strange and sad it is to know someone.

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin

Feeling constant embarrassment is also, for me and for many others, a close relative of the fear of being seen trying. Remember how for some reason at school it was so much better to do well on a test without working for it? How many times did you hear your friends say they ‘didn’t even revise’ yet they scored a perfect mark? No one wanted to admit that they’d spent hours at home studying for that grade. Whether we try and we fail or we try and we succeed, it’s the effort before we get there that we seem to take issue with. I suppose that’s why people often obfuscate their path to success, they say it ‘just happened’, they can’t even believe it. We can’t meet the eye of our efforts. We can’t acknowledge how much trying goes into living.

The same goes for being embarrassed to be seen wanting. Telling friends let’s do something, ‘if you want to’. Not telling friends about how your dates with that person are going in case things don’t end well. Please don’t see that this matters to me, please don’t see me lacking, wanting something before I get it.

But the desire to shield oneself from embarrassment betrays the real process – where the heart is. Because to deny how hard I try is to dilute my essence. To resist embarrassment’s rule, sincerity is cardinal. And being honest about trying can be the deepest act of sincerity at our disposal.

I don’t want to be a museum of all the things I’ve achieved. I would rather be a museum of all the things I’ve tried to achieve, showing exhibitions of all the things I became in the process. Because I realise now that an embarrassed life is a narrow life. Without embarrassment, you could have the whole horizon; with it, you just get a fraction. I cannot be satisfied with a fraction, I have never been one for moderation. I went all out in repressing my emotions and now I vow to go all out in baring my soul.

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

I’ll Give You the Sun, Jandy Nelson

Opening my heart ended numbness’s hegemony. When I fell in love, I started crying again. I had met the painfully sincere to my everything is embarrassing. He taught me how to cry while I scream.

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

Selected Letters, Friedrich Nietzsche