Notes From The Smoking Area

I watched an interview with Austin Butler and he said that embarrassment is an under explored emotion.

Recently, I have experienced a huge amount of embarrassment.

Telling jokes that didn’t land.

Stumbling over my words.

Posting videos of myself on Instagram and TikTok.

Tripping up in the street.

Getting escorted out of festivals (twice).

As you have probably come to know, reader, I am hugely interested in emotion.

What we feel and why we feel it.

One of the emotions that I have struggled to or point blank refused to confront is embarrassment.

Then during one of my despair spirals, ruminating over something I had said, I said to myself:

“It can’t always be you.”

What I meant by this was that I have had a really lovely, fun life.

I have gone to festivals and had the time of my life.

I’ve had compliments about how I looked.

I’ve gotten jobs.

I’ve been top of my class.

I am surrounded by who I deem to be the coolest people alive.

I’d say I feel like a winner most days, actually.

But when the moment of humiliation arises, all of this falls by the wayside.

“Of course I did that.”

“Of course it had to happen to me.”

Immediately forgetting all the moments in your life when you were the person having fun, you were the person who got the job, you were the person receiving the compliment.

Suddenly they become non-existent ghosts of a life you apparently never lived.

Because this time you waved at someone who wasn’t actually waving at you.

Your life is over.

We go out of our way to avoid embarrassment at all costs.

Rehearsing a talk you are giving at work for weeks just to ensure you don’t fuck up the pronunciation of a word.

Practising how you might deliver certain news to someone, just to make sure you have covered all bases.

Striking poses in the mirror after buying a new outfit just to make sure you don’t look like a clown in your Von Dutch cap.

But what I have learned since discovering that I am actually quite an embarrassing person – not someone who is easily embarrassed, but someone who evokes that feeling in others quite often – is that there is a liberation in humiliation.

You are at your most vulnerable when you’re embarrassed.

It feels like how I’d imagine a turtle would feel without its shell.

Naked.

Exposed.

But you can’t get any more naked, can you?

Embarrassment doesn’t actually X-ray you.

I’ve found that when I don’t allow myself to feel embarrassment freely and honestly, it doesn’t disappear.

It just turns into something much uglier.

Shame.

There is a difference between thinking:

I did something embarrassing.

And:

I am embarrassing.

One is a moment.

The other becomes something you believe about yourself.

Now, I have spent around 24 years embarrassing myself.

In public.

In front of family.

In front of colleagues.

On stage in front of a thousand people.

Simply walking down the street in front of innocent bystanders.

And I can say that the more embarrassed I have been, the less embarrassed I become.

The next time I told the joke that didn’t land – because you never give up on a bit – I anticipated a chilly response.

I didn’t get one.

But the victory wasn’t in the laugh.

It was in my ability to know that it would be okay if they didn’t laugh.

It would be okay if I felt embarrassed.

Recently, I have grown fond of wearing a scarf on my head when I go on nights out.

I have heard it all.

I look like a babushka.

I look like a twat.

I look like an uncle who has escaped Italy.

I look like Old Mother Hubbard.

In fairness, this all might be true.

But I don’t feel embarrassed by the fact that other people find me embarrassing.

Trust me, I grew up in Dundee carrying tote bags.

I am used to embarrassing people.

I just feel like me.

That is it.

And I think there is something interesting in the fact that I don’t find it particularly embarrassing when other people wear clothes I don’t like.

Wear what you want.

I couldn’t give a fuck.

But I do find it embarrassing when someone tells a joke and nobody laughs.

Because when that happens to me, I want the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

We often judge people for the things we most judge about ourselves.

Sometimes when we cringe at someone, I don’t even know if we’re really embarrassed for them.

Maybe we’re imagining how embarrassed we would be if we were them.

I would be mortified wearing that.

I would be mortified saying that.

I would be mortified dancing like that.

Okay.

Good thing you’re not fucking doing it then.

Survival in life is not to live it in the hope that you never feel embarrassed.

You will.

It is to know that embarrassment is something you can survive.

I think we run the risk of taking ourselves far too seriously.

There is a degree of narcissism in embarrassment because actually, reader:

Why wouldn’t it be you?

Why wouldn’t you be the person who waves at someone who isn’t waving at them?

Why wouldn’t you be the person who farts while picking something up?

Why wouldn’t you be the person who suddenly trips over absolutely nothing?

Someone has to be.

It would obviously be lovely to never do anything remotely embarrassing.

Do you think I enjoy the idea of people having seen me in my most embarrassing moments?

OF COURSE I DON’T.

But I have also seen some people do some hideously embarrassing things.

I am not being funny we are all seeing photos and videos of a woman covered in her own shit doing Hyrox.

The internet is an astonishing place.

Yet I could not tell you what she looks like.

When someone else does something embarrassing, eventually I forget.

But when it’s you, all of a sudden we live in a society where everybody has developed a photographic memory.

Your fuck-up has been permanently inscribed into the history books.

When really, your embarrassment isn’t history.

It’s just something embarrassing that happened.

And I am starting to realise that avoiding embarrassment also means avoiding quite a lot of life.

Posting videos of myself online has been embarrassing.

I’ve stumbled over words.

I’ve watched myself back and thought, why the fuck did I move my face like that?

I’ve wondered if people I know are watching them thinking I am a twat.

But then I was out the other night and a girl came up to me.

“Hugh Sloane?”

I said yes.

She told me she’d been watching my videos that morning. She told me she loved my essays. She said a lot of incredibly kind things about my work.

I walked away thinking about how strange it was, because I could have avoided the possibility of embarrassment completely.

I just wouldn’t have posted the videos.

Then that moment wouldn’t have happened either.

However on the other hand wetting myself walking home from the club didn’t teach me anything about life-

Sometimes humiliation is simply humiliation.

But the things capable of embarrassing us are often the same things that require us to be seen.

Tell the joke.

Wear the outfit.

Post the video.

Say what you actually think.

You might look like a twat.

That is unfortunately one of the available outcomes.

But I don’t know how you build a life where nobody ever gets the opportunity to find you embarrassing without also building a life where nobody really gets the opportunity to see you.

I originally started telling myself:

“It can’t always be you.”

And I still think that’s true.

Tomorrow someone else will tell the joke that doesn’t land.

Someone else will trip.

Someone else will wave at somebody who wasn’t waving at them.

Thank fuck.

But I think I was using the phrase to reassure myself that eventually I might somehow become exempt from humiliation.

I won’t.

It can’t always be you.

But sometimes it absolutely will be.

And both are okay.