Nothing Is Embarrassing If You’re Not Embarrassed
The social hallucination that sustains normality
I’ve experienced a bit of vertigo, as if the axis of my thinking has turned.
I’ve felt as though my head was lifted from my shoulders, turned around, and set back down with some invisible upgrade to my conscious mind. As every writer knows, or rather, as anyone who spends long stretches of time surrendered to a singular activity knows, the longer you stare into the abyss, the more clearly you see two eyes blinking back. Sometimes, they even whisper.
In this beautiful, dark void, a familiar idea kept following me around. Embarrassment. Not in its ordinary form, not the clenched stomach, fleeting yet grippingly paralyzing shape, but as something else: I’ve started to believe that embarrassment is nothing more than a poorly executed social construct, a shared hallucination. Its an illusion, it’s a farce; and it deserves far less reverence that we give it.
The reason that Embarrassment thrives is because we all participate.
We contribute to the petridish of this grand mutation each time we agree that something we did (or likely, something we thought about doing, wanted to do, or almost did) deserves to be categorized as shameful, as wrong, as uncomfortably ‘not right’. Embarrassment is not a natural response, it is a form of discipline. A subtle form of control that keeps people in line. The threat of being humiliated teaches us to anticipate it, to censor ourselves before anyone else needs to. It ensures conformity not through rules, but through fear.
We live in paradox. We move through the world as though our every action is being broadcast to a live audience of millions, yet simultaneously convince ourselves that we are inconsequential, too dull and unremarkable to be worth watching. Both beliefs cannot be true; we can’t be humiliated by such small actions if we think we are unworthy of the grand show. Embarrassment manufactures the illusion that eyes are always upon us, that deviation is dangerous, that small risks are fatal. The paradox is a trick, a very insidious slight of hand, that ensures we maintain our composure, wear something acceptable, behave. It’s a farce.
I think back at all the times i wanted to try something, wanted to start something, and at the very last minute, i caught my breath. Small things: giving a stranger a compliment, declining an invitation to an event I didnt even want to go to, wearing the same shirt twice in one week. All of these things would have done nothing but make me feel better, and yet, I left them behind. Convinced myself otherwise, I carried on, as usual. I walked away from things that would have made me more comfortable, more alive, more me. And for what? To avoid the phantom of embarrassment.
Do you know why the so-called normal life carries such a dismal reputation? Because normal is the watered-down version of great. It is what you get when you subtract risk, chance, and improvisation. It is what remains when all risk has been siphoned out, when each impulse is softened into routine. Normal is not the opposite of extraordinary, it is extraordinary rationed, thinned until it becomes daily, tolerable, predictable.
What makes a life remarkable is not its predictability, but that it contains eruptions! Moments that arrive unannounced! moments that could never be scheduled!
We prevent ourselves from experiencing these fabulous maybes each time we hesitate, each time we rehearse safety over instinct. For it is precisely the thing that appears out of the blue that holds the possibility of greatness. The extraordinary can only ever arrive by surprise; it ceases to be extraordinary the moment we try to domesticate it. We will never find our Unicorn held captive at the zoo.
There is nothing that exposes this truth more clearly than style. When I look to my idols, I realize how little they would be if they had feared embarrassment.
On June 29th, 1994, 11,411 days, 374 months and 3 weeks ago, Princess Diana’s black ‘revenge dress’ rocked the world. If she had stumbled, worn something else, if she had donned this dress but worn it with the air of apology, it would have been tabliod fodder. Because of her lack of shame, her lack of embarrassment, we saw it for what it was, a grand gesture of self-worth, a woman unafraid, a woman refusing to be defined by anyone other than herself, anymore.
Björk’s swan dress could have been remembered as ridiculous, yet because she wore it with complete commitment, it has outlived its critics and become iconic.
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era was absurd on paper, alien makeup, sequined jumpsuits, theatrical androgyny. But absurdity without hesitation turns into revolution.
This is the critical point: embarrassment is not located in the act itself, but in the posture with which it is carried. Style, performance, self-expression, these things become embarrassing only when you hesitate, only when you allow the gaze of others to define what is possible. Conviction erases ridicule. To inhabit something fully is to strip the world of its power to make you small. And you, my dear friend, in my not-so-humble opinion, deserve more than to feel so sedated.
Nothing is embarrassing if you are not embarrassed. What remains is a kind of freedom: to try, to experiment, to fail, to begin again, to make the ordinary extraordinary.
To live unembarrassed is not to live without shame, but to understand shame as a choice. It is to recognize that the extraordinary waits on the other side of the smallest risks. It is to stop rehearsing normality and start inhabiting life.
This is my manifesto against embarrassment.
The false verdict, the phantom discipline, the silent hysteria that begs you to stay in line. You were not created to rehearse normality. You were created to live with conviction, to wear what you mean, to inhabit yourself without apology. remember that you are made of all things powerful and great, you are made of stardust, of planetary explosions beyond our wildest comprehension. You are a human being of singluar creation, no one has what you possess. No one can see things in the way that you can, no one is able to understand the beauty of the world through your eyes.
Laugh too loudly, wear the wrong thing, bask in the glow of bad style and rejoice in the idea that tomorrow was made new, just for you, to try again. Do not contort yourself for an audience that is not even watching. Do not live half-measured, bowing to the gaze of strangers.
Nothing is embarrassing if you are not embarrassed. It is a leash, not a law, and you must cut yourself free to create something great. Something grand, something worthwhile. Something that belongs to you, born from your mind, the alchemy of your creation.
Conviction, true, unflinching conviction, is what transforms a moment into legend, a style into history, and a life into something worth remembering.
With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List
needed to read this!
I feel this every time I post on this app :)