I Am Already Embarrassed
Writing often makes me want to cry. To scream into a pillow and flail my arms about. The tension spreads from the pit of my stomach to my lungs, and while I search for a deep breath I have to consciously push back a wave of panic.
It’s not just writing like this — oh, no. This bubble of angst is not limited to personal essays. Communication on any level, if it isn’t for professional purposes, makes me cringe. My entire body becomes one giant knot.
As I sit here forcing the words to come out, a wall of “who the fuck cares” and “this is so stupid” and “you are so embarrassing” is building up brick-by-insufferable-brick. And that’s what it’s about, right? This newfound inability to communicate, to share myself on a human level, is entirely rooted in feeling that no one cares, and even if they do the very act of sharing my innermost thoughts, experiences, or opinions is something to be picked apart and heavily criticized. It’s something to cringe about and judge.
Face-to-face communication has always been somewhat of a problem for me, but this is a level of social anxiety I never expected to battle. Truly.
How could someone that won scholarships and awards for essays and speeches, who only felt free in their writing, become someone that had to struggle to piece together a few coherent paragraphs? Someone that has to schedule time to respond to their friends? Someone that writes rough drafts of responses, revising them and picking them apart, only to panic after finally hitting “Send”?
It’s a level of anxiety that has become crippling… and entirely isolating. Not even my closest friends understand the back-and-forth I have with myself before responding or the anxiety that surrounds not wanting to be a bother, or desperately wanting to connect with them, but feeling silly or divided on every topic. No one knows how much time I spend trying to pick out the right words to express myself, especially if it’s in response to anything remotely personal.
Few people know that I’m so embarrassed by myself that to share my writing, my deeper thoughts, I make separate accounts. Afterward, I am overwhelmed by a different crushing shame to the point of abandoning or deleting them. I’ve scrubbed the internet of any of my longer-form writing, and if you do see accounts or old posts it’s simply because I’ve long forgotten the passwords and am locked out.
While I ask, “How did this happen”, I’m mostly aware. It’s a mixture of a lifelong fear of (feeling of?) never quite fitting into any one group, a few years of control being controlled by an ex with a dash of being extremely afraid of being offensive by virtue of not saying exactly the right thing. Of being too poor, or too conservative, or too liberal, or too angsty, or not emotional enough, or too loud, or not smart enough, or overly analytical. It’s a tasty little cocktail with clashing desires and solutions, with the end product being a person desperately seeking to build a relationship with the world, with their friends, with themselves… and always feeling like they’re coming up short.
The beauty of an increasingly digitally globalized society is that people that often feel untethered and aimless, can find a community. That no matter how far away you are physically you can stay connected with those that you hold dear. For all of its pitfalls, this digital landscape provides us with the ability to have deeper, more diverse human relationships. And contrary to the jokes about me being a robot, and my own admittedly shallow emotional pool, I do need and crave that experience.
But when it comes to putting my thoughts into words, either in a short WhatsApp response, a journal entry, or rambling post such as this, I freeze. Panic. Ignore. Journals are abandoned, wedged between worn novels and expectant empty notebooks. Messages lay dormant and avoided. My innermost self is stuffed away under televisions and work and wine. In truth, I stopped thinking deeply and exploring the wisps and wonders of the world around me a long time ago.
I value my friendships and push through to respond, although I’m certain my friends take it as a personality trait that I go days or weeks before doing so. I’m also certain that while I consider them to be some of my closest friends, my spotty communication does not put me in the same space for them. It’s a cycle of distancing, to say the least.
As for other connections? They are few and far between. The anxiety that comes with a discourse with an acquaintance or stranger is almost too much to handle. Writing in this form… hasn’t happened for months. Even my journal began to become too tedious and dry to maintain. My inner world has been so unexplored and self-deprecated that I’ve believed I had nothing of value to bring to myself, let alone anyone else.
And in truth, I crave encouragement. Metrics that show interest or agreement. We all do. We all write for an audience, even when we take to our most private journals. Being such a solitary person, and in particular being someone that feels too insecure to share their work with their friends, makes getting that positive feedback quite difficult. At times I am a vapid being. One that has grown in part in a world of instant gratification and one-click “hugs” and “likes”. It’s a disdain for this part of myself that feeds into my embarrassment too, I suppose.
This logical part of my brain prompted this little exercise in writing, and as I read over what I’ve managed to release, I see what we in the South so eloquently call “fucked upedness”. There are layers of internalized sexism, elitism, self-doubt, and simply still feeling like the odd duck out at 25. Fear of backlash, shame over missteps made years ago. Fears of rejection, of failure… And just outright neuroticism that I have to wonder is a byproduct of a social media-fueled society.
Even now, not so deep in the back of my brain a voice, coming from what I can only imagine is a face with a sneer and upturned nose, is asking, “Why do you even write and share it publicly? What’s the point? Your deeply interested but chaotic nature will never have you settle on one theme, and that’s not interesting to anyone! Who cares if you don’t respond? You’re just a fickle friend that thinks chatting is a waste of valuable working time. Professionally, you could put yourself at risk by sharing anything so personal. What will people think of such vacuous displays? You use the first-person far too often. So self-absorbed! ”
As that voice drones on the tension in my body rises, but I’ve completed the exercise. I did my “hard thing” for the day… maybe the month or year. I only interrupted myself with a numbing binge on burgers and wine once, did not throw up from the stress, and managed to only rewrite what was meant to be free-form thought 20 times.
It is not one thing that got me to this point, and it will take more than one exercise to find a more consistent connection with myself. It will most definitely require a measured and concentrated effort to better connect with others. But I completed what I set out to do… and while I will undoubtedly experience shame, embarrassment, judgment, and probably still feel very isolated, I’m going to post this somewhere. Under my real, Google-able name. Under my actual account. As my neurotic self, entirely.
And I won’t delete it.
…. For at least a week!
