The Age of Embarrassment

On childhood joys, adolescent humiliations, and ordering papaya juice at Chili's

My memory is full of holes and somewhat unreliable (a problem for these essays), but I can still vividly recall one particular moment of second grade. It was circle time, so we were all sitting on the floor, and somebody said something funny, and we all started laughing, and my burst of surprised laughter caused me to emit a loud, high-pitched, involuntary toot.¹ Which made all of my classmates laugh even harder. At me.

But here’s what I remember so clearly: I started laughing even harder, too. Sitting there in that circle, I was just tickled by the whole situation. My classmates laughed at me, and I laughed at myself, and I felt happy. 

My second-grade self was pretty chill.

Another memory from that same year: One afternoon I was riding my bike up and down my street—Deer Meadow, a suburban street offering neither deer nor meadow—when I saw a neighbor girl who was a year older than me. In a cloudy and confused second-grade way, I felt that I might have a crush on this honey-haired older girl. Now here she was, walking towards me (but also towards her house) as I rode my bike.

So I pedaled quickly towards her, and when I finally got close, I opened my mouth to say hello and a bee flew into my mouth and stung me, and I crashed my bike.

The neighbor girl just stared at me, sprawled out there on the concrete. Did I try to explain myself? “A bee flew into my mouth! I swallowed it! I know how to ride a bike!” If this had happened in middle or high school (or now, actually), I would’ve been desperate to explain myself. But my second grade self was just focused on the pain in my mouth and the scrapes on my elbows and knees.² Also, I may have been crying a little bit. When the neighbor girl went inside her house, leaving me alone on the concrete, I barely noticed.

Banged up but unashamed, I picked myself up and rolled my bike down the street, leaving it on our driveway to go tell the whole story to my mom, who immediately expressed the kind of surprise and concern a kid hopes for when they swallow a bee. When I showed her the inside of my mouth, she nodded seriously and said, “Okay, I think what you need is a popsicle.” Soon enough, after a trip to the grocery store or maybe just a trip to the freezer, my mom placed a box of Blue Bell popsicles in front of me. She said I could have as many as I needed³.

The pain disappeared pretty quick. I didn’t think about the neighbor girl. By the third popsicle, the whole afternoon seemed like a sequence of strange good fortune. Pure happiness, without a trace of humiliation.

***

There’s a particular kind of aliveness that comes from being unworried about embarrassment. To skip around just because you feel like skipping. To trip and fall (or crash your bike) and only worry about the scrapes on your knees, not the witnesses. To say whatever random thing comes to mind without rehearsal or hesitation.

I see it in my kids now (especially the younger ones) and other kids, too, even just some random kid at a park who wants to tell you how much they know about cars or something. And I remember feeling it myself, that special freedom to just be however you wanted to be that day, without second-guessing it.

I see my second-grade self when my kids want to put on a play or show for us, dancing and singing on their bed or the coffee table in their pajamas, just for the pure unembarrassed joy of performing. But there’s always something poignant about witnessing that freedom, because you know it can’t last forever. And, depending on how old they are, it might even be slowly slipping away right now.

My own freedom from embarrassment slipped away both slowly and suddenly. I went from doing my Crocodile Dundee impression for all my parents’ friends to barely being able to say hello to those same people. I went from not even knowing that a person could feel uncomfortable in their own skin, to feeling increasingly uncomfortable in my own.

By eighth grade, I was nearly six feet tall and my self-consciousness seemed to have grown in direct proportion to my strange, awkward, extremely skinny body⁴. Not that I was particularly self-conscious about my height—I wasn’t, actually. I was just self-conscious about my entire existence.

Being laughed at by my eighth grade classmates because of an accidental fart would not have been a happy moment. Crashing my bike in the middle of the street in front of my crush because a bee stung my mouth? That would have utterly humiliated me, of course. But here’s the thing: I would never have been riding my bike in the first place. Because by eighth grade I’d started to think it was embarrassing just to be seen riding my bike at all. Riding to get somewhere was only mildly embarrassing, but riding alone, just for the pure joy of it? Unspeakable.

What a sad thing, when joy becomes embarrassing.

But I wasn’t just embarrassed by joy—I was also embarrassed by my own innocence. I didn’t have an older sibling and didn’t have cable or the Internet during my middle school years. (Both would come soon enough, though, very much complicating my innocence.) Didn’t have MTV or BET or HBO or Cinemax or any of those other outlets that might’ve alleviated my cultural ignorance and helped me more quickly learn the dark and secret ways of the world.

Spring of eighth grade year, we were warming up at the start of baseball practice and our coaches were out of earshot, so my buddy Cody started talking about stuff that he couldn’t say around the adults. “Y’all know what movie I wanna see?” he said, in a conspiratorial tone. Everyone looked at him. “Threesome,” he said.

Some of the other boys nodded and laughed as if they were in on the secret, but I’d never heard of the movie—or the term—so I guess I looked confused, or maybe just neutral. Cody noticed, smiling some more, and said, “You know what it’s about, Burke?”

I smiled back, suddenly panicking, everyone’s eyes on me. Where had I heard the suffix -some before? And why was Cody leering at me? I decided to give my real answer, even though I knew it must be wrong.

“Yeah,” I said. “Golf.”

There was a brief pause and then everyone, led by Cody, started laughing at me. I felt like an innocent idiot, the worst possible thing to be. But then Cody said, “This guy is hilarious,” and I suddenly realized that he thought I was joking. I adopted a goofy jokester’s smile, hoping nobody would notice my red face. Cody slapped me on the shoulder and I laughed, too. “Golf,” Cody said, shaking his head.⁵

Potential embarrassment lurked in everything I didn’t know back then. I was always pretending to be more worldly than I actually was (until I finally became the person I was pretending to be). All these decades later, I can still remember an eighth-grade cafeteria conversation where I pretended to know what the rap song “I Got 5 on It” was about, even though I’d never heard the song before. (I assumed it was something sexual—a fivesome, maybe—but it was actually about drugs.) Something about our minds gives permanence to every memory of our own ignorance.

So many of these little adolescent embarrassments stick with me, like pebbles that keep getting stuck in a shoe. I could share plenty more, from the time a cheerleader at a basketball game said, “Oh my goodness, somebody smells” when I passed by in my warmups—I’d forgotten to wear deodorant—to the time my dad attempted to order papaya juice at a Chili’s in front of my friends, which (to my mind) brought shame on my entire family. Why on earth do I still remember that papaya juice, when so many of my most important memories have gone hazy?

When you finally leave adolescence behind, you realize that embarrassment is not the worst thing in the world—not even close. But those minor, irrational humiliations never feel minor or irrational at the time. Maybe that’s why we all maintain our own unique adolescent blooper reels, full of public and private missteps that we somehow can’t forget.

***

I’d be lying if I said that eighth grade was one long string of embarrassment. There were so many moments of joy, genuine friendship, discovery. But adolescence created a large gulf between my private enthusiasms with my friends and my boring, risk-averse public self. That gulf hadn’t existed in childhood. Kids don’t hide their enthusiasms.

For me, the Age of Embarrassment lasted a long time, maybe even through college. (Is that late? When was it supposed to end?) And traces of that stage are still with me now. I still embarrass myself pretty much once a week. I still have regular bouts of self-consciousness. More and more, though, I feel unembarrassed about the little things that might’ve shamed my younger self. I’m the one ordering the papaya juice at Chili’s. (Metaphorically speaking—I would never actually order papaya juice at Chili’s.) That’s one of the consolations of adulthood: every subsequent decade makes us a little less sensitive to embarrassment.

I aspire to be an unembarrassed old man. My granddad, J. Ray, would talk to anyone and everyone, and as an adolescent witnessing this I’d sometimes cringe at the awkwardness of his random conversations with strangers. But I don’t think he ever cringed at himself.

I have this memory of going to dinner with him when I was in my twenties. We were at a crowded restaurant on a Friday night, sitting at a booth, and J. Ray suddenly reached out past the booth and grabbed the arm of a guy that was walking by. He’d grabbed it pretty hard, and the guy looked shocked. My granddad smiled and said, “What are you doing over here?”

The guy, looking more confused than shocked now, said, “I’m…eating dinner.”

My granddad, still smiling, said, “I thought you’d be over there at…” and named some other place and some other people.

The confused guy said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking bout. Who do you think I am?”

My granddad, not smiling quite as big anymore, said a person’s name, and the guy said, “That’s not me.”

This is the point where I would say, “I’m so sorry! I thought you were someone else!” and then, after they quickly walked away, I’d feel like crawling underneath the booth for the next ten or fifteen minutes.

But my granddad just said, “Well, what’s your name then?”

And the guy told him. And they shook hands. And then they talked for like ten more minutes at our table! My granddad asked the guy questions, learned about him, what he does, what part of town he lives in, etc. And then my granddad responded by sharing whatever associations he could make with this information. By the end of the conversation, the guy was laughing and telling my granddad nice to meet you like he really meant it. They were new friends.

Only later, after my granddad was no longer around, did I realize that this was a beautiful and exemplary J. Ray moment. And I realized that I wanted to be like that, too, the kind of person whose friendliness and curiosity and genuine enjoyment of people completely drowns out his awkwardness detector. (Although it’s possible that J. Ray was born without that detector, the way some people are born without wisdom teeth.)

Still, we can’t just tell ourselves to be a J. Ray. I’ve tried—it’s not so easy. Most of us retain some of our eighth grade selves well past eighth grade, no matter how well we might hide it. We still carry around some of the old adolescent insecurities, the desire to be accepted and included, the fear of embarrassing ourselves by saying or doing the wrong thing. The only difference is that, if we’re lucky, these feelings don’t dominate our consciousness anymore. And that’s a huge relief.

If we can’t be J. Ray, we can still aspire to be a little less like our eighth-grade selves and a little more like our eight year-old selves, putting on a show in our pajamas, doing our impressions, joyfully unembarrassed. And when that doesn’t work, and we find ourselves reeling from some recent humiliation, there’s always that other option: we can turn it into a story.

1. I’ve struggled with what word to use here. To me, poot implies a smell (i.e. “Who pooted?”). Mine was more sound than smell. And fart is too adolescent. This was second grade, man.

2. In retrospect, I feel bad for the bee, who was just flying around, minding their own business, and then died in my mouth. But at the time I could only think about what the bee did to me.

3. My younger brother remembers this moment vividly, too. He claims that our mom told him he couldn’t have even a single popsicle, because he hadn’t been stung in the mouth by a bee. The mother character in his story doesn’t sound like our mother.

4. I’d grown so fast that my spine got all out of whack. In 8th grade, after I suddenly found myself unable to stand up during basketball practice, a doctor diagnosed me with spondylolysis. He told me I might never be able to play sports again, which made me cry, since I mistakenly assumed I had a great deal of athletic potential. But I only ended up being away from the team for a couple weeks, and soon enough I was back to missing layups like I’d never left. Except now I had a back brace under my jersey that I could use as a convenient excuse.

5. I had another golf-related humiliation in 8th grade. My friend Adam asked me to be his caddie in a junior golf tournament. During the tournament, he would sometimes toss me his golfball for me to clean off with a towel. So when a ball came rolling my direction on one of the final holes, I picked it up and toweled it off. Then I realized everyone was staring at me. And then I realized that Adam had just putted and I’d picked up his ball as it rolled toward the hole. He was assessed a two-shot penalty. Many people laughed at me that day, including several strangers.