My Embarrassment
On shame spirals, pride masquerading as humility, and the cringe-y but radical act of sending yourself love
I slept just fine a few nights ago… until I didn’t. I slept great until my brain thought it would be fun to remind me of something embarrassing from the day before. It then played the situation over and over. Kind of like those looping videos where someone stumbles and their dress gets caught in their underwear and it resets every four seconds and somehow gets funnier each time.
Except I was the one stumbling. And also somehow the one filming it. And the one playing it on a loop. And the one watching it. And it was 3 a.m. And not funny.
Normally I would just lie there frustratingly awake for a couple of hours -- unable to look away from my most recent personal blooper reel -until it became obvious that the most logical solution would be to move to another city where I could start over with a new identity.
Like an emotional witness protection program.
As someone with a “big personality” who blurts things out and later regrets them—someone prone to a Ready-Fire-Aim approach to life—I am not unfamiliar with a solid 3 a.m. perseveration on my gaffes.
But a few nights ago, something different happened.
I hesitate to say it was a nudging from The Spirit, because that always feels perilously close to spiritual self-flattery. And we all know how the “God told me” thing can go very sideways. But I say it may have been a God thing mostly because… it did not feel like me.
In fact, it felt like the kind of thing I would usually mock.
Here’s what happened:
Every time my brain tried to replay the embarrassing thing, instead of sitting down with a tub of popcorn and watching it again—nodding gravely and pricing out moving trucks—I said one word:
“Love.”
That’s it.
When the scene tried to start again, I said, “Love.”
I pictured surrounding my caught-in-a-loop, wish-I’d-done-it-differently self with love. I sent myself love.
I am love. I give love. I need love. I receive love.
Most of what I do in this life, I do out of love. And yes, I mess things up. I blurt things out. I do things I later wish I had done differently.
But love is stronger than all that. Is it not? I mean, if we don’t believe that, what the hell are we even doing? And for maybe the first time in my life, I actually sent some of it to myself and it doesn’t feel forced or facile.
But reader, my tiny prayer-this little mantra, this visualization of surrounding my mortified self with love….worked.
I even, and trust me when I say this is NOT NORMAL FOR ME – I even went back to sleep.
It’s hard to write that I “surrounded myself with love” because this is exactly the kind of thing that usually makes me cringe. You don’t have to look far these days to find someone pawning off benign narcissism as a virtue, or suggesting that the height of “wellness” is to be exclusively self-concerned.
But maybe sending myself love when I feel embarrassed has anything to do with ego.
Maybe it is the opposite because the ego wants me to feel special. And it’s indiscriminate—it’s perfectly happy feeling better than others or worse than others. Either will do. Superiority and shame are just two sides of the same coin. Both keep me at the center.
Once, when I was beating myself up over a mistake, my sister asked why I was being so harsh when I preach grace for other people all the time.
“Because I should know better,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied, “then that’s not humility, baby. That’s just pride.”
That one still stings. Because she’s right.
To have compassion for myself - to send love to myself the way I would to a struggling friend, or a disregulated child … to haltingly place my hand on my own heart and say, “It’s okay, little sister”… that’s not about thinking I’m better than or worse than anyone.
It’s about admitting I am simply a member of the class of people who stumble and are still worthy of love and compassion.
No better.
No worse.
Just human.
And I guess that’s just all of us, isn’t it?
I feel like this post was a combination of my two most common sign-offs:
Be gentle with yourselves,
AND
In it with you,
Nadia
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Shame and superiority—two sides of the same coin. That really hits home!
“As someone with a “big personality” who blurts things out and later regrets them—someone prone to a Ready-Fire-Aim approach to life”
This made me laugh out loud! I am soooo with you on this one, Nadia!! My husband passed away earlier this month unexpectedly. My way to deal w/ hide from a lot of things is humor. Some of the things I said during those first days left some people wide-eyed and wondering about my stability. When I met w/ my financial guys, I COULD NOt wrap my head around one of the legal pieces we needed to go through…I understood everything else. But there have been multiple nights where I laid awake beating myself up and being embarrassed over things I said while grief/adrenaline fueled and about my confusion around legal processes. Until one night I finally understood I get to give myself grace too, just like I do for others. There’s not one way to grieve. I get to do it my way - regardless of how it looks and feels to others. And I GET to ask my financial people over and over again if I don’t understand something. THEY’RE the experts - not me. I pay them to talk to me in language I can understand 🤣 “So there!!” I thought w/ a sassy smirk, and went back to sleep:)