<\/p>\n
If you’re anything like me, you probably handle humiliation by fleeing the scene, crawling into bed under the cover of darkness, and not showing your face in public for the next three to five years. And that’s normal! Well, okay, not normal<\/i>, but you’re hardly the first person to \u00a0suffer some sort of embarrassment and think, “TAKE ME, DEATH. I’M READY.”<\/p>\n
As someone who humiliates herself roughly six times every day before 10 AM, I’m here to walk you through the process of handling humiliation without wondering if there’s a place in hell for people like you, because there’s not and you’re going to be fine. Let’s do this.<\/p>\n
Accept \u00a0that you’re going to embarrass yourself, in some form or fashion, EVENTUALLY.<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ve embarrassed myself once or twice in my time, which is to say I’ve got a whole cache of embarrassing stories that \u00a0my scumbag brain likes to save for conversational lulls on first dates. But humiliation (much like death, or looking at Chris Evans’ glistening abs<\/a> and crying) is just a part of life. There are socially acceptable ways to behave in public, like when you’re eating corndogs at a theme park. When we deviate from those behaviors and commit a faux pas, like when you’re \u00a0vomiting corndogs on screaming children mid-rollercoaster, we tend to get embarrassed. \u00a0Our cheeks flush, our heart \u00a0races, and we deduce that we are no longer welcome in polite society. It’s just something that happens, and it happens to all of us. It’s happened to Chris Evans, glistening abs be damned.<\/p>\n Realize that nobody is thinking about the humiliation nearly as much as you are.<\/strong><\/p>\n We are all, essentially, narcissistic trash goblins drowning in our own self-awareness. I \u00a0don’t think this notion really hit home \u00a0for me until I saw a friend of mine flub \u00a0a conversation with her co-worker. She and I \u00a0laughed it off when the \u00a0co-worker left, but fifteen minutes later she said, still visibly embarrassed, “God, I can’t believe I said that!” It took me a hot second, awash as I was in my own magnificent ego, before I realized what she meant. \u00a0I was thinking about what I was going to have for dinner that night, despite the fact that we were literally in the process of eating lunch; her embarrassment could not have been further from my mind. Your moment of personal mortification may seem \u00a0<\/em>huge and significant \u00a0and like the moon landing of our time. But rest assured\u2014it was merely a blip on everyone else’s radar.<\/p>\n Give yourself the same amount of slack you’d give somebody else<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n When you \u00a0see someone \u00a0else commit a heinous social blunder, do you \u00a0store the memory in your brain and hold it against them forever? Of course you don’t. If I saw someone \u00a0erupt with corndog vomit at a theme park, and another person was still giving them a hard time about it five years later, I’d think that person was \u00a0a total \u00a0bully who needed to be barfed on \u00a0immediately.<\/p>\n Science says humiliation can actually make people like you more.<\/strong><\/p>\n Provided you didn’t accidentally set someone’s cat \u00a0on fire or drop a baby into a bucketful of sharks, there’s a phenomenon in social psychology called the Pratfall Effect<\/a>. It states that when competent people screw up, it actually makes them \u00a0more likable and attractive. I’ve decided to say that the corndog thing was strategic rather than horrifying; I was trying to be more attractive.<\/p>\n Laugh it off, or at least acknowledge it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes you can find humor in humiliation, but sometimes you haven’t yet lived far enough beyond the incident to laugh about it. That’s okay. Just acknowledging the thing\u2014”Well, that was embarrassing”\u2014is cathartic and helps relieve a little bit of the discomfort.<\/p>\n HUMILIATION IS UNIVERSAL. I CAN’T STRESS THIS \u00a0ENOUGH.<\/strong><\/p>\n Allow me to reiterate: everyone from Jennifer Lawrence (Oscars tumble<\/a>) to President Obama (messed \u00a0up the Oath of Office, TWICE) \u00a0has been embarrassed. Nobody is tallying up the amount of minor to major transgressions you commit over the course of your lifetime. There will be a voice in your brain saying, “Remember that time you did this horrible, awful thing in front of everybody<\/em>? Yikes. It would really suck if we re-lived that thing right now and \u00a0EXAGGERATED EVERY SINGLE DETAIL.” Tell that voice to shut the hell up; literally think or say the words “It’s okay to make mistakes,” then repeat it, because this goes a long way in rewiring your anxious brain’s auto-negativity response. On the surface, you may recognize that dwelling on humiliation is silly, but that doesn’t stop your brain from chanting, “BE PERFECT OR DIE! BE PERFECT OR DIE!” over and over again. Look, there’s no shame in making mistakes, no matter how dumb and humiliating. And you are not lesser for having made them.<\/p>\n The takeaway here? You’re allowed to mess up. You’re allowed to be \u00a0embarrassed. You’re allowed to barf on a bunch of schoolchildren on their field trip to the theme park. Like, I wouldn’t recommend it or anything, but you’re allowed to, I guess. No one can stop you, really.<\/p>\n Have you ever embarrassed yourself? HAHA, RHETORICAL QUESTION. How did you handle it? Did you \u00a0employ Chelsea Dagger’s notorious BARF acronym<\/a>? \u00a0How much sobbing was there? \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’re anything like me, you probably handle humiliation by fleeing the scene, crawling into bed under the cover of darkness, and not showing your face in public for the next three to five years. continue reading<\/span>