Everything is so embarrassing

Everything has been embarrassing lately so I wrote a bit on my notes app about how everything got to be so embarrassing. By the way I don’t mention the notes app to seem quirky and relatable like, oh, I’m such a silly girl I can’t be bothered to write on Google docs like others I just have to use the notes app on my iPhone. I mean notes app in that, it’s 28 degrees outside at the time of writing (a warm temperature) and I haven’t been outside for a longer period of time than ten minutes since November and I am simply too tired and exhausted to open my computer.

People on Substack are Embarrassing

The first thing that has been embarrassing me is that I’ve been trying to use Twitter less because it basically one-shotted my cognition and attention span over the 8 years I’ve used it heavily as it probably has yours (though it did introduce some fun terms to my vocabulary like one-shotted, thank you famous Landshark tweet) and so I’ve been looking at Substack more and the Substack feed. Not even on purpose I just have to use my phone for 8 hours a day no matter what. I have essentially admitted to myself that I will never fully log off twitter because there are some pros though I can’t really think of them right now, I have met some friends and acquaintances I like on there, it helps me feel connected to a broader cultural zeitgeist (lol embarrassing), it’s good for meeting people for someone who is honestly shy like myself (embarrassing), other things of this nature. I will get into how embarrassing Twitter is later but Substack feed is crazy because it will be the dumbest most asinine blog post from some rando and someone will have “quoted” it (the substack equivalent of quote tweeting) and be like this is the most profound thing I have ever read I need to get it tattooed on my cerebral cortex. Um…not really? My thing is, if your essay took you less than a week to write I don’t really want to read it. I don’t think it’s very profound. If your essay took less than two weeks to write it’s probably not very profound. Idk, maybe you’re a genius and I’m stupid (quite possible). But why am I constantly being barraged by the most insipid, surface-level short-form analysis bereft of any original thought or honestly, effort, and have to listen to someone call it super profound? It’s not profound. It’s tired and embarrassing to think that something someone essentially vomited on a page which took them an insignificant amount of time to create and published instantaneously is going to be the most interesting and important thing ever. It’s fine to do that (I’m doing it now) but stop pretending like it’s going to change my life if I read your blog post. I’ve never read a blog post that changed my life to be honest. Maybe when I was 14 and on tumblr a blog post would be capable of changing my life. I’m sorry because this makes me such a hater and this doesn’t apply to any of my friends or people I think are smart. I know time is a finite resource and everyone has a lot of jobs and responsibilities besides one’s blog but I am begging people to stop publishing everything and become intentional about the things they say and write and are making me read. It’s so much chicer to write like 4 times a year or 4 times in your life, like Donna Tartt. This is extremely related to my profound embarrassment about posting a lot on twitter because nobody really needs to know all of that. Or it’s not even about writing or publishing a lot but acting like some one-off blog post someone wrote in 3 hours is a life-changing piece of literature. No it’s literally not. You are embarrassing me.

Not Posting Ever is Embarrassing but in a Different Way

Not posting ever is cool and I wish I could do it. It’s mysterious and indicates you have a life. I am mysterious (Scorpio) but I don’t have a life, so I can’t do this. Or I do have a life, but it’s honestly pretty hard and not fun a lot of the time, so posting makes this better (posting through it as some say). Posting is hard because once you start it’s hard to stop. I imagine maybe once you stop it’s hard to start. Posting begets more posting, which is my main problem with twitter, because once I share one stupid thought that doesn’t matter at all I’m like here’s another and another. I want everyone to be in my head with me sharing all my thoughts. I have to stop doing this because it’s so embarrassing and has created a digital footprint that honestly could impede my ability to be employed by the government in the future so I had to private my twitter indefinitely. It’s not even that I say anything that bad but my future government job does not need to know about my IUD. Neither does anyone honestly, but sometimes putting thoughts outside your own head makes you feel better. It’s normal. This is why I don’t get the non-posters because it’s like, don’t you have terrible horrible thoughts and feelings you have to exorcise onto the Internet? I’ve heard pretty much my whole life from doctors family members ex friends and ex boyfriends that I have a unique psychological profile so I can’t really expect everyone to act in the same dysfunctional ways as me but my question to the non posters is what are you so embarrassed about.

Being a Person on Social Media is So Embarrassing

Being a person on social media is so embarrassing. I feel like someone wrote this about Instagram once which I forgot to read and I don’t even have Instagram but it’s like yeah, so embarrassing. Taking a selfie is sooo embarrassing. Yeah I look like this. And now I’m uploading how I look to see if you like it. Being a pretty girl is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to admit you’re pretty and embarrassing to act like you’re not pretty. It’s embarrassing to not know honestly how pretty you really are. It’s totally acceptable that you might not be pretty to some people which is fine, but people really hate it when a woman is at all aware of her appearance and the effect it has on men because they would prefer a woman to be hapless and coltlike and like what???? I’m not pretty you’re the first person to ever tell me that. It’s honestly super annoying and even more than that embarrassing when a kind of medium attractive (refusing to say mid because I don’t believe in that) woman acts like she’s super beautiful so I try to avoid any self-congratulatory statements about my looks in case anyone thinks I’m mid. Which is fine. It’s not embarrassing to be mid. It’s literally normal. But back to selfies I hate them and hate taking them. I already know that I’m less beautiful than I was when I was younger and I still haven’t found lasting love so whoever ends up loving me forever is going to have to be ok with the fact that I’m uglier now than I used to be which is embarrassing for them. Also it’s so embarrassing when a guy responds to your selfie or even more than that starts interacting with you more after you post one. But back to being pretty it’s embarrassing because I’ve come to the conclusion that you still suffer a lot as a woman even if you are extremely beautiful. Also a lot of the super hot girls I know or know of are honestly kind of dumb. Which is not their fault, it’s literally the societal impact of being super hot. And it doesn’t matter how pretty you are because a guy will still cheat on you (there are many famous examples of this happening throughout history). So yeah, being beautiful is embarrassing but so is being ugly. Being on social media is particularly embarrassing because it means you are considering yourself a lot. What about me. Me me me me me.

Texting a guy is embarrassing

I recently texted my friend Benin “I regret every talking stage I’ve ever had im like I should have been working on my career.” Texting a guy is embarrassing because it’s like, I need to update my CV and LinkedIn. You don’t need to even text that much to have sex. Not that many texts need to be sent! I resent guys who I will never speak to again for the time I spend texting them when I should have been working on my oeuvre or again updating my CV. I resent texting courtship because I have a lot of things to do every day. But you have to do it. I resent texting in general but again have to do it because I don’t want my friends to think I hate them. I don’t hate anyone even guys I will never speak to again. It’s embarrassing to never speak to someone again because it’s like we care this much that we’re intentionally not speaking for our whole lives but sometimes it happens. This is about embarrassment, not resentment, but I resent all men for the specific offenses of a few specific men and then I resent those men for making me resent all men so much I can’t form relationships with any of them normally. I just watched Contempt which helped me work through these unprocessed feelings of rage and made me realize I need to chill. However the thing about men is they are never thinking about women as much as women are about men— they’re probably working on their CV. Or like, taking apart computer parts and putting them back together differently. I honestly don’t know what goes on with them because I only start paying attention to the weird stuff they are constantly doing after it’s already too late, hindsight being twenty twenty and everything. But to my point, no man has ever allowed a relationship problem to derail their professional endeavors as much as a woman because they are simply able to metabolize negative emotions and grief easier by compartmentalizing things and subsuming them into their subconscious¹ whereas a woman will walk around feeling like an open wound or just carry a deep pit of grief unrelated to anything in their body until it slowly begins to kill them (I think this is a plot of a movie² I saw once). Plenty of women these days have mastered malebrained emotional regulation which is sort of required of us by the culture but they are the type of women who scare me and are kind of mean. As such,³ if you’re a girl reading this and you’re crashing out over a guy you need to realize it doesn’t matter and work on your career because a guy will be climbing the professional ladder regardless. A guy will probably use his feelings about the breakup to further his career by writing songs or a short film about it or allowing the unresolved feelings to drive him in his professional endeavors, imagine that. You need to subsume your desire for male attention and validation into getting really good at something or into buying the same stock portfolio as Nancy Pelosi, so you can accumulate enough wealth to the point where you can have a husband and a zoomer boyfriend like Nicole Kidman in the aspirational movie Babygirl⁴. Anyway it’s not embarrassing to feel sad about a breakup, that’s normal, but it is embarrassing to spend time “dating” when you know that time would be better spent elsewhere in your life and you’re only doing so as a distraction from yourself. I don’t even mean to be prescriptive here because what do I know. I just know it feels deeply embarrassing to put time and energy into something, maybe even years, and you have nothing to show for it and they maybe even hate you. And I know I will probably do this several more times in my life. But such is everything. I have to pay so many more sets of taxes in my life too⁵. It’s honestly whatever. I recently wrote in a draft of something I didn’t publish, “It’s more failing that I’m afraid of, than falling out of love.” Failing feels bad but it’s important to do, just like having sex or dying. The thing all of these things have in common though is that they are embarrassing.

Trying is embarrassing

Trying is embarrassing because it means I care. Caring is embarrassing because it means I will be disappointed when I don’t get what I want. Caring is creepy, also. This is from the Shins album Oh, Inverted World which contains one of my favorite songs in the universe since I was 12 or 13 New Slang, an aside about me, the Author, in case you didn’t think I was revealing enough⁶. Trying is so embarrassing and I’ve let my fear of trying prevent me from doing so many things which is almost worse than if I had actually tried. I wonder if I would write more if I had the potential positive reinforcement of more publications publishing my work but I am so afraid of failure that I barely submit anything (and so, barely receive rejections, which is good because I don’t like rejection). I wonder about all of the things I have probably missed out on for lack of trying. It’s possible that I am not really very good, but who is good at anything if they don’t try? But again, the embarrassment. And the creepiness of people knowing you want things. I don’t want anyone to know I want anything, even though I spend a lot of time wanting, all day, every day.

Families

Families are embarrassing. I feel like I’ve covered a lot of things in this post including culture, literature, art, love, sex, and death so now I will cover the family. It’s embarrassing especially if you have the type of family where you can’t really honestly explain how things operate to others because they would be troubled and look at you weird. Attachment theory⁷ is embarrassing because it’s fake but also not fake, in an embarrassing way. It’s like, you’re telling me I will never be able to experience love because my mom didn’t hold me enough as an infant because I had colic and wouldn’t stop crying? It’s embarrassing to engage in psychological dramas with people in other parts of your life to heal the damage of your relationship with your family members only to realize you’ve just recreated the original dynamic only with poor unsuspecting people who have no idea what it’s like to come from a family like yours. It’s embarrassing that going to therapy to talk about your fucked up horrible miserable family helps but it does. When people make fun of therapy I always wonder if they’ve ever had any really bad things happen where the only option is to go talk to a stranger about these things in an office or on Zoom. Therapy is embarrassing, but sometimes not going to therapy is even more embarrassing. This is how I feel about the climbing gym or like, AA. Yes it’s embarrassing to do these things but what is the alternative. It’s embarrassing to say my little sayings and get my coins but slowly poisoning myself to death would be way more embarrassing so I choose the former option. Being alive is really embarrassing but being dead is even more embarrassing.

Airpods

Airpods is embarrassing because it’s like not only am I broke and passé, but I’m also listening to music. Enjoying things is embarrassing. Music is embarrassing, especially the type I listen to. Recently I had to tell a guy at a bar who was talking to me about some extremely niche BBC radio alt music talkshow from the 1990s that I like Tate McRae because it was the only musical artist that came to mind. He agreed that she’s hot in an extremely Calgary way. Airpods are embarrassing but it’s like, yeah I’m broke and I’m not going to spend money on dumb giant over-the-ear headphones when I don’t even fw music like that. It’s honestly ok. I feel like the only person who thinks music is just fine and I’ve never had the inclination to play an instrument or make music besides when I played the violin when I was like 11. Movies however I like a lot. I wish I could have a less embarrassing hobby but that’s just the way things panned out. I don’t know how to end this so am going to send off with an Everything But The Girl song that I was listening to earlier that makes me feel embarrassed but good as well. Also a song from TikTok that I find really embarrassing but also amazing. The duality of music (embarrassing, good, embarrassing, bad).

Eternal return is embarrassing

Eternal return⁸ is embarrassing because you’re telling me everything that happened already happened and will continue to happen forever? What the hell.

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I don’t know why I have to live within a register of intense shame and concealment of myself or exposure of the worst parts of myself, why everyone does. I think we are just living through an embarrassing/embarrassed affect, and maybe it will pass. I always think about the intense well of anger and hatred I reserve for other people (not in any specific sense, just generally) and know it’s about the even greater well of anger and hatred I reserve for myself, which saddens me because there’s no reason for this and it also means I’m thinking about myself too much. The precondition for existence right now feels like an intense scrutiny and consideration of one’s self constantly that is naturally also extended outwards in violent and destructive ways— I see this the most on social media which is why I have to take extended breaks from time to time. I also think sometimes people couch their hatred of the whole world in “criticism” or “cultural criticism” and it’s like actually, you just seem to hate the whole world which seems very hard and painful for you. This reminds me of the only post that has ever mattered to me in any real way.

I don’t know if the culture could be healed by all of us returning to love⁹, because what if I return to love and you don’t and that’s embarrassing for me. It’s like when in elementary school you would tell someone who you like and you would both say it on 3. 1, 2, 3. I think a lot of what I talked about specifically problematizes the digital self (which I don’t really feel like getting into right now). And it’s also increasingly inseparable from the actual self, a never-ending feedback loop wherein we subsume the internet into our selves and vice versa, a process I have been unwittingly taking part in for around 12 years (I’m 25, so sorry). The unmediated real self is not embarrassing, but the online one is. Looking into someone’s eyes across a table Marina Abramović style¹⁰ is not embarrassing, but looking through a screen is. I’ve been hating everything, everything that could have been. Could have been my anything, now everything’s embarrassing.

1. I always confuse the subconscious and unconscious mind, one of my flaws

2. Maybe Melancholia?

3. Practicing the use of this fake phrase please let me know what you guys think

4. It’s good even though it’s A24

5. Double taxes this year because I reside and work in a country that is not the country I am a citizen of, in case you thought your life was bad

6. I was because I tend to reveal too much, generally

7. One of my new “things” is explaining that the attachment theory industrial complex as promulgated on TikTok is actually an Israeli psyop which I know because I read Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find— and Keep— Love, a theory which has unfortunately reinforced my tendency to avoid closeness at all costs and do everything within my power to prevent it from happening to me

8. Black Hair by Alex G is another song

9. Williamson, Marianne. A Return to Love. HarperCollins, 1996.

10. the face and the body, voice, eyes, gesture, a Giorgio Agamben text I haven’t read yet. versus the digital face, body, voice (authorial), self. Is there even semiosis in social media? My semiotic analysis of social media here integrating ideas of gesture and physical presence probably doesn’t hold up at all but I don’t feel like doing any outside research or thinking very deeply at all. I’ve committed to the form!