I used to be terrified of embarrassment. In my teens and 20s, mortifying situations became the rocket fuel for my late-night insomnia. They would be replayed on a loop by a brain that could not get over the awkwardness of my own actions, making me go blisteringly red in the face and dying a little inside.
In my early 20s, I remember standing in the baggage claim of Dublin Airport after getting off a long flight from South Africa. My first port of call was the bathroom to freshen up while I waited for the bags to come through. I used the facilities, took my time, and splashed some water on my face, before casually strolling over to the baggage belt to wait with my family. I had been standing there for what felt like a good 15 minutes before a lady tapped me on the shoulder. I sort of rolled my eyes and turned around thinking ‘shur lookit you can’t go through the airport without meeting someone you know,’ only to find I didn’t recognise her. I looked at her for a moment, puzzled that I couldn’t place her. Then she leaned in and whispered to me very slowly that she was sorry to tell me, but my skirt was tucked into my knickers. I turned a shade of red that probably only exists on the surface of the sun and nearly hopped on the next flight out of the country to flee the shame.
Occasionally, it still gets played as part of my brain’s highly curated embarrassing moments reel and I cringe a little inside. However, if the same thing happened to me today, I’d probably laugh it off a lot more quickly and feel far less mortified. I might even take a bow and simply reclaim the moment as my own laugh instead of everyone else’s. It’s a mantra I took on board from the late, great Norah Ephron whose mother instilled in her that “everything is copy”. Even the things you perceive as huge, embarrassing dramas in your life have the potential to be turned into something useful.
More than anything, though, becoming a mum has been the ultimate game-changer, not just for my outlook on life in general, but especially when confronting my own fear of mortification. Until then, life’s little embarrassments exposed my vulnerabilities and made me feel seen in a way I didn’t normally like. From the get-go, however, motherhood got me up close and personal with bodily embarrassment in a way I couldn’t run from.
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Be it giving birth with my legs in the stirrups in a room full of strangers or losing control of all my bodily functions during labour, it drastically rewrote my feelings on what I found embarrassing. Things like going out to the supermarket pushing my newborn in his pram, with a huge post-baby winding session vomit stain down the back of my jumper that looked like a seagull had sat on my shoulder and done his business. Or that time I answered the door to the postman with one side of my nursing bra still down, unknowingly flashing the poor man and only realising what I’d done at the next feed. My sense of embarrassment went out the window along with my sleep.
No matter how much you think the whole world is watching you, they probably aren’t
All of that was nothing compared with life with toddlers, which humbled me far beyond the bodily. Toddlers may appear small and cute, but their complete lack of filter or fear of embarrassment is nothing short of liberating. Whether it’s them asking very loudly why you’ve got a hairy bum in the stall of a public bathroom or commenting about random people’s bellies or lack of hair in the queue at the supermarket, you could say parenting a toddler is the ultimate crash course in embarrassment. It wasn’t always easy, but I’ve come out all the better for it – more confident, even.
These days, I truly believe that a little embarrassment every now and then is good for us all. It allows us to be less self-conscious, to laugh at ourselves a little more, and know that we probably won’t go into cardiac arrest from mortification. Because the thing is, we all make fools of ourselves sometimes and that’s okay. Texting the person you’re bitching about, instead of the person you’re bitching to. Tripping up in public. Having autocorrect badly misconstrue your words before you get a chance to change them and send them off to the boss or an important client. Thinking a bottle of wine on a table at an event was for the whole table and filling your glass up like it’s going out of style, only to realise it was purchased by the woman at the end of the table for just her and her friend. Well, maybe that last one only happened to me, but you get the idea. We all embarrass ourselves to varying degrees every day and those little humblings are good for us in so many ways.
I was in a well-known high-street fashion retailer, a couple of months ago, trying on a few bits in the dressingroom. I decided to take a video to share online of this clothes try-on for a review no one asked for, but were getting anyway, when the curtain fell down, mid-try-on.
Twenty-year-old me would have instantly imagined Septa Unella, aka The Shame Nun from Game of Thrones, appearing and walking after me with her bell shouting “Shame, shame!” as the entire dressingroom looked mockingly at my wobbly bits. In reality, nobody batted an eyelid or even noticed. And that’s the other big thing it can be hard to get across to the self-conscious. No matter how much you think the whole world is watching you, they probably aren’t, because most of the time other people are so concerned with their own worries, insecurities, and thoughts, they aren’t looking at you or are even aware of you. That is unless you were that poor fella who slipped on the ice on the RTÉ News 15 years ago. We did in fact all see that, but I think we can all agree that he’s a bit of a legend.
