What is Embarrassment?
Well...
“An embarrassed mind thinks their fart echoed across the mountains.”
— Lirzod Basha, Shambala Sect.
Embarrassment is closely related to the societal reaction that stems from one's insecurity and awkwardness levels. For example, if you slip on a banana peel when you’re alone, you don’t feel much embarrassed at all, but if the same thing happened in front of others, then you’ll feel embarrassed to an extent. If you aren’t much of an insecure person, though, then you shamelessly fart in public and not bat an eye about it. You get the point.
Embarrassment can either be a positive or negative emotion. For instance, if you compliment someone in public, they’ll blush out of embarrassment, which is a positive experience with a little awkwardness added in there. Sometimes it also helps ground a person.
Embarrassment can also be negative when you make a fool out of yourself or fail to meet the societal standards. Lack of social support can lead to chronic mental issues; for example, every teenage friend group has someone among them who constantly gets teased or bullied verbally by others, and this may lead to developing an inferiority complex and what not.
Embarrassment can be thought of as a social bugger. It can bug you both positively and negatively. In the professional field, beginners often face this, but that doesn’t mean the masters are exempt from this, either, and the masters feel extremely embarrassed because such incidents completely complement their position. It can result from your own failures or of others. For example, if your colleague farts in a conference meeting, the buddy next to him might also feel embarrassed while others laugh it off.
Mild embarrassment can result in short and simple reactions such as smiling or just saying: Oops. However, embarrassment can quickly escalate into social anxiety or guilt or shame or frustration, or hatred depending on the context where you’ve committed the error. (If you want to know more about guilt/shame, then check the relevant post.) Unless you have a grudge against others, embarrassment is generally self-centric i.e., you overthink your embarrassing moments but don’t bother much about those of others.
All in all, embarrassment is predominantly shown through reaction. It paints one’s facial expression, sings through their voice, or shows through their body language either subtly or vividly, and so on and so forth. All of this happens, when things don’t go your way, and you end up constantly embarrassing yourself, which for all I know, is probably the last thing anyone would want to experience.
Like with any emotion, adults are better at handling/hiding their embarrassment compared to innocent people like children.
Below are some rife embarrassing moments. How many did you fall prey to out of all these?
- Falling off stairs/chair
- Farting in class
- Throwing up on someone else
- Mistakenly getting into another car
- Your friends bring ‘it’ up every five minutes just to worsen your day some more
- Your child(or maybe even you) wets a hotel bed
- Taking jokes seriously
- Stomach making noises when it shouldn’t
- Talking about someone else(maybe your boss at work), unaware that they’re right behind you
- You hit a tree or a wall in public
- You know people are gossiping about you, and you can’t stop it
- Singing out loud thinking no one was around
The fact is, all of us have dealt with something embarrassing in our lives, so let’s try and not be embarrassed while reading the following examples.
- Blocking face from view with your hands
- Covering/hiding face in the hands (This is different from above because you are tilting your head down in this case)
- Wiping your face with the hand(not with a towel or kerchief because this bodily reaction often happens spontaneously)
- Putting a finger in the mouth (of course, slight biting ensues)
- Putting multiple fingers or tips of both hands in the mouth (only if the jaw turned loose enough)
- Blushing (can’t help it)
- Awkward laughter (putting hands on the mouth or nose to cover your laughter, touching glasses, etc)
- Awkward smile through the eyes (generally comes when your eyes are not settled i.e, not looking straight. So you’re either looking sideways or above etc)
- Stretching your mouth wide open with corners at least slightly tilted down
- One side of the lower lip goes down while the corner of that mouth is slightly elevated, and subtle stress folds on your eyebrows when you look at others
- Saying exaggerated stuff (wanna throw yourself off a cliff, want to dig a hole and hide, hate yourself, smash your head into the door or a brick wall, cry in a corner, etc)
- Slapping yourself
- You ball your eyes out, especially when things don’t go your way in quick succession (this is all the more the case with sensitive people)
- To some, it’s a natural reaction, but to some others, it’s a death sentence
- Face turned beet red with...
- Stuttering/voice cracking
- Voice/breathing gets choked
- Biting lips or folding them inside(into the mouth)
- Lips shivering
- Crying (yes, some people do)
- The neck goes out of control (looks everywhere except into other’s eyes)
- Head heats up (maybe steam comes from it?)
- A sense of discomfort (internally)
- Thinking about the embarrassing incident(probably when alone and sitting in an unusual place for you like a windowsill or rooftop)
- Trying to distract yourself from the pain of being so embarrassed
- Stomach growls so loud people think you farted
- She felt like digging herself a hole to hide
- Mortified to see
- Avoiding eye contact (when you don’t feel guilty or ashamed)
- You look them in the eye (when you feel guilty or ashamed and so you’ll look at them to see how they’re reacting)
This is just a preview of 30 examples.
The main document expounds the emotion extensively.
The full list of over 110 examples is available on Patreon.
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