It started with a crush. We met at a book launch and drank martinis, our knees touching under the table in the corner of a dim bar. They were charming. “You’re charming,” I told them. They were also tall, with beautiful hair, eyes that seemed to collect everything and an impassive face that gave nothing away. This attitude of reserve made me crave their attention. I read their horoscope, jabbered about them to my friends and wrote bad, moony poetry. If I sound obsessed, I was.
Obsession made me a little careless. One afternoon, I wrote a text to my friend Stewart, a complaint that ran on for many chat bubbles. “[My crush] is treating me the way I treat men and I want to go on the record that it’s annoying,” I wrote. I explained that they seemed flattered by my adoration, but didn’t make much of an effort to reciprocate it. I ended with a boast I would swiftly regret: “Like, what about me? I am still super hot.”
But I hadn’t texted Stewart — and by the time I noticed my mistake, it was too late. I had sent the messages to my crush instead. That’s when my cheeks started to burn; mortification saturated my body. I was in my living room, alone, but I hid my face behind my hands. I wondered if I was going to throw up.
If embarrassment were a sport, I would have a shot at the majors. At 10, I wept in gymnastics class after falling off the balance beam. Whenever I cried, which was often, my coach would ask, “Is everything all right at home?” Things at home were fine, but the conditions inside my head were not. I had an excoriating sense of perfectionism and took every failure as evidence that I was an inferior sort of person. I compensated by becoming an anxious overachiever, insulating myself against embarrassment and failure.
In my final year of college, I enrolled in a workshop taught by one of my idols, a celebrated poet and classicist. That semester I wrote with unaccustomed vulnerability. I wrote about trying to decipher my own sexuality and feeling embarrassed about the things I liked. By the end of the term, however, I convinced myself that my professor would dismiss my writing as confessional and unserious. I was so anxious about imaginary judgment that I sacrificed the chance to learn. She may have offered encouragement or even freed me from my self-critical rut. I’ll never know. I never picked up my essays, along with her notes, from her office mailbox. For the next decade I wrote almost nothing at all.
Writing felt fraught, risky even, like touching a hot stove. I avoided it, and anything else that required self-exposure. Instead I worked as a graphic designer, beautifying other people’s words in magazine layouts. I kept my feelings to myself and my friends at arm’s length. Then a few years ago, as New York emerged from Covid lockdown, something shifted. Perhaps those long months of fear and isolation altered my perception of risk, or getting older had earned me a little more grit. What if I didn’t have to be good? I wondered. What did I really have to lose?
“When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you,” Nora Ephron once said. “But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.” For Ephron, any experience, no matter how silly or tragic, was grist for the mill. The artists I admired rarely lived smooth lives. I didn’t want one, either. I wanted to slip, struggle, punch above my weight. More than anything, I wanted something to write about, and embarrassment is the rich soil from which so many of the best stories grow. It isn’t only useful to writers; the stories of your own foibles make for great gossip, juicy yet victimless. I imagined a dinner party, not so far into the future: The lights are low and the last of the wine has been tipped into cups. I turn to my friends and announce, “You’ll never believe what happened to me.”
Embarrassment can also be our guide, revealing not just our sore spots but our passions, the gaps that separate who we are from who we want to be. I joined a writing workshop, then another, then started one of my own. I befriended poets whose work I loved and asked for their feedback on mine, first through gritted teeth, then, increasingly, with ease. Some became trusted readers and true friends. We shared first drafts and manuscripts, family lore, stories of bad dates and our anger about the state of the world. I became less guarded with my old friends too, and those relationships bloomed. It’s only when we’re vulnerable, after all, that we allow ourselves to be known.
After the texting debacle, I messaged Stewart — for real this time. Stewart is a runner, and we go on long, chatty jaunts through the city. It’s how we became close: story by story, block by block. “Oh nooooo, babe,” he responded, then offered every flavor of reassurance, from magical thinking (maybe my crush didn’t see the texts) to minimizing (perhaps they weren’t so bad) to problem-solving (was it really too late to edit them?) and finally distraction (his daughter was excited to see me at the park tomorrow). If Stewart was judging me, he kept it to himself. I was touched.
A crush thrives on mystery. We see only the other’s best qualities, overlaid with a crazy quilt of our fantasies and desires. Friendship is another matter — it deepens as we reveal ourselves, becoming stranger, sillier, more profound. When a friend is embarrassed, we have the chance to bestow a sort of grace. “I see you,” we might say. “And I like you anyway.”
Ariela Gittlen is a poet and designer in New York.
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