“Embarrassing moments”?

I wouldn’t be surprised if all sorts of bad memories are popping into your head as you read this week’s title. All sorts of different words are used to describe these moments. Some people call them blunders, flops or moments of foolishness and stupidity. My favourite, though, is moemish of the week or moemish of the month. Even though we may use different words, there’s one thing that never changes when one thinks about them: they are moments we try to escape as quick as possible.

When you’ve fallen down the stairs, for example, you don’t want anyone to see it happen, right?

Well, that’s just how I’ve felt each and every time something embarrassing has happened to me. And believe me when I tell you, my life always has a moemish waiting for it around the corner.

We can go back to a thirteen-year-old version of me, way back in 2005, for example. It was the first time that I was getting real attention from an older girl and let’s just say I made it into a BIG deal. Everybody in my circle of friends, and even in my class, knew that she was the girl of my dreams. I wrote her three love letters and four poems even though it should’ve been obvious to me that she wasn’t interested. I even made her a wooden cup with a huge heart painted on the side and I bought her chocolate on Valentines Day. Unfortunately, though, I saw her the next day, sharing a kiss with an older boy behind the toilets. My heart dropped to my shoes. The worst part is that my whole class saw the kiss and I was laughed at for the next two weeks.

Next, comes a moment the following year in Grade 9. I allowed myself to get pressured into making a move on a girl I was convinced would like me. I went up to her, trying to look as confident as possible even though my legs were barely holding me up. After telling her how I felt about her, I asked if she felt the same and that’s when she dropped words that haunted me for the next six months.

“Let’s just be friends,” she said.

Her response was in simple words, but it still crushed my confidence. I felt completely rejected. To make matters worse, the next time I saw her I literally tried to run away. The guy who had convinced me to go after her kept pulling me towards her just to ‘man up’ and say hi, but I just refused. It was like a scene where a mother is leaving her son behind on the first day of school, but the kid refuses to let his mommy leave him, so he holds on to her leg and hopes she’ll change her mind.

These are only two examples out of the many times when I’ve been embarrassed. When I look back at these moments now, they’re not embarrassing anymore; they’re actually funny, in fact. I appreciate these kinds of moments for teaching me something important about life: NOT everything in life is in our control. Basically, every time we leave our houses, we run the risk of tripping on something and falling on our faces or saying something stupid in front of people and getting laughed at for an entire week.

But does that mean that life is over and that we should just stay in our bedrooms and not leave our houses?

The answer is pretty simple. No.

The moment you pick yourself up after falling on your face and the moment you recover from being laughed at by an entire room of people, are the moments you know you’re living life.

#ChatBack: So tell me what some of your most embarrassing moments are.

And how did going through that embarrassment make you feel?

But most importantly, how do you feel about those moments now?

Congratulations to ALLY- winner of this blog’s best comment:

I stil laugh when i think of my blunder moments but the one that sticks out is in gr.9 Where i fell inlove with the school hotey we started talking and hanging out and made it obvious to the entire school we were a couple and then during a school asembly my dad rocks up @school to fetch our house keys and he spots me and my bf siting cosy i was freakin out thinking o.m.w im dead but then dear old dad saz the folowing infront of the entire school ”oh how nice to see u and youre COUZIN have met i didnt know u stil knew each other” and thats when i passd out i swore tht day never to date before finding out if im related to the guy.