Embarrassed about Being Embarrassed

Maybe it was a bridge with no shoulder in rush-hour traffic. Maybe it was an asphalt downhill, patched with loose gravel. Maybe it was a yellow light on a busy urban street. Whatever it was, it was sketchy. I had to decide if it was worth the risk.

I really don’t remember what it was, but I remember this: My top-of-the-mind reaction was odd. It wasn’t, If I do this, I might get hurt. It wasn’t. I could die. The fear at the top-of-my-mind at that moment was, It would be really embarrassing if I died doing something stupid.

What a strange word: embarrass. It comes from the French, embarrasser, to hamper or perplex. A tangle of driftwood below the surface of a river, low enough to be unseen, but high enough to gouge the hull of a boat is called an embarassment.

I don’t know how or when embarrassment got infected by shame. In the modern world, to be embarrassed is akin to being dishonored, but dishonor is a more serious business. It’s a moral failing. Embarrassment is something else. It’s a feeling of exposure. If dishonor is closer to the bone, embarrassment is closer to the stomach.

Back in the 90s, a friend of mine used to have fits whenever someone died on Mount Denali. When I thought this avid mountaineer would express sadness and pity for the victim, he would express rage. He’d find out whatever the victim did wrong, and bellow: “F-ing Idiot!

Thinking about it now, I suspect the rage was performative. I think he thought shame was a tool for safety. Adventurers don’t fear physical danger the way the rest of us do. Maybe he thought ego fear would be a better deterrent than physical fear—both for himself, and for whomever listened to his rant.

Those tirades had an effect on me. I really don’t want to do stupid decisions to embarrass me or my memory.

But there’s another thread to pull here. Maybe we humans use embarrassment as a protective layer against more substantial fears—fears that are too uncomfortable to talk about. Embarrassment is easier to contemplate than physical harm, just as desecrating the flag is easier to argue about than desecrating the Constitution.

Maybe humans invented embarrassment, because it’s easier to navigate.

Embarrassment is more map than territory: a bloodless two-dimensional simulacrum of a three-dimensional world.

Except: I don’t think the analogy works. Embarrassment is not a map of an experience. It’s a layer of experience. A map is divorced from the territory it represents in a way that embarrassment isn’t. When you poke a map, the territory doesn’t flinch. When you feel embarrassed, your stomach aches.

Embarrassment is cultural. It’s cultural in the same sense that a home-cooked meal is cultural. You are feeding your body with carbs and proteins, but the joy of a home-cooked meal is a layer above that. It’s taste, memory, ritual, tradition: culture.

Culture grows on a layer above the immediate senses. Culture is the layer that connects us. It’s what changes my joy or pain to our joy or pain. Religion is also cultural, but some religions give us tools to temporarily drop away from culture. Some forms of prayer or meditation are all about turning down the volume on cultural layers of our lives. “Living in the now” means burrowing down to the moment unmediated by external narratives, expectations, emotions.

The hope is that when we return to the cultural moment after our thoughts and prayers, we’ll return with more clarity, more energy. The danger is that we won’t want to return, that we’ll want to stay living the high rather than actively participating in the shared world.

That would be embarrassing.