Cringeworthy (ADJ): Causing feelings of acute embarrassment or awkwardness
Do you want to view the image next to cringeworthy in the dictionary?
It’s a photo of me.
… and I love it.
While watching “Inside Out 2”, I felt an extremely strong maternal instinct for Embarrassment. Maybe this was because he’s so darn cute, or because I was subconsciously trying to soothe my inner child’s fear of embarrassment.
One of my favorite things is to take the 5000-character quiz. It’s a personality quiz that spans hundreds of fandoms to give you a collective list of what characters you’re most like.
My top results, you ask? Penelope Garcia from “Criminal Minds”, Linda Belcher from “Bob’s Burgers”, Kurt Hummel from “Glee”, Chandler Bing from “Friends”, Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex and the City”, and Leonard Hofstadter from “Big Bang Theory”.
You may have whiplash from those six, my apologies.
But these characters are all unapologetically themselves, even if that may be perceived as “embarrassing”.
Some of the show’s most famous lines come from these characters! We all know the “Get it while it’s hot!”, “Everybody’s thanking, the whole world’s thanking you, thanking us, for thanking you!”, and even the “I’m hopeless and awkward and desperate for love!”.
I have had more than my fair share of embarrassing moments in my time here on this planet. One of my favorite stories to tell about myself is when my pants fell down in kindergarten in front of my whole bus. Everyone in my life has heard this story AT LEAST once.
I don’t want my dear readers to think things are never embarrassing, or I’m saying I never feel embarrassed. I do. All the time. I can consciously recognize when something I say or do is cringeworthy.
To allow little Leah some peace and solace from that all-consuming feeling of shame and turning beet red, I have learned to bask in the embarrassment. When I was younger, I grew up with an older brother six years older than me as my only sibling. You know what that means? I was never exempt from teasing. I was chased around with a Golem action figure that still haunts me to this day. I was pranked beyond belief… and I hated it. I was the kid who could not handle teasing. Period. I was the big baby who couldn’t take a joke. The buzzkill. I now know that my brother teased me to tell me he loved me in the way that a 10, 12, 14, and 16-year-old boy does.
Today, I am lucky enough to live in a house where we all know the teasing of each other’s embarrassing moments is a sign that we love each other as well.
My roommate Ellie loves to take sneaky videos of me and post them to her TikTok (the one of me sleeping with the caption Dr. Pepper Museum blew up, so you’re welcome, Ellie). Though this is a joke point of contention between me and Ellie, I love that she finds me funny enough to post these, and they are for sure hilarious (everyone go check out my Swaggy Lee cosplay on Ellie’s TikTok).
I love to be embarrassing because it serves as a signal to myself that I have grown up and into my own skin enough to laugh at myself and let other people laugh at me. I can’t wait until the day I have my own embarrassing line that follows me around because I know there is no possible way to spell embarrassing without me!