To truly be free in life is to have complete freedom to do what YOU want to do, not what you think others want you to do. Many people go through life not even realizing that the everyday decisions that they make, like the clothes that they wear or the music they listen to, could be influenced by how they want others to perceive them. People spend so much time thinking about what other people will think of how they look or act that it can be easy to lose who you truly are.
In one of my favourite shows, Gilmore Girls Season 6, Episode 13, the main character’s grandfather Richard Gilmore told Rory that “anger is a useless emotion Rory, a waste of time.” This got me thinking— is there really such a thing as a useless emotion, and was anger one of them? This statement had me contemplating this idea, and I came to the conclusion that the only useless emotion humans feel on a day to day is embarrassment.
Don’t get me wrong— there is a time and a place for embarrassment, like when you’ve done something really wrong. However, I have noticed that people tend to take incidents from their lives and feel like they need to be ashamed about how they acted just because they didn’t fit in the box of how they want others to perceive them. Despite someone feeling embarrassed about a small instance or detail in their life, could they just choose to accept it and not feel embarrassed at all? Is embarrassment a useless emotion?
Think about this: are people really thinking about us as much as we think they are? Do small details about our styles and tastes really affect how someone perceives us, or are they too busy analyzing every action of their own life and every detail of their personality to worry about what you are doing?
It’s easier said than done to just let embarrassment go. It is natural as humans to want others to like us, and when we think we did something to taint our image that others have of us, it is naturally going to stay stuck in our thoughts for a while. But when this feeling enters our thoughts, it might be for the best that we realize that even if someone thinks something of us that we don’t like, does that really matter? What would happen if we just chose to ignore it and went on with our lives? The reality is: nothing would happen, because we may not control how the people view us, but we can choose how we view ourselves!
As long as our actions are not hurting other people, and we feel proud of ourselves overall, it doesn’t truly matter what we do. How does someone thinking we acted a little weird, too loud, too quiet or even did something out of the ordinary affect us at all? In reality, it doesn’t change your life in the slightest. For my final thoughts on this matter, I want to leave you with instructions to take that embarrassment, anxiety or overthinking of a social interaction and just let it go – because the truth is, this embarrassment is a useless emotion.