the art of being cringey

life is too short

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) directed by Shūji Terayama

Last year, an insufferable presence took shape in a white girl in my high school Spanish class. This girl with skin pale as a cliché, with a rehearsed smile and that unmistakable air of someone who has never been embarrassed a day in her life because she’s never risked much. It seemed she made it her mission to quell my enthusiasm wherever it dared to emerge. I’d say something I found funny—she’d glance at me with a raised eyebrow and mutter, “It’s not that funny.” I’d let loose on a tangent about a book, a film, a vision of mine, and I’d catch her lips curling into those two simple, mind-numbing words: “That’s embarrassing.” She had a gift for it, a way of turning phrases like “calm down” and “no one cares” into weapons of repression.

What struck me most, though, was the dullness of her own existence. Her ambitions seemed to consist of Snapchat streaks and Instagram scrolls alone. If you asked her what she was interested in, she’d shrug, maybe mumble something about “going out,” as if her personality itself has shrunk into the empty bottle of her drunk Friday nights. It wasn’t that she lacked interests, but rather that she wore her lack like a badge, as though there was merit in reducing oneself to the baseline of human experience.

There are people like her, who cling to the stale and accepted lines of decorum. They are the ones who fidget uncomfortably at any expression of fervour, eyeing you with a cocktail of condescension when your laughter crescendos a bit too freely, or when your arms wave with the erratic joy of telling someone something that means something. You can usually find them hanging back, observing with faint smiles that curl with the smug satisfaction of remaining above it all, as if emotion or passion were markers of some inferior being as if life were an exercise in being nonchalant.

Embarrassment, when you dissect it, is a little more than a mirage of the mind. It exists not in the act of feeling or expressing oneself but in the imagined judgements we assign to others, in the narratives we write about how we might look, sound or seem. We project this onto the world and feel our confidence cave, as if everyone else’s perceptions were both microscope and mirror. In reality, people are far too distracted with their own lives to be the careful record-keepers we make them out to be. The “cringe” we fear exists more in our own heads than in theirs. Embarrassment is a state we choose to live in, a barbed wire fence that only we can choose to cut through.

Living freely, though, demands the shedding of that invented weight. To be free is to exist outside the perpetual self-policing, the silent running monologue that edits before we speak and warns before we laugh. Free people know that shame is a secondhand emotion—it is only there when you believe someone else’s opinion should matter more than your own. Every time we suppress joy, or mute ourselves to fit in, it is because we have allowed someone else’s imagined thoughts to guide our actions. We’ve chosen to shrink because we’re convinced they’re watching. But here’s the thing: they rarely are. Most of us are caught up in our own dramas that we do not have the time to notice, and if someone is spending their time on others, they’re jobless.

To live free is to live with the knowledge that the world’s focus is fleeting, and to stop waiting for others to hand over permission to be ourselves. What if we removed the “what will they think?” and instead centred on “what do I want to do?” What if we let ourselves fully engage with each moment, allowing our passion to be as visible as our bodies, our laughter as loud as our voices can make it? To live free, without embarrassment, is a daily act of courage, a commitment to honouring the odd and enthusiastic parts of ourselves without an apology. Every time we do this, we reclaim a part of ourselves that was buried under all that hesitation, and in doing so, we chip away at the mental prison of shame, little by little, until there is nothing left of it.

Life is too short. It is a melancholic hush fluttering behind every silent encounter, a pulse throbbing in every vein. Life is painfully short, painfully brief, and all the worse for those who would have us use that brevity to shrink. To them, “cringey” is the gravest sin; it’s stepping out of line, daring to let people know you care. Being embarrassed is a cage we willingly walk into, then marvel at our own confinement.

What they don’t tell you, what that white girl in my Spanish class last year likely still doesn’t know, is that the art of being cringey, letting your weirdness or passion spill forth unfiltered, is a kind of freedom few can reach. It is an instance of taking up space and saying, “Yes, I care, yes I feel, yes, I am here.” When I think back on high school, on the years spent trying not to be “weird,” trying to hover just within the bounds of acceptability, I think of all that I shrank into, all the words I never spoke, the laughter I kept small, the interests I buried in quiet until they scarcely seemed like interests at all. And for what? To be liked by classmates who would forget my name as soon as summer break began? To impress teachers who stood by, cataloguing my story, and passion in the dull museum of their minds? I shrank and was still judged.

If I have one truth now, it is this—life is too short to silence yourself, your passionate voice for the sake of those who would find your happiness and dreams embarrassing. So when they tell me, “That is so embarrassing,” my answer is a simple one—So what?

So what if I love out loud? So what if my interests are as strange and specific as they are vast? So what if I choose, every day, to risk being seen and heard rather than waste myself on empty words and pointless nights? Let them laugh. Let them roll their eyes. Let them mutter “cringe,” “weird” and “calm down.” For when you have tried to live small and failed, when you have tasted what it is to shrink your spirit and still stand judged, there is nothing left but to live as boldly, as unashamedly, as one possibly can.

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“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.” — Audre Lorde