As kids, the varying levels of embarrassment come to us in different forms. My brother loves to recount the story of my encounter with McDonald’s one day when I ordered my food, arrived back to the van to discover that I had forgotten to add fries to the order. However, the horrific mortification of returning inside to order AGAIN was too much for me. “I’ll give you an extra dollar,” I offered to my overly confident, capitalistic brother. “If you purchase the fries.”
In retrospect, my low self-confidence as a kid seems rather ordinary. All teens go through this “everything is embarrassing” phase, right? I’ve heard the laughter of adults over the red-faced teen who caught him/herself in woeful blunder, or at times, a strictly imagined one. “They’ll get over it in time,” they nod, believing that time and age mercifully erases many of the heart-stopping embarrassments that afflict our late childhood and teen years.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
My Voice In Pen 