I heard this expression once, “I’m not who I think I am. Nor
am I who you think I am. But I am who I
think you think I am.”
I had to read it repeatedly to even understand what
it meant! The meaning became clear to me but not until I suffered this
expression myself!
I said something incredibly stupid to someone, stupid enough
to make me want to cringe at the very thought of it! And if I could somehow
have the proverbial “chullu bhar pani” (a handful of water) I would have gladly
drowned in it! The more I thought about it, the more my face turned a nasty
shade of pink! I apologized repeatedly to that person, as if doing so would rid
me of my embarrassment. And the apology addict that I am, I kept apologizing at
every given opportunity! “Just one more apology and I’ll be ok” I would think.
But I didn’t feel good at all. Far from that, I felt worse!
Theoretically, if I could stop myself from revisiting my
past, and try and stay in the present moment, I would probably not feel
embarrassed, because what I said belonged to my past. It belonged to a
different time and place. Practically though, it was impossible to disassociate
oneself like that!
And apologizing kept taking me back to my past. That was a
vicious cycle I was getting myself into!
As I tried to rid myself of these feelings, I realized that
most of the times, we base our identity on what we think, other people think
about us. We assume that people are reacting to our embarrassing act in a way
that they may or may not be. And so we base our reaction to our perception of
what we guess their reaction may be.
That is a lot of needless guesswork!!
Embarrassment belongs to the disorder known as
perfectionism. Think about it. You are embarrassed because you didn’t live up
to your standards. That tiny little gap between your expectations of yourself
and your performance caused that embarrassment. The fear of being perceived in
a way that is less endearing than we would like it to be.
No one’s perfect anyway!
