“It’s not cringe to try hard, guys, it’s not.” These words, spoken by a recent graduate on a panel on the media industry, coalesced something for me that I had long suspected but struggled to articulate.
It’s easy to get caught up in other people’s opinions of you. Particularly as newly fledged young adults taking on independence for the first time, it feels only natural to curate the experience of ‘you’ to the tastes of those you find yourself with. Black Mirror may be a dystopian nightmare version of reality, but the reason the idea of social capital is so freaky is because of how close to real it seems like it could be. We don’t have numbers floating above our heads, but the feeling of “everyone must know” is familiar.
That fear of shame is something I struggled with for a long time, every time I spoke up first, risked making a mistake, did something silly. “It’s not cringe to try hard,” but if that’s true, why is everyone looking at me like that? Why can’t I shake off the uncomfortable, prickling heat of a blush?
One of the main lessons that has come to me over the years is that when the source of embarrassment is our imagined reality of what people think of us, it actually fades pretty quickly, however intense it may feel in the moment. “It’s not cringe to try hard,” and the embarrassment of speaking up in class is gone in a moment.
Late at night, when I’m trying to sleep and the spectres of cringes past revisit me, I can silence their howling with a parallel mode of thought – what about all the times that I thought I was being cringe that resulted in something good? “It’s not cringe to try hard”, and sometimes, something brilliant will come of it.
I think about all (there really are a lot) the times I have asked a question in class and received, in a conspiratorial whisper, the feedback “I’m so glad you asked that, I was really confused.” If the price of doing business is a moment of pink-faced embarrassment, the payoff is worth it every time. Or the times I’ve volunteered an answer that was incorrect and received a clarifying explanation that has helped greatly.
I think about the time dedicated to perfecting pieces of work, articles written, the times I’ve said ‘not tonight, I’ve got to work on something, I’m trying to get this done’. The momentary flicker of shame at putting in effort pales in comparison to the results. Good marks in assignments, paid writing gigs, a prestigious fellowship, Best Culture Writer in the UK at the Student Publication Association Awards. “It’s not cringe to try hard.”
I think about being the only person dancing at a wedding, by myself on the floor. A brief realisation that everyone else had sat down or gone to the bar, a pang of oh god there’s no-one else here I should sit down that lasts only as long as it takes a friend to join in, or for the next song to start, a wedding classic, and all that’s left is the joy of celebration.
Embarrassment and shame are very real emotions that can catch us unaware at moments where they really don’t deserve to be. It’s not cringe to try hard, and even if it feels like it is in the moment, lean into it, move through the cringe – there could be something brilliant waiting on the other side.
Featured Image by Alice Pollard
Student journalist & freelance writer. Check out Quick Play, where I review video games that are 10 hours or less.
