Everything is embarrassing
Hey friends, it's been a while. I had too many Doritos last night. Let's talk about it.
I ate so many Doritos last night that my stomach turned against me today.
Actually, both my stomach and brain reminded me that I hate myself when I eat half a bag of Doritos at 1 am. So I threw the rest of the bag in the garbage and tried to go for a run, but then I had to go into a McDonald’s after one block to use their bathroom, so here I am at home, my stomach in knots because of the Doritos, both the mental choice and the actual digestion.
Miss Doritos has come for me before!
When I was 17 years old, in the first month of college, I ran to my friend’s dorm across campus in an effort to be fit, having spent my entire adolescence being overweight and feeling bad about it. I got to her suite, but she wasn’t there, so while I was waiting, I found a bag of Doritos and ate almost the entire thing.
This was the same girl who had said to Alison at our first lunch together a few weeks later, “I know I shouldn’t be eating pizza because I’m fat, but I don’t care, it’s not my fault that I love pizza and I love myself,” and Alison was like, “Okay, I didn’t ask, but I love that for you.”
I didn’t feel good about those Doritos, though. Or the pizza, or the rainbow cookies I stole from my own roommate’s mini-fridge when she was away. I didn’t feel good at all, and it was not until months later in a sudden and rare moment of triumph that I adjusted my lifestyle and lost 60 pounds.
Obviously, though, weight loss doesn’t solve any real problems, with the minor exceptions of doctors visits and Forever 21 dressing rooms making you feel slightly less bad about yourself than they previously did.
And so here we are, years later, ruminating on and regretting the sudden impulse to eat Doritos at 1 am.
As a kid, my dad, a lawyer, trained me out of rationalizing my own culpability in careless mistakes.
“I didn’t mean to drop the vase, it was an accident,” I’d cry, horrified and embarrassed to have done something so wrong.
“Well, of course you didn’t mean to. If you intended to drop the vase, that would be very weird.”
Desperately eating Doritos at 1am is not an accident in the definitive sense.
But there’s a gray area there, where the outcome doesn’t match the intention, and in an effort to self-soothe with a shit ton of Doritos, I gave myself a stomach ache and a day of feeling worse than I did before.
Though I like to think I’m brave, paradoxes make a personality, and embarrassment is my least-favorite emotion.
Doing something that yields regret, whether it’s eating too many Doritos or making a bitchy comment or screwing up at work, feels deeply embarrassing.
That familiar feeling came over me again last month, when I suddenly stopped publishing weekly posts through this Substack after readership dwindled. Writing another post risked further embarrassment — an opportunity for peers, colleagues, strangers, romantic interests, or friends to cringe.
Nobody wants to read this.
For those following along at home, yes, my stomach still hurts.
But I did eventually go for a run today; I’m not going to let the fear of embarrassment and failure prevent me from writing, because I’m a writer, and writers write.
And so here I am, writing into the ether that is the internet, and trying to replace those ruminations with some helpful mantras I’ve written about before.
Nothing bad is happening.
Everything is fine.
And everything is embarrassing anyway. Who cares.
Thanks for reading. I’ll talk to you soon. <3
PS I asked my mom, a writer, to preview this blog through the lens of, “Would you be embarrassed if I published this?” Reader, she said no, and then gave me some helpful feedback and edits, and then I published it. Love you, mommy.
Food issues can be so difficult.
On another note, your parents sound like a good support network :-)