Hexagram 34 > Hexagram 23
Or: The Great Equalizer of Looking Bad
Embarrassment is a bit of a death.
Maybe we can say the cosmic joke is dying and being reborn, again and again, to face that same fate of being bare beneath the Eden we were bolted out of. It's kind of like Prometheus having his liver eaten, day after day, a punishment in perpetuity.
Werner Erhard said "looking good owns your life."
Ain't that the truth.
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Everyone gets humiliated, unless your identity is cloaked by a name like HermeticSkunk83. But at the same time, no one is immune from being shit-talked by some guy on Reddit named OrangeIndulgentPorpoise.
I was once a wayward kid being rationed out the feeling of power by getting under the skin of others in internet chat rooms. One of my many misguided missteps, made to manage the feeling of not being able to control the feelings of fruitlessness I was facing on my own after friends started moving out of the neighborhood that seemed to include friendship automatically. As if it was some kind of N64 bundle pack.
There was a mourning of those relocated friends, despite the fact that some of them hit me in the face with a rock, or saw me get my ass beat with my own Sugar Ray Leonard gloves. It's funny how the mind works, or works us.
But then I was on my own, listening to .ram files of DMX yelling "I'm not a nice person." Evolving into a child that had uncontrollable laughter upon hearing a classmate stutter in a freshman Biology class, and regretting that impulse that was natural but undesired.
Sometimes, the best you can do is letting your future self down.
The boomerang of retribution comes back around, though. Like facing major depression, social anxiety, and sitting soiled in a cab with enough evidence that I would need later to stop ingesting wheat.
Or carving up both my neck and a shoulder I leaned on. Or coveting relationships more than my self-respect. Or having a crooked spine and teeth to match the path I placed my feet on.
I say that to say: embarrassment is a sort of birthmark, different for each of us. Some wounds almost make us trip, and fall inside, as they swallow us up. Some never make it out of them until they make that final wound.
And once you start to recognize the augmented reality mistakes that generate above your head in the mirror, you realize that being a 'recovering not-nice person' is about as good as we can do.
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With that small sampling of reasons to feel that Jay-Z's "Regrets" is forever relevant established, I want to talk about any practical thing we can really do to contend with embarrassment, and looking bad.
There's no bullet here that doesn't require you holding the casing and walking up to the target to put it in the problem by hand. It all takes effort, but what follows is my best idea on how to handle it.
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1) Reframing The Cognitive Dissonance
I wrote a whole post about this that I'll just link to instead of repeating myself. But there's a couple of other things I'll add:
1A) One way to deal with looking bad is to think about your opps nestling against in their pillow at bedtime, with their nightcap on, smiling ear-to-ear about you being upset. That can sometimes be enough to think about the problem in a more practical, and personally helpful way for yourself.
1B) Try the trade/choice question.
Would you trade your peace of mind mind for the favorable opinions of others?
Would you trade your relationship, family, hobbies, for looking good in the eyes of *them*?
Questions like these are designed to get you thinking about how much of your arm you're willing to chop off to 'look good'. And to make you wonder if that's too steep a sacrifice to actually make for people that probably don't have your best interest at heart anyway.
1C) Another little visualization-based tool I use is seeing the tape that each of us is running.
Think about a VHS-like tape being put into your opposition that turns them into a windup toy, dishing out harm to you. And you being affected is a tape entering the back of your head allowing you to play the victim, and feel powerless.
By externalizing those seemingly uncontrollable emotions, and seeing them as something happening as a choice, that can also be ejected from your person, it can snap you out of your automatic behaviors.
You start to realize that you didn't actually sign a contract handing out your self-confidence to your personal Satan.
While the Practical Pathetic Syllogism in the post I linked to might be the best bet to grapple with these feelings, hopefully those two thought exercises help, too.
2) The Considerate And Fair Approach
2A) Conscious Consumption of Content
You give CPR to the content you click. Do you want it to breathe and take in new life, or do you want it to decay?
What you view online, because of ads, analytics, and tracking, multiplies.
Outlets, writers, and 'content creators' are incentivized to seek out more clicks and it often comes from others misfortune.
If you read internet comments on sports news you'll see just how needlessly vicious humans become when a buffer of bits exists between them and the world.
Our media supply is injected with new documents of misfortune daily. Garmonbozia in the form of hastily made crime documentaries, serial killers, reality stars pursuing fame at the expense of optics.
Ask yourself if it's making your life any better. Though a simple prompt for that kind of self reflection is enough to spawn attacks fueled by defense if placed in front of the right eyeballs, I'm not judging.
I just hope we all ask ourselves if the return on these things is actually worth it.
2B) The Others' Shoes
Ask yourself would I want this headline or tweet to exist if the main character was swapped out for my brother, sister, mother, or father? What about yourself?
Everyone's being embarrassed, we just have varying levels of information about it. Some only try to see it in others to sustain schadenfreude, but there will likely be at least one event where you're showing your ass among other humans.
It's a good thing to keep in mind when we're passing judgement based on a sometimes self-motivated headline, or four paragraph story.
The most powerful people are not immune to having their resemblance likened to an unlikable cartoon character, or having their flaws carved up with cutting words in a character limit constrained typing box. But of course, neither are we.
2C) Hexagram 4.6
Hexagram 4.6 of the I Ching is something I sum up as 'don't be harmed, and don't harm others'.
Essentially, don't make anyone else look bad, but if they aggress against you, I understand if you're forced to defend yourself.
But hopefully it doesn't come to that point.
3) A Magical Approach
Peter Carroll, one of the originators of 'Chaos Magic' had the idea of retroactive sigils.
Basically, you have an intention that involves time that has seemingly already passed and been decided, in hopes of altering the present and future.
I've written about the creation of sigils, if you're unfamiliar, but I'll give you some sigil intention examples for how this might work:
- I eliminated all regret over embarrassment by the age of 7
- I made amends for all future mistakes at an early age
- I was always a positive influence on the lives of others since childhood
Or you can be more specific:
- I was never embarrassed for having uncool clothes as a kid
It seems silly, especially if you've never seen anything that can be construed as a magic result, but it's funny what's possible with both the mind, and time: two things we still don't have a complete handle on.
If you're skeptical, see it as a Hail Mary in a society of pessimism. Or just ignore this part of the post
Final Thoughts
Retroactive embarrassment is a sign that the pencil marks on the wall above your head have gotten a little bit higher over time.
That you've grown.
And if you have that recognition, one of the best things you can do for your fellow humans, is allow others the grace to grow into the place you presently occupy.
At the end of the day, it's important to remember that we all use toilet paper.
We'd all look bad under the right set of eyes at the right (or maybe wrong) time.
But it's the price of admission.