If it’s embarrassing, then it’s important

I was having a conversation a while ago with some friends about how we all have things we’d rather not admit to, because we feel they’re embarrassing. Things that ”expose” us as not being the way we want people to think we are or the way we tell ourselves we want to be.

They are proof that we don’t practice what we preach, of our double standards, or that we let the wishes or values of others dictate what we do. So we discussed what embarrassing secrets each of us had and compared. This is a selection of things that we, as perfectly ordinary women, felt embarrassed about admitting to others and sometimes even to ourselves:

Someone was jealous of a certain cathegory of person and was feeling terribly sorry for herself because she isn’t like that. And felt that it was really ridiculous because she has a lot of other things going for her and feeling sorry for herself isn’t helping.

Someone else felt that she was too superficial, because she is really an intelligent woman with great depth who should rise above such things.

Yet another one found it hard to admit, even to herself, that she is in a certain way, and felt that it was embarrassing that she couldn’t just embrace it, because what does it really matter?

Another woman had such performance anxiety that she would completely freeze everytime something needed doing, and very little would ever get done because she was too busy worrying about it not being good enough. She thought it was silly.

One wanted to leave her job and go back to school, but was hesitating because she didn’t want to loose the prestige that comes with her current job -and was embarrassed that she’s letting such a thing as prestige affect her choice.

Someone wanted to work fewer hours because she was always too tired to do anything meaningful on her time off, and believed that her boss would allow her to, but still didn’t ask to get a reduction in the hours because ”you’re supposed to be a good and productive person and also be grateful that you have a fulltime job.”

And so on…

What we talked about was that though we would rather ignore our little ”weaknesses” and the parts of us that don’t quite resonate with the kind of persons we would like to be, we can learn something from them. If we stop being cowards and start examining them more closely instead of trying to push them out of our minds, we can find clues to how we can develop and grow as persons, and live life more fully.

These things can be the starting point of much needed change, because they are things that are important and matter to us -if they weren’t, we wouldn’t care enough to be so embarrassed about them!