Stripping Naked

Time to go skinny dipping

A wave of embarrassment swept through me turning my face crimson and making my eyes water a bit, making my embarrassment obvious to everyone. Despite the cool breeze blowing in through the window I was sweating profusely as my computer teacher roasted me over flames of humiliation.

“I am sure you don’t even know which chapter are we studying right now,” he said mocking me. I did and the kid sitting right in front pointed at the heading of the chapter in his book to help me out, but twelve-year-old me was too arrogant and all he could think was ‘In general my scores are pretty decent, there was no need to humiliate me for one bad score.’

“I don’t” I said trying my best to sound cocky and nonchalant.

“You realize you have the lowest score in the class? You…” I blocked out the rest of it, all I could think about was how one bad test had made me look like an idiot. Back in grade seven we had had a surprise tests, my score on this one, one on ten, which like my teacher had pointed out was the lowest in the class. I was distraught by my score until my teacher had just announced my score to the whole class, now, my primary concern was the humiliation I felt.

We are all familiar hot prickly feeling of being embarrassed, when we make a fool of ourselves, fail, or our ‘dark secrets’ are exposed. The root of embarrassment is insecurity seated deep in our minds. This post is not to tell you that it is okay to have shortcomings or you are perfect the way you are, because truth be told you are not, far from it. Look around, who is? We all have probably have the equal amounts of ‘ugly’ and beautiful parts if not more. But these short comings are the reason we are a in work in progress, good news, we love progress way more than perfection. But, how should we deal with these insecurities? And, how does one dispel embarrassment?

There are three steps to it:

Stripping naked

Before you start taking off those layers, I am talking about removing the veils you have put over your fears, shortcomings, and failures in order to hide them from the world, in short, embrace vulnerability. I am not telling you to go around telling everybody about how you peed yourself laughing in class, but if it comes up or people find out, do not cast every spell to wipe off people’s memories. Jokes aside we all have embarrassing incidents, controversial opinions, and shortcomings. Instead of investing a ton of energy hiding them from people, invest that energy in changing the narrative you tell yourself. Once you stop pushing aside uncomfortable thoughts about yourself and start accepting them, once you are comfortable in your own skin, the level of embarrassment you feel will drop by several notches. The most confident people we meet don’t lack flaws, but have the courage to own them and work on them. You will also realize much of the judgement other people have is because of the influence of the negative opinion you have and that their criticism unless constructive has little value.

The plunge

Now that you have stripped, the next step is but obvious, you need to jump into the inviting cold water. What I mean is the next step is to find the root cause of the insecurity or the bad characteristic that you have. The reason I compare it to jumping into cold water is because they both are extremely uncomfortable for the most part, but get fun towards the end, also it goes well after stripping naked. The reason this is uncomfortable is because the ‘ugly’ parts of yourself that you have been turning a blind eye to suddenly become crystal clear. The moment you find the root cause you know what you need to work on, this clarity and the sense of purpose is the fun part, because at least for me the lack of confusion is a huge sigh of relief.

The cleansing

It would be a shame to jump in the cold water, but come out dirty. This part is pretty simple, but the hardest to implement. You know what the problem is, you have figured out the root cause or the driving factor, now you have to cleanse yourself of it. Some of these habits or insecurities are so deep rooted that it takes a great amount of effort and will power to get rid of them. This step is the most important because this is where most of the growth happens.

Enough reading, time to go skinny dipping!

-Sartha