Day Ten: Embarrass yourself!

So today’s prompt is:

[Day 10]: What is your most embarrassing moment?

and as is the case when anyone asks me this question, I freeze up and have a huge brain fail because I cannot recall my most embarrassing moment. It’s not like I haven’t had thousands of embarrassing moments, I just can’t recall them when I need to and when I don’t need to remember them – they sneak up on me and surprise me. Thanks for that, brain! So what am I left with? The time I had one too many Sangria drinks in Spain, or the Attitude Adjusters that altered my state of mind in Venice? Or do I go with every first day of semester when I have to introduce myself to a whole new group of people and my face turns bright red with embarrassment?

To be quite honest, I can’t nail down one particular memory because there are far too many of them and like I said, my brain saves those memories for the moments where I really don’t need to be thinking of cringe-worthy things that I’ve done. So instead of talking about a particular memory, I’m going to try and talk about these embarrassing moments in general.

Throughout my life, there have been moments that have been varying degrees of embarrassing. The moments where you want to cringe or the moments where you just want to hide under a rock and never emerge. When I was 4 or 5, I remember being at a friends house and being so scared to use their bathroom because I was scared of my friends older brother, that it resulted in a very wet accident. I can assure you there was nothing sinister going on, people just scare me. That was one of the times you just never want to think about but occasionally pops into your head just to screw with you a bit. There are also those times that were alcohol induced but you can still remember them as clear as day and it doesn’t help that there is photographic evidence, those moments are especially devilish because even though you can blame it on the alcohol, there’s still no escaping that it was you and you really did dance on a table for fun.

 

Oh look, I’ve already managed to rattle off two embarrassing stories for you. But like I keep saying, embarrassing moments are just that not necessarily because of how cringe worthy they are when you are in the moment, no, they are so frustrating because they tend to stick with you and that back of your mind, waiting for the right moment where you shouldn’t be thinking about them, and they just pop into yours mind. Like during job interviews, while your watching a movie or while your in the middle of a very serious situation.

Job Interviewer: “So Kerri, Why should we hire you”

Kerri’s mind: “OK PEOPLE, Play that movie of when Kerri crashed her ex-boyfriends car”

Kerri: “…*turns bright red and then starts to cringe*…”

That really did happen by the way, well not the interview, although there have been times where I have been sitting outside waiting to go in for an interview and something hilariously inappropriate enters my mind. But the car thing, really did happen.

Unfortunately right now, I can’t think of any more specific moments in my life where something has been super embarrassing, although I do know they exist and I do know they will pop up at the worst possibly time. The worst part about these memories is that they are very hard to get rid of, they are always going to be there and I’m always going to cringe when I remember them. Although some of them are hilarious, for people like me, the constant reminder of those moments is enough to make us cry and as that painful memory replays itself in our heads, we wish we could do anything to make it go away and to go back in time and relive the moment differently. But I guess at the end of the day, that’s life, embarrassing moments and all! Some are hilarious, some make us cringe and some make us want to run and hide, but they are just one more piece of evidence that we live lives that aren’t written out perfectly for us, we take each step and we enter each moment differently and sometimes those steps give us good memories, sometimes those steps give us bad memories and then all the other times get left in the “embarrassing moments” box waiting like a jack-in-the-box to be let out when we “need” them the most.

Day Two: Six-Word Memoirs

Hello, Hello! Well it’s day two of the 15 day challenge and todays prompt is all about writing memoirs, short ones, 6 words to be exact. I didn’t know how I was going to do mine, I mean 6 words is really hard to work with! But then I saw Suze at Suze Blog at I really liked the way she set hers out. She came up with milestones or eras within her life and used them as a starting point to create the 6 word memoir. So because I think it’s such a great idea, I’m going to follow her lead and go with a similar method.

Childhood: Daydream Believing: adventure and magical hideaways.

Teenager: Pain, Anger and Truth with Lies.

20Something: Learning from the past; moving forward.

 

To go one step further, I’m going to explain my choice of words and why I feel they describe those decades in my life. First and foremost, the fun that was my child hood! I was a bit of a dreaming when I was younger, I was the type that believed in magical beings, fairies and other such things. I use to believe the characters in my books were real and there was a world of adventure I was missing out on. When I was living in New Zealand, our area use to flood a lot and I thought that I could be like Christopher Robin (but a girl) and turn an umbrella upside down and sit in it like a boat and it would take me away to some place amazing (clearly didn’t understand the concept of what floats and what sinks!) But my point is, I was one of those creepy kids that live in some imaginative world in their head because that’s just how they are.

As a teenager, I wasn’t exactly the poster child for perfection. I was really angry, I was sad, I was a jumble of emotions and while I realise it was my teen years and I’m not the only one to experience hardship in my life, I’m just well aware that all that pent up frustration I had and the animosity I had toward my parents and my family was part of the reason I made bad choices and basically led a life of self-destruction. I wasn’t a terrible teenager but I did make bad choices and if I could go back again and do it all over again OR if I could go back and tell my 15 year old self what she’s doing wrong, I would make it abundantly clear that I’m stronger than the choices I make, I don’t need to be impressing anyone else or fighting for the attention of my parents, I just need to find my own courage and make the choices I know are right.

 

And clearly my 20something memoir is fairly self-explanatory. I’m smarter these days and I’ve made plenty of mistakes in the past that I know what I need to learn and what I need to change in order to shape the future I want. The past is the past and there isn’t anything I can do about it to change it, I made my mistakes and whether or not the choices I made back then were right or wrong, I can’t change them; all I can do is look to the future and realise that the mistakes of my past are what gave my strength in the present.