Embarrassment

If I had to summarize my year abroad in one sentence, this would be it:

“I spent so much time being in hideously uncomfortable and embarrassing situations that now I am more confident and more immune to embarrassment.”

This could be restated in a more optimistic way by the more typical “Now that I've survived my year abroad, I feel like I can do anything!” They're pretty much the same thing.

Some parts of my embarrassment have been silly and unnecessary and I regret it. Sure, emotions are never logical, but if no one else understands why I was embarrassed, it was probably a less awkward situation than I thought it was. Being embarrassed about my accent is something I've struggled with these past 9 months. It is, of course, ridiculous to be embarrassed about one's accent. I'm proud to be American! And it's simply a fact of life that I started learning French at age 14 and not when I was a baby. Therefore, I have an accent, and there's no reason to be ashamed of myself when all I'm doing is studying abroad, which is pretty awesome. I think it partly comes from the curiosity that people naturally experience when they hear an accent: they often ask me where I'm from and what I'm doing in France and if I like it here. At home people probably wouldn't say anything, but I live in the Vendée which is both much less politically correct and much less diverse than California. This curiosity makes me feel like I need to explain myself every time I open my mouth in front of a stranger: “Yes, hello, I'd like fries and a burger please sorry for my accent I'm an American exchange student.” As a consequence of this awkwardness, I've always hated ordering food in restaurants, or answering the phone when I don't know who's calling, or anything else that involves talking to strangers. There's also the concern that they won't understand me, which is embarrassing for both of us. I was ordering a soda once with my host sister in a crowded bar, and the waitress didn't understand what I was saying until my host sister repeated it for her. She was horribly embarrassed and so was I.

I remember the first time I forgot to be embarrassed about my accent: It was actually more a question of forgetting I'm American than forgetting about my accent. I went to the hospital for my back coming out of place in gym, and I was talking to the doctor normally, describing what happened and answering that no, I do not take any medication and no I'm not pregnant, when he suddenly said “Wow, you speak really good French. What are you, German?” (People think I'm German all the time, because I'm blonde and I don't have such a strong accent that it's obvious.) I had actually forgotten I was American, forgotten to awkwardly explain myself and apologize for my accent, forgotten that I wasn't just like anyone else who came through the door of the ER. To his credit, he continued speaking to me normally, only pausing a second to make sure I'd understood when he used words like “anti-inflammatoire.”

Another part of my awkwardness comes from not believing in a thing I'll call the charity principle, which is just sort of a realization that everyone else is human too, with their own good intentions and insecurities. When I landed in Paris with my CIEE group from the US, we met up with some other future exchange students from other countries to be redistributed to our cities. I was put on the train to Nantes with a girl from Slovakia. I do not remember her name, but she was intimidatingly beautiful, well made-up and dressed, with designer handbag and shoes. She started out in English, in a beautifully lilting Slovakian accent – few enough grammatical mistakes that it falls into the “sexy foreign accent” category Americans have in their heads instead of the “ridiculous foreign accent” category most French people fall into. She asked if I spoke good French, and I said “sort of.” She apologized for her English and asked to switch to French, as she went to an immersion French school in Slovakia and her French was much better than her English. I agreed, but we didn't end up speaking anymore anyway. I pretended to sleep on the train, but didn't because I was nervous about meeting my host family. She listened to her iPod and stared out the window, like any beautiful, popular, normal teenage girl would.

We could've had lots to talk about, of course, just like how the 7 exchange students from the US who had met in Boston formed an immediate bond over our excitement and our fears. But we didn't, simply because she intimidated the crap out of me. I knew what I looked like in her eyes – a stupid, poorly-dressed American in sweats and a t-shirt, who spoke French less well than she did.

Maybe that was true. But on the other hand, maybe she was thinking about how it's cool that I'm American (because Europe is obsessed with American culture) and being nervous about her English. Maybe she had a neutral observation about how Americans actually do dress worse than Europeans, instead of assuming negative things about my own social skills. Maybe she didn't think any of those things at all, but was merely thinking about the year ahead of her and worrying about recognizing her host family at the train station.

My point is, I have trouble realizing that I have a right to be the way I am. Why would I be ashamed to have an accent, when I obviously have the right be the American that I am? Why would I be ashamed to simply not be into fashion, when it's not something I find interesting and I shouldn't be required to? I haven't done anything wrong, and I don't know who or what put the idea into my head since I was little that I should be ashamed of myself, but it's been pretty damn hard to get rid of. I think the blunt frankness of the French has helped, though. To give a crude example, an American farts and everyone in the room pretends it didn't happen. Shame on you, farter. A French person farts and (if it's my host sister, anyway) gives an evil cackle and pretends to wave the smell toward everyone else in the room, who groans and says “Becca! That's disgusting!” Which would you prefer? Honestly, I prefer the French. They are quite superficial in other respects including their assumption that taking care of your appearance is as necessary (and an obligation to others!) as basic hygiene, but they are less ashamed of things that are natural and shouldn't be shameful, like having an accent or farting.

But part of my awkwardness was normal. I do wish I'd been less shy at the beginning, as it took me at least 3 months to settle in and be comfortable with my host family. But that's a personality trait: I'm not a reserved person when you get to know me, but I'm extremely cautious with strangers, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Still, being shy does not have to mean being awkward. I always suffer from terrible body presence in strangers' houses – I do not know where to put myself because I'm scared of touching something they don't want me to touch. This is funny because in my own house I'm not at all like that. I tend to think it's ridiculous when people ask me if they can have a glass of water. Well, duh, the glasses are over there and the sink is over there, help yourself. Of course you can use the bathroom, it's right down the hall. Why the heck would that bother me? And yet in strangers' houses, I'm afraid to sit down in case that chair is not meant for sitting down in. What the heck, brain. Anyway, this is why having my own room was such a comfort to me at the beginning; it was the only place where I stopped thinking about what to do with my body and just let myself be.

It's also normal to be embarrassed about being the butt of jokes, which is just something that happens as an exchange student. It's not in a mean way, it's just something that happens. It tends to happen either when we make mistakes in French that are “cute,” or when we don't understand a joke that everyone else understood. Having people make fun of my accent is something that still bothers me, but that I've gotten used to. The only way I can stomach it is by pretending that we're all English speakers, and we're imitating our hilarious Spanish friend who rolls his Rs. If you hear a Spanish person say “rrrhinocerrros,” of course you're going to want to imitate it! You don't do it to remind the poor guy that he's an immigrant and different and will never sound like an American. You just do it because it sounds hilarious and awesome to roll your Rs. So when I run across the occasional person who finds it necessary to repeat everything I say with a chuckle and a fake accent, I just try to remember that it's because accents are hilarious, not because they're trying to make me feel like an outsider.

Once at a party, someone cracked a joke about not knowing what water is (because in Vendée, the most alcoholic department of France, they don't drink very much water). Everyone laughed, and I chuckled even though I hadn't understood the joke. This was way at the beginning of my stay here, by the way, and I didn't register that I knew all the words in the sentence “C'est quoi, de l'eau?” because it was a question “What's water?” and so I assumed that “deleau” must be a word that I hadn't learned yet, a word other than “de l'eau” (some water). Anyway, I shook my head confusedly. No, I didn't know what water was. And so then the jokester burst out laughing because the fact that I didn't understand was even funnier than the original joke, leaving my poor protective host brother repeating “de l'eau, water. You know, water?” trying to keep me from feeling too much the victim of everyone's hysterics. Awkward. So for things like this there's nothing you can do. You can't be perfect all the time, so there's bound to be moments where you're tired or not focused and you just completely miss the point of the joke. The best you can do is learn to laugh at yourself. Once you understand the joke, you laugh along with everyone else and say “Wow, that was a blonde moment.” See this other post for anecdotes about learning to laugh at myself.

I guess what I've been learning is that embarrassment is a horrible emotion from the inside that does very little from the outside. If someone else makes a social faux pas, you tend not to care, especially if you're American. If someone in your house is about to sit on a chair that is broken, you just tell them “Sorry, that one's broken, sit over there.” If someone is dressed oddly, you don't question it – everyone has their unique style, and every day you see goths and nerds and hippies, so why on earth would you question someone else's tastes, especially since there's no objectively right way to dress? If someone else doesn't understand a joke or is the butt of a joke, you probably don't even notice their embarrassment. We never think about the embarrassment of others unless it's a really bad situation, like, I don't know, someone peeing their pants in public. Embarrassment is one of the worst feelings you can have and yet it's not one that goes both ways, like affection or anger or other shared emotions. Therefore, if embarrassment is mostly all in your head and very little about negative social consequences, it should be possible to minimize embarrassment by convincing yourself that it doesn't exist. I do this by pretending I'm someone else. Since for some bizarre reason my brain has decided since I was very young that I am a martian and should be embarrassed about it (this is a post I will write soon, by the way. Keep your eyes peeled for “Being a Martian”), it works better just to pretend that I'm someone else. A normal person, who would have, of course, no reason whatsoever to be ashamed or awkward. So when I meet people for the first time, I pretend I'm a confident, worldly, socially competent individual named Jenna. It works pretty well, except when I see my reflection in shiny surfaces and remember that I'm actually me. (Moral of the story? Shiny things are bad.)

So in case after three pages of me talking about embarrassment you haven't figured it out yet, I have some issues with social anxiety. I am not intrinsically embarrassing, and don't sit alone in my room stressing about how awkward I am. This happens only because I find people terrifying and intimidating. But the best way to get over an irrational phobia is to expose yourself to it and to get over your fear by realizing nothing bad is going to happen. This has limits, of course. I'm not recommending you put spiders in a real arachnophobe's hair, because they'll probably just have a heart attack or an emotional breakdown and develop PTSD or something like that. Irrational fear is powerful and you shouldn't mess with it. But if you're managing your own anxiety bit by bit, exposure can be a successful way to get over it. So I have ordered food for myself in restaurants. I have asked strangers in Paris for directions. I have answered the phone to talk to strangers. I have dared to make friends at high school, and I even somehow ended up with the most beautiful and intimidating-looking girls in the school as my buddies. And gradually, it's been getting easier. My anxiety hasn't gone away at all, but I've become accustomed to overriding it, like a janitor getting used to cleaning the toilets even though the job doesn't become more pleasant. I also notice that the more I pretend to be confident, the more confident I am. By walking into the drugstore with my chin up and a smile on my face, I can buy a bottle of shampoo without cringing inside at how awkward I am. Because it's my secret. I'm pretending to be confident, so the cashier has no way of knowing that it's all just an act. It makes me feel powerful and secret-agent-y on the inside. Similarly, I can go to a party pretending to be a super popular exchange student who is way too worldly and interesting and far up on the social totem pole to be here, but kindly condescends to speak with the others anyway. And for all I know, no one figures out that I'm actually a nerd.

After 9 months of suffering from my worst anxiety nightmares over and over again (except the showing up to school naked one. I haven't yet managed a blunder that bad), I can do anything. Most of the time the only thing stopping us is really just other people. Do you want to quit your job to move to Zambia and teach little kids how to read and write? Well, you could. After you tell your boss and your coworkers, who'll be disappointed, and you bully an organization into accepting you and another one into funding you, after you manage to talk to the scary people in the embassy to get your visa and fill out all the paperwork. I wouldn't be surprised if this problem is not very common: most people would instead be stopped from fulfilling their dreams by financial worries, family obligations, or worries about the future. But I'm pretty good at doing crazy things like that and ignoring the consequences for my personal life. I just have trouble talking other people into it. But already coming to France in the first place was pretty difficult. I had to convince my high school to let me go, get accepted to CIEE, get a scholarship, say goodbye to everyone, get a visa, try to talk my bank into letting me have an account in France even though I was a minor (pro tip: don't try this, kids, it doesn't work), and many other terrifying steps involving talking to strangers. Once I got here it was worse, because I had to do many similar steps, like getting into my French high school, only it was in French and I was unfamiliar with the customs and politeness rituals and all that. And gradually, after doing scary human interactions in another language in a foreign country over and over and over again, I started getting a helluva lot more comfortable with being uncomfortable. I feel like I'm ready for just about anything now, like no matter what crazy things I decide to do in college, I'll have the balls to do it.

After my year abroad, I feel like I can do anything. I spent so much time being embarrassed this year that I think I broke my embarrassment circuits.