Transcript

749: My Bad

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Prologue: Prologue

Elna Baker

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Elna Baker, sitting in for Ira Glass. Kids have a stage where they learn to be embarrassed. It begins when they're toddlers, but some of us don't seem to take the lesson to heart, like my friend Jane Marie.

I've known Jane for years. She used to work at the radio show. And her shamelessness was the quality I most admired about her, especially as a woman. You know, she didn't care what people thought. Am I acting nice? Am I dressed too sexy? Am I being loud? She didn't ask those questions. She was totally opinionated and scrappy.

Jane was never embarrassed, and for a pretty specific reason. The way she grew up-- she was Methodist-- she was taught you are not the center of the universe, which made her feel free, like no one was watching.

Jane Marie

To be embarrassed would be to assume that anyone in this room or anyone who witnessed this actually spends more than 5 seconds thinking about me. And they don't. Why would you think anyone but God gives a shit about anything you're doing, ever? They don't. Like, you are nothing. You mean nothing in the world. It's obnoxious, basically, to think that, like, any of your actions-- that anyone is actually looking in your direction.

Elna Baker

This worldview, that others weren't judging her, helped her not judge herself. Those thoughts just didn't occur to her.

Elna Baker

Did you have an inner critic?

Jane Marie

What do you mean by inner critic?

Elna Baker

Like, a voice that--

Jane Marie

(LAUGHING) That's actually funny, sorry. I'm like, [KNOCK KNOCK], come again?

Elna Baker

So I was surprised when she texted me and said she'd heard I was looking for embarrassing stories to put on today's radio show. And that she had one, a big one that she'd never told anyone but her therapist, something that changed who she was. And I'll get to that story in about a minute.

But first, let me just say, I love embarrassing stories. I always ask for them at parties. If I hear a good one, I'll retell it for years. Some of them, so funny. But that's not the only reason I like them. I think the best ones say so much about us, reveal sides of ourselves maybe we'd rather not see.

And to prove the point that embarrassing stories have a lot to teach us, I decided to harness the power of the radio program. And we asked you for your embarrassing stories. People sent in over a thousand of them. Today we'll hear some of those and talk about what they reveal.

But we're going to kick things off with Jane's story because, honestly, of the hundreds of embarrassing stories that I've heard, I've never heard another one like Jane's, where it changed someone so deeply. Her story is our first act. Let's call it Belle of the Gall.

Act One: The Belle of the Gall

Elna Baker

Jane's story starts at a big charity event at a bougie hotel in Beverly Hills. The night is a fundraiser for children with epilepsy. It's held in a grand ballroom with fine china and excessive centerpieces and some of the most powerful producers and executives in Hollywood.

This is not Jane's scene. She's there because she's interviewing for a job, a job with a big studio. A job that would be a major leap for her and pay a ton more money than she'd ever made.

They'd met with her several times for interviews, and they'd invited her tonight and paid for her ticket as a kind of fun, looser, let's go do something more social and see how we all hit it off. Knowing where it's held and knowing it's a gala, Jane wears a ball gown, a two-piece dark green dress that shows off her midriff with a giant billowy skirt. She walks into the event and, to her surprise--

Jane Marie

People were wearing, like, business casual instead of, like-- it wasn't black tie. And so I'm overdressed. They're passing around champagne flutes. I grab one but promise myself I'm only going to have half of this one glass of champagne before we sit down at the table. Like, I am going into this with full control of myself. Like, I am--

Elna Baker

You're there to make a good impression.

Jane Marie

I am there to make a great impression on these people. I want to work with them. And I want them to think I'm respectable. And it's a weird thing. Like, I hate that I still have to talk about the world this way. But when you're the only woman at the table, or one of two women at a table, and they're all, like, old, older white dudes, CEO types who, in a certain way, have your future in their hands. It doesn't feel great.

Elna Baker

In the ballroom of maybe 500 guests, they're seated at the main table, front and center. During dinner, Jane's looking for her opportunity to shine, a moment when they'll get to know her better. But it's not coming. The CEO guys are all talking over her. There's no moment to jump into the conversation. No one seems curious about her at all.

Jane Marie

So they get to the auction portion, or the fundraiser portion, of the evening. And there's a person up onstage who's calling the auction. And they say, all right, let's get things kicked off here.

Elna Baker

Jane has an idea. One time-- the only other time she's been to a gala-- they'd had an auction too. And to surprise her table, as a joke, when they started the bidding, before any of the celebrities that night-- Lady Gaga or Angela Bassett or Heidi Klum-- could get in a bid, Jane raised her paddle.

It was for an item that was tens of thousands of dollars. Jane was broke. Her friends at the table knew she couldn't afford it. But she figured, I'm surrounded by rich people. Someone will absolutely outbid me. And they did. The item went for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone thought it was hilarious. So she looked at this table of CEOs and thinks--

Jane Marie

I know how to spice up the evening because I've done it before. I'm going to throw my paddle up again. I'm going to throw my paddle up again, get things cranking, have a funny story for our table to laugh about. And so they opened the bidding. And what I hear is, we're going to start the bidding out at $25,000.

And I shoot my paddle up in the air with the same confidence that it'll get outbid immediately and then we're moving on. And then we're cooking with gas, and everybody's like, you're a blast, you know.

Elna Baker

Jane feels a rush. Ha, that was fun. She waits to be outbid.

Jane Marie

And I had somehow not heard that this round of bidding was really just-- it wasn't something that anyone else could bid on.

Elna Baker

It was not an auction at all. It was a pledge.

Jane Marie

So it was a $25,000 pledge from the eight people sitting at my table. It all happened really quickly. After I raised the paddle, they were like, yay. And they put the name of our table and everyone at our table up on this board. There was a TV screen, a large TV screen hanging from the ceiling, and the name of the company I was with and our table number and the amount of my pledge.

And I look over, and the one person I know best at the table, it looks like he's having hives, like an attack. Everyone else is just slack-jawed. Oh my god, Jane, what did you just do? What did you just do? What did you just do? And they're, like, mouthing this. Or even just saying it out loud, depending on how close they are to me. They all just stared at me and were like, how are you going to fix this for our table?

Elna Baker

Sometimes when something embarrassing happens to you, you exaggerate it in your head, think it's a bigger deal than it was. But in this case, no.

Adam Davidson

I wish I could take this away from Jane and tell her her memory's wrong. Her memory's not wrong, because I'm here to tell you, yes, it was that bad. It really was. It was that bad. You're not making that up.

Elna Baker

That's Adam Davidson, Jane's only friend at the table. He's the guy who broke out into hives.

Jane Marie

As I'm remembering it, I just-- that feeling of wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. The universe is different now. The universe is-- fix it, fix it. We're off course. [SIMULATED BUZZING] You know, like that kind of emergency.

Elna Baker

Right. So part of the panic is like, if I don't stop this, I'm going to have to pay $25,000.

Jane Marie

Uh, yeah, because I said I would. What if there's no way out of this and I have to, like, max out all my credit cards? No, I really was like, can you-- OK, because I don't have auction experience also, I'm like, can you take it back?

Elna Baker

She decides to try. At the other end of this giant ballroom, there's an exit. Jane thinks, there will be people in charge there. They can help me. So she bolts up out of her chair and heads there, fast as she can.

Jane Marie

Through dozens of tables full of people, I mean, I really was having to be like, excuse me, pardon me, pardon me, excuse me, excuse me, pardon me, pardon me, excuse me. Like just, I gotta get out of here. So I get through the double doors at the back of the room as quickly as I can, and it slams shut behind me.

Elna Baker

"Who's running the auction?" she yells. A volunteer points her to a woman with a laptop. Jane rushes over and explains it's all a mistake. I don't have money. The woman is surprisingly understanding. She says, "What would you like to do?"

Jane Marie

What to do you want me to do? And I was like, well, I just need to, like, I take it back. I can't spend that money. And she was like, OK. And then bleep, bleep, blarp, she's in her computer. And I said, thank you, OK. And then I walk back into the ballroom and I'm looking up at the leaderboard, essentially, of all the pledges. And we're at the top. And then it disappears, right as I walk back in the room. It felt like a spotlight was turned on.

Elna Baker

Like the whole room turned around to look at you.

Jane Marie

The whole room, it's record scratch. And everyone knows that I just took $25,000 away from this charity.

Elna Baker

But, of course, it wasn't Jane's name that was on the screen. It was the company's, the one she's hoping to work for.

Adam Davidson

So very quickly it wasn't, oh, Jane did this. It was, our table did this.

Elna Baker

Again, Jane's friend Adam.

Adam Davidson

And it wasn't like we went from first to second or first to third. We went from number 1 to, like, the bottom. So yeah, I was embarrassed. I think everyone at the table was embarrassed. Yes, we were embarrassed. Wouldn't you be embarrassed?

Jane Marie

And so I get back to the table and I sit down and have kind of like a [FORCED LAUGH] "wasn't that"-- you know, like a nervous laugh. No one is enjoying that. And so I just start focusing on anything but the people around my table. I'm just really intently listening to the auctioneer guy. And we have to watch this really sad video that's, like, a mini-documentary about the children that we're supposed to be there to help. And they dim the lights.

Elna Baker

The movie is about 15 minutes long. The music is emotional. It's parents and their children with epilepsy talking about how scared and sad they feel, how much they need treatment. Sitting there in the dark watching this, this is the moment that hits Jane the hardest. It's not when everyone looks at her. It's when she realizes what she's actually done. She'd only thought of this evening as an opportunity for her to make an impression.

Jane Marie

That was gross, what I did. It was gross and wrong. And watching these children with this illness, on a big screen, I was just like, I am the worst person on the Earth, that I bid and then I took it back, and then I said no. [SNIFFLE] There's was a part of me that was like, oh, could I just take out a few more credit cards or something?

And then it's like a tidal wave of what just happened and what I did and how mortifying it is. Just the layers of, like, the reasons I should be embarrassed and criticizing myself. You know, why would you even do that? Why would you do that? And then when you did do it, why would you try to get out of it?

Elna Baker

The answers to those questions are uncomfortable because they force Jane to see things about herself she doesn't like. Embarrassment can do that. It can show you your blind spot.

Jane Marie

It exposed a fatal flaw that I have to pay a lot of attention to now.

Elna Baker

And what is that fatal flaw?

Jane Marie

Um, hubris. Something about that made me feel like my confidence had bad consequences, that there was something bad about it.

Elna Baker

The night ends. She doesn't get the job. And she has it on pretty good authority that the decision boiled down to her big mistake that night. This stings, but that's not the crux of what that night did to her.

Jane Marie

It has actually changed a lot about how I act in public. I'm just much more self-conscious after that.

Elna Baker

Really?

Jane Marie

Like, I used to get super pumped about going to a party. And now that's kind of fraught. I know this is going to sound counterintuitive, but I've started leaving the house sometimes without makeup because it's like I don't want people thinking that I'm thinking about what they're thinking, if that makes sense. I don't want anyone to think I put makeup on for them. But this is just like the weirdest stuff that now pops into my head about what other people are thinking, where I wish I just didn't care.

Elna Baker

I've always been that way, worrying what other people are thinking about me. And I can't imagine what it would be like to discover this as a full-on adult. Jane says everything feels different to her now.

Jane Marie

I feel completely neutered a lot of the time.

Elna Baker

Really?

Jane Marie

Yeah, I do. I feel like it made me second guess myself a lot, I guess. I used to write essays about parenting and sex. And I would give advice and I would go on radio shows. And now I'm just like, shut up, Jane, shut up, Jane, shut up, Jane, shut up, Jane, shut up. No one is asking and no one wants to hear it.

Elna Baker

That's crazy to me that you can do something embarrassing once, and suddenly you have that inner policeman for the rest of your life. Is there anything that can make it go away, you think?

Jane Marie

I don't know. What could change it? I don't know. I just don't even have the desire. It's like, why would I want to change it, so that I could, like, put another ball gown on and go embarrass myself in front of a bunch of people? Like no, that doesn't sound fun. You know?

It doesn't sound fun anymore. Like, I don't think that the lesson I learned was necessarily all bad. And honestly, when I think about the old version of me, it was kind of gross, in a way, you know? It's kind of obnoxious. It's like, that's a baby.

Elna Baker

I'd honestly never thought of embarrassment as being helpful to anyone. It pummels us, humiliates us. But Jane's glad this happened to her. She's glad for her new, awful self-consciousness. She says her ego is smaller now, which means that with everyone in her life, she's quicker to admit when she's wrong and apologize. And overall, she says it's calmed her down. She observes more, hangs back, never wants to be the center of attention-- which, she says, is a lot less hectic.

Jane Marie is the host of the podcast The Dream.

Act Two: Judgment Day

Elna Baker

Act 2, Judgment Day. Part of the reason I'm interested in embarrassment is because of this realization I had recently. I'm so embarrassed of myself all the time. At least once a day, I break out into a rash from embarrassment, like a couple of days ago when I learned from a coworker that all my life I've been mispronouncing the word "incongruous." See? I get embarrassed when I think people are looking at my eyebrows or when other people see my dog poop. Embarrassment is on me all the time, and I want to get it off.

And one of the ways my obsession with embarrassment has played out in the last few months is I'm in a group chat dedicated to it. There are four of us in it. One of the people, Kiese Laymon, I only met when we started this group. Any time we feel embarrassed or do something embarrassing, we write to each other.

It's how I know we've both worn Spanx for decades, or that he's self-conscious of his hairline or how he walks. These little secrets, you'd never know about someone otherwise. Sometimes we swap stories of past embarrassments, like the time Kiese was teaching a class at Vassar College on hip-hop as literature, and the alumni magazine wanted to do a story on him. This was back when he was in his 20s. They did the interview, and then a photographer comes to take his picture.

Kiese Laymon

So, we're in the library, and I'm like, where do you need me to stand? And they're like, well, could you crouch? And I was like, huh? I ain't never crouched for the photographs before. And they were like, you know, crouch and, like, do something cool with your hands. And I was like, what do you-- what do you want me to do?

And then the lady says, could you do rap hands? And I'm just like, wait a minute now. You want me to do rap hands in a picture that's going to accompany an article about my teaching hip-hop as literature and hip-hop and literature? And you know my stupid ass did that shit? Like, I'm doing rap hands, fam. Like, I can't lie to you.

So then the fucking article comes out and my students, particularly my Black students, are like, bruh, you teach about representation, stereotypes, fetishization. There's nothing ironic about this picture. You look like a fucking fool, wannabe rapper/professor doing crouch rap hands.

Elna Baker

I know so many of Kiese's day-to-day screw-ups from our embarrassment group. But it's funny. I never asked him an obvious question.

Elna Baker

All right, so I guess-- I think-- you know, I'm coming into this totally blind, so I don't know what you're about to tell me. What's your most embarrassing story?

Kiese Laymon

My most embarrassing story has to do with Heavy. So I wrote this book called Heavy. I've been spending my entire life trying to write it. And I needed to write it to help my relationship with my mother and my relationship with my body. But also, it's a book that I wanted my grandmama to really be proud of.

Elna Baker

The New York Times names Heavy one of the best 50 memoirs in the last 50 years. A lot of the book is about Kiese's shame around his weight. He went from being 319 pounds to anorexic, getting down to 159. Then gaining it back, then losing some. By exposing everything about his struggle with his weight, he overcomes it. Near the end of the book, he writes, "I am no longer ashamed of this heavy Black body."

Something else he talks about, how important his grandma is to him. She's funny, the voice of reason in his life. And she's one of the only people who's never on his case about his weight. In Heavy, he writes about his grandmother, "She responsibly loved me and never harmed me."

He's disappointed her many times-- got kicked out of college, lost all his money to gambling. But writing this book was a way to prove to her he's not his failures. And it's his attempt to fully explain himself.

Kiese Laymon

By the time it comes out, I think I had won a lot of awards that I did not expect to win. And with every award, I just was like, yo, my granny is going to be proud of me.

Elna Baker

Two months after the book is published, he flies home to Jackson, Mississippi, for Christmas. It's the first chance he gets to celebrate the book's success with his whole family. And he brings a stack of books, each of which he's signed with a dedication to each family member. He runs into the living room with a big smile on his face. Everyone's there. He heads straight to his grandma and gives her a big hug.

Kiese Laymon

She looks up at me, and then she looks over to my mom and she says, is this Kie? And then she's like, yeah, Mama, that's Kie. And I said, Grandmama, what you asking am I me for? And she just straight-up said, because you're so fat, baby. You look way too fat to be Kie. And she said it in front of my family. She said in front of my little cousin, Nicole.

And I just started sweating. And I was like, what the fuck, what the fuck? Am I having a panic attack right now? And at the time, I didn't understand why. Like, I didn't think I was having a panic attack because of embarrassment or shame at my grandmother calling me fat.

Elna Baker

It was some combination of humiliation, shame, and embarrassment. Shame and embarrassment often get lumped together. But what makes embarrassment distinct is it's always tied to other people. You need an audience to be embarrassed.

Kiese Laymon

Like, I can be ashamed in my house by myself.

Elna Baker

Yes, totally.

Kiese Laymon

You know what I'm saying? Like, I can be in shame, like, a boiling pot of shame. But embarrassment, to me, is much more dramatic. I feel like, when you ask me stories about embarrassment, they're all going to be stories about how somebody saw me.

Because if I came in my house and there was nobody there but my Granny and she did that, it would hurt. I mean, it would hurt. But it would not come close to that hurt of having her say it in front of the entire family. And the family doing their version of looking down. You know, we're going to act like we didn't hear that, when everybody heard it.

So I just walked right back out of the house, got in my car for a second, tried to get my breath right. And I had some Xanax because I was on book tour earlier, and I use Xanax to sleep on the planes. [HEAVY SIGH] So I was like, yo, should I take a half a Xanax? What the fuck is going on with me? I didn't know what was happening. So I didn't. I took the Xanax, one of the Xanax, and I went back in the house, tried to do it again.

Went back to my Granny. Walked in the room, Granny, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Kie, boy, I don't know how you got so fat, but you need to stop eating. And I think the shameful part was, like, I could write all the books in the world I wanted to. I could write one of those books as good as I could ever write them. But I was still going to look and feel not just fat, but gross, to my family.

Elna Baker

Did you also feel like you had, in writing a book and working as hard as you possibly could to look at this stuff, that you had overcome the capacity to feel so ashamed of yourself?

Kiese Laymon

Yes. I thought, in writing about, among other things, body and sex, fatness and sex, I did. I fooled myself into believing that I was delivered from it. And I think when I came in the room thinking Heavy would shield me from their critiques, and being greeted, initially, and then my grandmother calling me fat, looking at me like I'm fat. Not seeing anything but a fat ass middle-aged man when she looks at me is kryptonite, is my kryptonite.

Elna Baker

She'd always been the one person who'd never judged him. And when he tries to make sense of this turnaround, the best he can come up with is, with the success of the book and the money it brought in, she now saw him as a man. And in her eyes, men were supposed to be productive and lean. He spends the next few days with his grandma, and she keeps bringing it up. It looks like Kie ate Kie. He's as big as a house. How did he get so fat?

Kiese Laymon

And I just think that was embarrassing, to think that a book was going to change your life and make you not look and feel fat to your family and to the person who means the most in the world to you. And the book didn't matter at all.

Elna Baker

Oh, it's crushing.

Kiese Laymon

[LAUGHS] Oh, it's so funny. I have to laugh my way through all of that. But yeah, it felt pretty crushing.

Elna Baker

But this isn't something he tells people in everyday conversation. Honestly, when I asked him for his most embarrassing story, I expected the kind of funny story you tell at a party. That's usually what he delivers when people start telling these kinds of stories, something more like Rap Hands.

Kiese Laymon

That embarrassment and the embarrassment I felt in my granny's house, in some way, I don't even know if they should be called the same word. Because I literally-- like, I like telling that story. I've never told the story I told you about my granny because I don't like remembering that. I don't like telling it. You know what I'm saying?

Elna Baker

Totally. I mean, because there's certain things that you can laugh at. But you can't laugh at the thing that makes you want to die.

Kiese Laymon

Yeah, I mean the embarrassing stories that I tell are always not true. Like, the drama of the story will be true, but I'm going to hide that mushy, sometimes toxic center that thinks telling embarrassing stories will make people like me more. You know what I mean?

So when I'm telling embarrassing stories, the part of the story I'm not telling is, I'm going to tell you all this story because I feel very fucking insecure and I want to make you feel or laugh. So if I'm not telling that part of the story, I'm being dishonest in the storytelling.

And most of us aren't telling that part of the story when we tell these self-deprecating stories about whatever. I'm only telling you this story because I want to control the velocity and pace at which you like me. That's what I think those stories lack. They lack the preamble.

Elna Baker

They lack the sad history that makes you need to tell a funny story in the first place, he says. And maybe that makes sense. Who wants to bring that up at a party?

Kiese Laymon is the author of Heavy and Long Division. Coming up, a date that ends in nudity, but absolutely not the kind that you might want. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Act Three: Traumarama

Elna Baker

It's This American Life. I'm Elna Baker, sitting in for Ira Glass. Today's show, "My Bad." Today we're looking at embarrassing stories and what those reveal about us. We're at Act 3, Traumarama. Like I mentioned earlier, we asked you listeners to share your most embarrassing stories. We got hundreds of Facebook and Instagram messages and nearly a thousand emails.

OK, quick note, embarrassing stories can sometimes involve bodily functions, and we have one or two like that. If that's not your thing, don't say I didn't warn you. Anyway, these stories you sent in, I invited the regular host of this show, Ira Glass, in to share those.

Ira Glass

Hey, there, Elna.

Elna Baker

Hi, Ira.

Ira Glass

So can I ask you something?

Elna Baker

Yeah.

Ira Glass

OK, you said earlier that you get embarrassed every day. Really?

Elna Baker

Oh, yeah. I had something really embarrassing happen to me two nights ago, per this show.

Ira Glass

What was it?

Elna Baker

It started with tripping and falling. I was carrying a pizza on a plate and I tripped, and it fell face-forward onto the couch.

Ira Glass

Uh-huh. This is in your own home?

Elna Baker

No, this is at the guy I'm seeing, right. And it was, like, a white couch, so it stains. So I'm cleaning it up. And then there was a perfect piece of mozzarella curl. And, you know, it fell, so I shouldn't have eaten it. But I wanted to eat it. So I picked it up out of the-- it was stuck in the couch. I picked it up and ate it. And as I bit in, I realized--

Ira Glass

[LAUGHS] It was not--

Elna Baker

It was a full toenail, like, a big toe toenail.

Ira Glass

(LAUGHING) What?

Elna Baker

It was so--

Ira Glass

How does that look like mozzarella? Mozzarella has three dimensions to it. A toenail?

Elna Baker

(LAUGHING) It was the grossest thing I've ever done.

Ira Glass

I don't think that's on you. I think that that's on him for leaving the toenail in the couch. He should have been embarrassed.

Elna Baker

Yeah, but the needle that needed to be threaded for me to pick up a toenail and put it into my mouth, the sequence of events that would be the only reason I did that, happened seamlessly.

Ira Glass

And was he watching?

Elna Baker

Yeah. He was embarrassed too. He was very embarrassed.

Ira Glass

Because it was his toenail.

Elna Baker

Yeah. He goes, that just doesn't-- it just doesn't seem like me. I was like, well, whose toenail is it then?

Ira Glass

Yeah, somebody broke into your apartment, cut their nails, didn't take anything, and left. I've been reading about that in the New York Post, happening all the time.

Elna Baker

OK, but we're not here to talk about me. We have all of these listener embarrassing stories I want to share with you.

Ira Glass

Yes, and I am very curious about what you found.

Elna Baker

All right, so one of the things that stood out to me most from reading all these emails is that so many people wrote in saying, I'm the only person who could have possibly done this. And then five emails later was someone in the inbox with the exact same story.

Ira Glass

Really?

Elna Baker

Yeah. Like, there were 16 women who wrote in with epic period fails.

Ira Glass

Though I have to say, that's one you could kind of anticipate.

Elna Baker

Yeah, but you couldn't anticipate that three people were mistakenly the reason that a bomb squad got called in.

Ira Glass

OK, yeah, didn't see that coming.

Elna Baker

Or two people showed up dressed above and beyond to a costume party, only to find out that it was the wrong day, which also actually happened to me.

Ira Glass

So what was that like? OK, so there are these, I guess, different categories of responses?

Elna Baker

Yeah, basically, like, the same things came up over and over again.

Ira Glass

OK, break down the big ones. I want to hear, what's the number one?

Elna Baker

So I would say the biggest one, the number one, was bathroom stories. Like, a quarter-- a quarter of the people who wrote us, bathroom stories. Followed by naked stories.

Ira Glass

That's number two.

Elna Baker

Number two, not to be confused with number two.

Ira Glass

I will say that both of those are so basic.

Elna Baker

I think that people get embarrassed by the things that you were told not to do when you were a kid. Like--

Ira Glass

Don't be naked.

Elna Baker

Don't be naked.

Ira Glass

Use the bathroom.

Elna Baker

Exactly.

Ira Glass

And so those are the biggest categories. And then what do the rest break down into?

Elna Baker

Little kind of like various piles. There's embarrassing yourself in front of a crush. 65 people wrote in about that.

Ira Glass

Wow, 65 people?

Elna Baker

Yep. Or embarrassing yourself in front of your boss or a celebrity, 79 people.

Ira Glass

Mm-hmm. I like that those two are lumped together. Keep going.

Elna Baker

Tripping and falling, usually at an important event. That was 35 people. And then there were people who were caught in a lie.

Ira Glass

All right, so tell me one like that, getting caught in a lie.

Elna Baker

OK. So there's this guy, Will. He told a lie for very understandable reasons. In middle school, he's ruthlessly bullied for being Haitian.

Ira Glass

Oh, wow.

Elna Baker

Yeah. And this is, like, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Our country actually banned people from Haiti from entering the US.

Ira Glass

Because of AIDS.

Elna Baker

Exactly.

Ira Glass

Right.

Elna Baker

And there were jokes about Haitians on late night TV. And so, in middle school, Will is picked on all the time for being Haitian. He's beat up. He's teased.

Will

So boom, I go to high school, ninth grade, new year, new location. This is a location far away from my home. New kids, new teachers, ninth grade going well. Two months in, getting some friends. And then, one of the kids asked me, yo, you got an accent. Where you from? I'm like, oh, shit, here we go again.

And so there's all the kids waiting for a response. And I just remember, I'm like, yo, I'm Jamaican. And they was like, oh, whoa, yeah, mon, eh, bope, bope, bope. And I was like, oh shit, now I got to be Jamaican for the rest of my life. And I just remember, during my conversations with people, I would just throw in Jamaican phrases like, yo, did you do you homework, bope bope? Where you going? Yo, I didn't understand the lesson. Blood clot. You know, just saying that, just to keep up this Jamaican image.

Elna Baker

It sounds to me like you didn't even really know much about being Jamaican.

Will

I didn't know anything about being-- I knew very little about being Jamaican. I knew how they sounded from their music, but it was all just-- I took the stereotypes of Jamaicans and I became that.

Elna Baker

So he pulls this lie off for three years.

Ira Glass

Wow.

Elna Baker

Yeah. At school, he's the Jamaican kid. But then, another Jamaican kid-- like, an actual Jamaican kid-- shows up and everyone's like, oh, you got to meet Will.

Ira Glass

Oh, that's not good for him.

Elna Baker

Nope.

Will

And then he just started questioning me. Oh, where you from? Where your family from? And I'm just making stuff up. I was just freestyling it. Then he paused and said, that boy not Jamaican. And I was like, oh, shit, oh, shit. And I just said, no, no, no, no. You're from Jamaica. I'm from Jamaica, Queens.

I'm not even from Jamaica, Queens. I'm not from Queens at all. I'm from Brooklyn, East New York.

Ira Glass

OK, so that's people caught in a lie. Tell me another category.

Elna Baker

OK, so I especially love the category of embarrassing stories where people tried to avoid embarrassment. And in doing that, they embarrass themselves.

Ira Glass

OK, let me hear one like that.

Elna Baker

OK, so this happened to this lady, Mary Gray, from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. So she's a bridesmaid whose dress arrives, and it's way too small. Day of the wedding, she convinces another bridesmaid, one size up, to swap dresses with her. This dress fits, but it's tight. And so she starts to get this irrational fear that if she's bulging out of her dress, she's going to upstage the bride and groom.

Ira Glass

Oh, like people will look at her instead of--

Elna Baker

Exactly. This cannot happen. And then this idea hits her, Saran Wrap.

Mary Gray

So I go into the kitchen. I find the Saran Wrap. I get it out and I just start wrapping. And I go around and around and around until I am cinched, and the dress zips up beautifully. And I think, yeah, this is going to work. This is actually genius. And out the door I go.

Elna Baker

So she's standing in 105 degree heat at the altar--

Ira Glass

Right, South Carolina.

Elna Baker

--next to the bride and groom. And there's a big crowd watching. And she just starts getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

Mary Gray

I can feel the sweat starting to kind of roll down my back. And I'm looking down at the floor and I'm seeing spots. And I'm a fainter, so I know what that means.

So, as subtly as possible, I turn around to my groomsman partner and I ask him to unzip my dress. And, of course, he has no idea what I'm talking about. And he's like, what? And I said, I need you to unzip my dress. So he does it. He unzips my dress. So now everyone knows that I'm wrapped up in Saran Wrap.

Elna Baker

And are you just mortified?

Mary Gray

I am just really focusing on not passing out. So I decide that I am going to take off.

Elna Baker

She ducks away. Her dress is open. She misses the rest of the ceremony, gets some water.

Ira Glass

It's funny. Her greatest fear was that she was going to upstage the bride and groom. And so she does the Saran Wrap, and then that leads her to do exactly that. She upstages the bride and groom.

Elna Baker

Yeah, yeah. She is the thing that everyone remembers about that wedding.

Mary Gray

From start to finish, I am my own worst enemy in this story.

Elna Baker

OK, so the most haunting story that came into our inbox was this one. And it's so embarrassing that the woman who sent it doesn't want us to use her real name.

Ira Glass

OK.

Elna Baker

We're going to call her Maya. So Maya is taking the GRE this last year so she could apply to grad school. And because of COVID, she had to take it online in her home office. But it's like a very regimented process, just so they know they're not cheating. There's a proctor assigned to watch her through a webcam.

Maya

So before the test, I have to give them a little tour of my testing space. I have to show under the desk, over the desk, the walls, just everything so that they know I'm not cheating. So we do that. Everything is good to go. I start the test.

Elna Baker

So partway through the test, she has this pain in her stomach. And she's like, oh, no. She's got to go. And she's got to go now. So she manages to hold it until the break. But then, to her horror, the next break is just 1 minute long, right. So she messages the proctor and she's like, can I leave and come back in a minute? And he tells her--

Maya

If you leave the frame, you will forfeit the test.

Elna Baker

[GASP]

Maya

And so I'm sitting there, and I'm like, I don't know what to do. Either I leave now. I give up. I go to the bathroom and don't take the GRE, give up grad school. Or I do what I actually did.

Elna Baker

What she actually does is she does the do on the floor.

Ira Glass

Wait, while staying on camera, like nothing is happening at all?

Elna Baker

Exactly. She positions her arms on the chair.

Ira Glass

Stop with this mental image. I don't want to see it. Keep going with your story.

Elna Baker

So this is surprisingly a category unto itself. We heard from four other people who had to make this same call during a standardized test.

Ira Glass

What?

Elna Baker

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Ira Glass

And made the same decision?

Elna Baker

Yeah. Oh, they tried to hold it and it didn't work for them.

Ira Glass

So what happens?

Elna Baker

So she assumes the worst of it is over. She makes it all the way to the next break. It's a 10-minute break. She's allowed to leave the room.

Ira Glass

Oh, during that break.

Elna Baker

Yeah.

Maya

But quickly, I realized that at the end of the 10-minute break I had to once again give them this web cam tour of my testing area, including under my desk.

Elna Baker

Oh my god, no.

Maya

So I realize, OK, the 10-minute break means cleaning this up.

Elna Baker

Keep in mind, the proctor is still watching her through her webcam. So she has to army crawl across the room on the floor.

Ira Glass

Oh, to stay out of the camera's sight line.

Elna Baker

Exactly, exactly.

Elna Baker

But you got away with it, right? Like, the proctor--

Maya

Well--

Elna Baker

--never saw, had no idea.

Maya

So here's the thing. I was telling this story to some friends over Zoom. And I'm sitting at the same desk where I took the GRE. And I told this story. And obviously, we're all laughing, whatever. And then one of my friends kind of like quietly waits for everything to die down and then says, is that a mirror behind you?

Elna Baker

[GASP].

Maya

And it was. I have a full-sized standing mirror behind me. And so I went back to the door of the room and crawled all the way in and reenacted everything. And all I could hear was them laughing. I wasn't even sure. I was like, could you see it or not? Could you see it or not? But they, like, weren't breathing. And so, eventually, someone said, yeah, you could see everything, for sure.

Elna Baker

So the thing that sticks out to her about this story is it showed her new information about herself.

Ira Glass

The new information being--

Elna Baker

Like, what lows she's willing to stoop to.

Ira Glass

That's so interesting, because I think of it in a much more positive way of how far she'll go to get what she feels like she needs to get.

Elna Baker

That is not her take on it at all. That's one of the big things with these embarrassing stories. People never take it the positive way, for the most part.

Ira Glass

Oh.

Elna Baker

They always take it the way where they're like, I knew all my life something was wrong with me, and now I know.

Maya

Now, forever more, me getting into grad school is tainted by this experience. The thing that I can't get over with this is that it was a choice I made. It didn't happen to me. It was a choice. Does that make it better or worse? I don't know.

Elna Baker

I mean, I think it makes it worse.

Maya

(LAUGHING) I think so.

Ira Glass

So Elna, you're somebody who's super interested in embarrassment. Like, you've thought about it a lot. You've experienced it a lot. Is there something that going through a thousand of these stories showed you, that you didn't actually know before?

Elna Baker

People in these emails, they were tortured by these mistakes. Totally embarrassed and often carried them their whole lives. And sometimes they were really small mistakes. And reading them, I feel like it just made me think, like, oh, actually, I think the problem is that we think we're not supposed to make mistakes. We think we're supposed to make it through this life without doing this, that, or the other. And if you just say, you know what, over the course of my lifetime, I'm going to trip and fall in public, my top is going to fly off when it's not supposed to. You just have to accept that that is part of it, that's part of the deal.

Ira Glass

I like that you're bringing this to a heartwarming ending.

Elna Baker

I know that you're being sarcastic, but you're welcome.

Act Four: Putting the Bare Ass in Embarrassment

Elna Baker

I want to share one last embarrassing story. Act 4, Putting the Bare Ass in Embarrassing.

Of all the kinds of embarrassing stories you sent in, one of the most common ones was a situation where you were a little bit naked or all the way naked, in public. This is a common fear. One of the most frequent nightmares is the dream where you look down and realize you're naked in front of other people.

Freud even wrote about it in The Interpretation of Dreams. He called it The Embarrassment Dream of Nakedness, and said, quote, "I believe that the great majority of my readers will at some time have found themselves in this situation in a dream." When we feel embarrassed in our waking life, we often have this dream.

The person in this next story, who wrote in from Nashville, has definitely had this dream. Her name is Cariad. She personally has no interest in being naked in public. In fact, even bathing suits are a stretch for her.

Cariad

I think people who have pool parties are total psychopaths. I don't understand why you would do that. You know? I have since I was a kid. Luckily, there aren't a lot in England. But I used to come here to visit my grandmother, and people would throw pool parties. And I'd be like, why? And I still feel that way.

Elna Baker

Why are you doing this to all of us?

Cariad

Yeah, I don't want to go to the fucking beach for your goddamn birthday.

Elna Baker

The story you're about to hear happened years ago, when Cariad was living in New York City. She had just started seeing this guy she liked a lot, an emergency room doctor, big personality, always smiling, reliable. He told a lot of funny stories about the ER. We're calling him Doug.

The way she remembers it, they'd been seeing each other for about a month. They'd slept over at her place, and it's the first night she stays over at his. As Cariad is drifting off to sleep--

Cariad

I just remember being really, really tired and really needing to go to the bathroom. And that was kind of my last thought as I was falling to sleep was, ugh, I really need to pee, but I can't be bothered to get up and find the bathroom. And then I had this dream that I really needed to go to the bathroom. And I was looking for one and I couldn't find one anywhere. And I was pushing this big metal door, in my search for the bathroom. And it was locked. And I couldn't get through, and I was really, really frustrated.

And then, I woke up. And I was naked, standing in a stairwell, pushing against a big door that went from the stairwell into the rest of the apartment building.

Elna Baker

Oh my god.

Cariad

It was like my mind melted. The logic of the situation made no sense.

Elna Baker

Cariad had sleepwalked out of Doug's apartment. Apparently, she'd done this as a small child, just a few times, though she had no memory of it at all. And she'd never sleepwalked as an adult. So it didn't occur to her that that's what's happened.

Cariad

I felt like I completely lost my mind. Like, just, how am I here? How is this a thing that is happening? How am I awake?

Elna Baker

Cariad pushes open the metal stairwell door and sees, to her relief, Doug's apartment at the end of the hall. She runs towards it.

Cariad

And then I realized, like, I don't know if this is his apartment. And I turned around and looked, and it was just one of those New York buildings, oh, just a bunch of apartments to each floor that all kind of looked the same. And I realized I can't--

Elna Baker

This feels like a nightmare.

Cariad

This was an absolute fucking nightmare.

Elna Baker

Cariad approaches the door she thinks his Doug's apartment, though she's not sure.

Cariad

So what I decide to do is knock on the door. And then I run away from the door, back into the stairwell, before they answer. And I put my ear to the door. I crack the door to the stairwell so I can hear them. But I can't see them, they can't see me. This way, if it's a voice I recognize, I can run around the corner and into the apartment. And if it's a voice I don't recognize, they won't see me. And hopefully they'll just close the door.

Elna Baker

That's a pretty brilliant plan.

Cariad

Thank you, thank you. So I do that, and it is not a voice I recognize. And I start to realize the depth of the horror of the situation that I'm in. People are going to start getting up and going to work, and I cannot be there when that happens. By the way, I still really need to pee. Like, I need to pee so badly that it woke me up and made me sleepwalk, you know?

Elna Baker

She decides the least conspicuous place to pee while naked is at the bottom of the stairwell, leaning against the door to the lobby. If someone tries to open the door, she can push back. And if someone's coming down the stairs, she'll hear them. So she swallows her pride and does it.

Cariad

I was just so horrified. I was so horrified. I remember very clearly just sitting down on this stairwell and just crying. This was just such a ridiculous situation that I couldn't get myself out of. And if only I had been more aware of my surroundings, I would have known that he was in apartment 2B, or whatever it was. Like, how could I have not paid attention in the lift?

And I remember drying my eyes and, like, I couldn't even wipe my nose on my sleeve. I'm wiping my nose on my arm and just thinking, all right, buck up. You have to take control of this situation and fix it. You do not have an option. You just have to fix it. And so I started very gently trying all of the doors in the apartment building.

Elna Baker

Her hope is, whatever door she came out of will still be unlocked.

Cariad

And I went systematically floor to floor and I tried every door. And on the top floor there was one apartment that I could hear voices in. And they were having a great time. It sounded like someone was having a party.

Elna Baker

If she can't find another solution, she thinks, I'm going to knock on this door. But first, she tries all the doors again. And then the answer occurs to her-- mailboxes. His name will be on his mailbox. She runs to the ground floor and sees through the door that the lobby is all glass windows. There's no way to get to the mailboxes without everyone in the street seeing her naked.

So she heads back up to that party on the top floor, rings the bell, and then runs and hides behind the door. A woman comes out. She's clearly tipsy. Cariad calls to her, asking if she can come over to the stairwell, which the woman does.

Elna Baker

How are you even able to, like, cover or hide yourself?

Cariad

I mean, there really is no-- it's just that cartoon. One arm across your boobs and your little hand is a fig leaf. I mean, that's all you can do in that situation.

Elna Baker

Cariad explains her predicament and asks if she can borrow some clothes. The woman seems totally unfazed. Like, of course, this happens all the time. She gestures for Cariad to come on in and walks back into the party. Cariad's like, wait, no, no, no. But the door is closing, so she reluctantly follows. Five people are there. They see her naked. Cariad dives behind a couch. The woman brings her a tracksuit.

The whole party rallies to try and help Cariad solve this situation. She describes Doug to them. The woman thinks she knows where he lives. They knock on one or two doors, waking up neighbors who are not him. They call Cariad's cell, no answer. Eventually, the woman tells Cariad to just sleep on the couch. Cariad wakes up at 7:00 the next morning, tries her phone again, and gets an answer.

Cariad

And the person on the phone is not the guy that I had been with. It's somebody else. And they're really angry. And he kept saying, what's your name, what's your name. And I kept saying, I want to speak to this guy. And they wouldn't hand the phone over.

And I was getting really pissed because I was like, well, who are you? Just give him the phone. And they said, what's your name, what's your name? And I said Cariad. And then they said, what's your last name? And I said Harmon. And then this guy gets on the phone.

Elna Baker

She means Doug.

Cariad

And he's just like, what the fuck? Where are-- he's, like, really angry.

Elna Baker

It turns out, while Cariad been running around the hallways naked, he'd woken up in the middle of the night to find Cariad's clothes, wallet, phone, but no Cariad. It was like she'd vanished.

I talked to Doug. He didn't want to be on the radio, but here's what he said. He looked for her everywhere. He peeked into his roommate's room to see if maybe she'd accidentally crawled in their bed. Then he opened the fridge, then the oven, before catching himself and thinking, why would she be in the oven?

Next, he searched the building, outside the building. Eventually, he called one of her friends. They didn't know what to do. He thought, she's been gone long enough with no clothes on. This could be serious. By now, it was almost morning, so we called the police. They showed up 20 minutes later. He explained to them, I was out with this girl. She came back here. She appears to be lost.

One of the officers started questioning him aggressively. He's not certain if they were just jerks, but he remembers thinking they were probably more suspicious of him because he was Black. It went from 0 to 100 fast. As Doug put it, I remember feeling like this is the most screwed-up situation I've ever been in. This dude doesn't believe I'm telling the truth. Maybe he thinks I killed her. Just as things were escalating, Cariad finally got through on the phone.

Cariad takes the elevator down to Doug's floor. When she steps out, the police greet her. She realizes this is who'd answered the phone. Once she explains her side of the story, they leave, and it's just Cariad and Doug.

Cariad

I think it took me a minute to recognize the gravity of what had happened to him. But I think once I really realized that at one point in the evening he was a suspect, like, oh, they were not on your side.

Elna Baker

That's funny. That's such a white person thing to think.

Cariad

Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course it is, yeah. You know, I felt the gap. I felt how much we didn't really know each other, in that moment. But I just remember saying I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. Because he was genuinely very shaken up. And he, being the lovely guy that he was, he was just like, I'm just-- I'm glad that you're OK. But I have to get on with my day.

Elna Baker

They never went out again, though mostly because he moved across the country a few days later. This date had been planned as kind of a last night together. But they stayed in touch. A year later, when he came back to visit, he and Cariad went to dinner with his friends.

Cariad

The gentleman that he is, I remember we were sort of chatting, and he said, oh, I haven't told them about the story. And I said, oh, it's fine. If you want to tell them, you could tell them. He said, no, no, no, no, no. I think he was worried about embarrassing me.

And then I went to the bathroom and I came back, and everybody was cracking up. And he looked at me and he said, I told them. I told them. I couldn't help it. And we all laughed about it. He also left that part out, in order for it to be funny.

Elna Baker

Since things came out OK in the end, they each tell it this way at parties. They leave out the fear.

Elna Baker

So, most of the embarrassing stories I've heard and collected for this week's show, the person does something that results in their embarrassment. Like, we have this lady, she Saran Wraps herself for a wedding. There's someone who raises a paddle in an auction and it goes awry.

And so, I get why they feel embarrassed. But you didn't do anything. You didn't overstep. You didn't make a mistake, but you still feel embarrassed.

Cariad

Yeah. I suppose if you take blame off the table, it takes maybe a certain flavor of that embarrassment out. But it doesn't take the embarrassment away. There is something inherently embarrassing about running into a room full of people you don't know, naked.

Elna Baker

Like, it still happened to you.

Cariad

It still happened to me, yeah. I suppose I should feel pretty bulletproof now, shouldn't I? I think once something really so embarrassing happens, I do think you sort of cross that threshold somehow. And if that's OK, then why be embarrassed? And for a long time, I would think, Cariad, you got yourself out of this situation. You're not naked in a stairwell on the Lower East Side. You can figure this out.

Elna Baker

I like ending the show there, someone who wasn't just embarrassed. She lived the experience that's like a metaphor for embarrassment, an experience most of us only know from nightmares, and came out better for it. I like thinking that's what embarrassment can do.

Credits

Elna Baker

Our program was produced today by me, Tobin Low, and Diane Wu. The people who put our show together include Bim Adewunmi, Susan Burton, Sean Cole, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Aviva DeKornfeld, Damien Graef, Chana Joffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Alix Spiegel, Laura Starecheski, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Chloee Weiner. Our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman, senior editor, David Kestenbaum, our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to all the listeners who wrote in with their most embarrassing stories. Also, thanks to Lisa Pollack, Ari Saperstein, Henry Phillips, Will Sylvance, The Epilepsy Foundation, Kevin Allison, Franqi French, Kate and Aaron Anderson, Reagan Baker, Hope Rosenblatt, Brian Finkelstein, Elle Birkenkemper, Emmali Branton, Carmen Cuba, and Tara Westover.

Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to my boss, Ira Glass. You know, he told me he does the same thing every Saturday night. He watches the Eminem movie, 8 Mile, shotguns a tall boy, stares at himself in the mirror.

Mary Gray

And I just start rapping.

Elna Baker

I'm Elna Baker. Join us next week with more stories of This American Life.