Past self embarrassment: You're Not the Only One

Am I the only one who has ever wanted to actually set themselves on fire out of pure, unadulterated shame because their own body betrayed them in a room full of strangers? …

Anyone else ever look back at their first real job and just want to like, crawl under a rock and never come out?

I just found these old emails from my first week of teaching and I kind of want to crawl into a hole and stay there forever.

Sometimes you just lie there at three in the morning and your brain decides to dig up the absolute worst version of yourself like it’s some kind of gift. …

I was scrolling back through the old stuff on my page and I just... …

Do any of you ever feel like human beings are just... …

I found the old photo album my mom kept in the back of the hallway closet. …

Kitchen island. …

I never told no one about my shoulder, not even my husband or my kids. …

—and it reminded me of that one Saturday back in ninety-eight, which is a weird thing to have stuck in your head at 2 AM when you should be sleeping because you have to be at the office by eight to… …

I'm sitting here at 2:14 AM and the city is still humming outside my window, that constant low roar of the expressway that I pay four thousand a month just to listen to while I stare at these old… …

am i the only one who looks at their younger self and feels absolutely nothing like it’s a total stranger?

I remember the exact shade of grey the linoleum was in my 8th grade math class—it’s funny how the brain records the most useless details of a catastrophe.

And it’s still staring at me with that fake gold finish that’s started to peel at the base. …

I am sitting in the kitchen at 2:14 AM, the blue light of this phone screen making my liver spots look like a topographical map of some country I shouldn't have been in forty years ago.

I’m 76 now looking at this kid who thought he was a poet but really he was just suffering from a massive case of unrequited limerence, just a total fixation on a girl who barely said hello to me in… …

It looked like a jagged ridge of bone that belonged on a mountainside, not a girl's face. …

I spent four years where every single breath was part of a command and every movement had a purpose and I knew exactly how to hold my body together but now I am in this studio with these people who… …

I deleted the email at 11:42 PM on a Tuesday while sitting on my velvet sofa that cost three months of rent back in 2018 and I just felt... …

Watching the sun come up again. …