The Cringe Blog Post

Note: Numbers in parentheses correspond to endnotes.

I have been transitioning from a life lived with rampant dissociation to a life of feeling. I am at that point where memories attack me that result in me strongly cringing from embarrassment or shame. I suppose this stage has always been warranted.(1)

Since dissociation is done unconsciously and has become normalized for me, I have realized that it is hard to notice and counter this force that works in absentia.(2) Hence, cringing can actually be satisfying in that regard –knowing that I am not dissociating, that I am fighting dissociation. I have found that the act of expressing my cringes is very helpful for me to notice that I am having an emotional reaction (albeit negative). Plus, if nothing else, externally expressing helps me rely on that splendid witness that is Erik. He has proven ever so helpful in our marriage to remember things about myself that would leave my mouth agape because I will have completely forgotten said things.(3)

The expression can be any combination of the following: a squeezed high-pitched squeal from the throat, a deep and tight low-pitched groan from the gut, a tensing and gathering up of my body with my arms brought in tight against my torso and my hands bunched up hiding my mouth or face, a pair of eyes shut tight and squinting or eking out a look of embarrassment or panic. Or I might skip all of these and curl up into fetal position wherever I am –the kitchen floor (face down), the couch (face down or sideways).

In these moments I am reminded of Rebeca Buendía, that young girl that arrived at the town from a neighboring village with a sack containing her dead parents’ bones (without knowing it was theirs) and has sudden fits of eating dirt and the white plaster off the walls. She had arrived at the Buendía family with a note that she was supposedly some distant relative, but the Buendías never quite figure out if she is related. When I am cringing, I wonder what it would feel like to eat dirt –would it placate the guttural tension?

Whenever I do express my cringing with Erik, he asks me what’s wrong, and then I tell him about some inane social situation that happened anywhere between now and five years ago.(4) I know it sounds silly. It’s the sort of thing that the person I was talking to likely did not notice, nor would remember the next day. Nevertheless, when I allow myself to feel things, these memories evoke strong feelings from me. If measuring pain ever felt utterly subjective – and consequently impossible -- then the measuring of cringes would certainly feel so.

One night, we talk about it when it becomes particularly egregious. Erik and I are enjoying a walk on a nice evening, when I must have cringed out loud at least three times. By the end of the night, back in our studio as we get ready to start washing up, Erik gently communicates enough exasperation for me to catch on to that my audiovisual cringing is affecting him.

“I’m sorry that I’m so frustratinggggg,” I turn around and tell him just as I enter the bathroom, my voice turning to a cringe. Erik has by now done countless greater things to ensure that I am safe and well, so much more worthy to merit a strong emotional reaction. And yet, the idea of causing him frustrations from these cringes also make me cringe.(5)

We go back and forth a bit, delicately communicating where we are on the subject to each other, with me internally teetering on that line of righteous dignity and utter helplessness about myself. There are long pauses in between while we gather our thoughts and try to make eye contact from the entrance of the bathroom.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be frustrated,” he says. I have lost track of what he’s been doing –putting things away or maybe flossing. “It’s just that whenever you are cringing like this, it’s not revealing or resolving anything about the source or nature of where it comes from.” I think to the helpful and productive questions he has asked me before to help me resolve the underlying matter. He enters the bathroom to also wash up.

“Yes, I know. But what about grieving? And aren’t I allowed to just express my feelings?” I make a face of supplication, which might be gratuitous, but I am not sure.

“Yes, of course you are,” he gives in. I knew that he would genuinely encourage these. He looks tired.

Later on in bed, he explains what a distraction it is for him while he juggles a lot of stressful thoughts related to his work to then turn to me looking like a wreck, only to find out it’s nothing. The case that seems to have stuck for him as an example was from the morning, about some word that he sometimes says in his video work meetings sometimes that reminds me of a time that I had used it in a meeting three to five years ago and now feel pretentious for having used it. I feel sorry that he has to explain himself this way. Every so often he explains himself as a polite way to excuse himself from some obviously careless or otherwise selfish demand from me that sometimes doesn’t immediately get through to me because it is done so devoid of aggression.

But at the moment, as he goes on to brush his teeth, I am reminded of a hidden reason I express my cringes out loud to him, likely the most affecting one: I want, or need, his attention. I am feeling bad and alone inside my own mind, and, in the most immediate sense, I don’t know what to do about it but to grasp for whatever affection, sympathy, or help I can get. But while I do believe that the feelings themselves –derived from years and years of neglect and denial-- merit honoring, I also know that I cannot dwell on them, and that he is right to encourage advancing towards the source.

Erik spits out the foam in his mouth and tries again to land his question. He asks me why some inane memory of that social sort matters so much. People make little blips here and there; it’s common. How do these things become so large in my head and why do I allow them to remain so?

I take a moment to think about how to concisely answer that complicated question. The answer generally points to my feeling that I did not present myself in a way that I would have liked to. I did not present myself in a way that I would have if it had not been for imperceptible pressures to account for various factors in place. I was trying to act in a way that I felt was myself, while nevertheless adapting my actions to account for how my interlocutors relate to me. When I tell him this, he knows what I mean.

Here I take a pause from the narrative to explain to the reader.

Given preexisting systemic power dynamics, cultural differences, as well as personal associations I have developed over the years, I might engage in a different way between: affable white men, Korean women who have found ways to be modern Korean women well, members of the queer community, or a myriad other people whose regards I might care for given who they are as a person. Each of these groups might present a different set of challenges. In the examples listed, respectively: they set the normative standard for American culture and behavior, they have achieved a way of being that I had wanted to but did not know how, they view people’s gender or sexual identities in ways that I also think I believe in but may not have fully learned to incorporate in my worldview, or they might otherwise be closer or farther to the center than I am in ways that merit consideration. Despite the challenges, it is necessary for me to account for them and, as one might say in the common parlance, be cool.

I was trying to be myself with them, but something went wrong. I misinterpreted or was not familiar enough with their worldview or line of thinking. Whatever I said, I might have afterwards felt (whether due to their reaction or simply some other internal realization) that what I said was reacting to the wrong thing, said in the wrong way, or simply overreacted to who they were. If they are white men I might also be hit with the question of why it must all be so difficult and complicated. Why do I make these backwards flips and summersaults when one can simply stand upright, as they do?(6)

Many of these are not significant disconnects. One might even say that, on the surface level, they are frequent and natural when any two modern urban Americans meet. I would likely believe that. But these memories are also chaotically mixed with more substantial ones that might more commonly be deemed to merit embarrassment, together adding up to me feeling gravely exposed.(7) With my body remembering my history in a way that my mind cannot, my intense cringes tell me that there was a history of similar such misses that revealed me for not fitting in. I cannot trace whether these moments are the cause or effect of me feeling so much an other.

Back to our narrative. Erik finds that mysteries remain.

He has washed and dried his face and is putting on his rather ineffective anti-acne medication. He understands why my feelings are there. But, given how well he knows me, he suspects that there is something else happening –otherwise these feelings wouldn’t remain as they do. What is the importance of presenting myself in a way that I did not like? People grow up and change all the time –could not I just view these cringe moments as part of a process of growing and save myself a lot of grief? Why do I keep placing such importance on showing a consistency of identity to these people that aren’t even a substantial part of my life?

I tell him that I don’t know. I’ve been standing on the bathroom floor, not knowing what to do with my body --to lean on the wall, to sit on or put one foot up on the bathtub edge. It’s a tiny and awkward New York bathroom not meant for two or more people to congregate in it. I’ve been watching him wash up and trying to engage with him, make sense of myself to him. It’s a unique sort of vulnerability that I am quite used to by now. It is marked by not knowing myself well enough, not being sure of myself well enough, not knowing who among my people might know us well enough (if there even is such a thing as my people), in the face of someone –an educated liberal white man, albeit one that adores me-- who knows themselves.

“I think there’s something Korean here,” he says as he finishes up his routine. “I think you’re right,” I say in quiet shock as we leave the bathroom. I mark this as another point that merits investigation.

---

Endnotes

(1) I will not delve into what I have found that previous stages have consisted of here because, truly, I can’t share *everything* about the insides of my life. But for anyone else that might be seeking to making this transition (I am particularly thinking of those who have experienced trauma –immigrants, BIPOC, women and gender nonconformists might fall in this category even if they are not aware of it), for now I say that it is a long journey that is not easy but entirely worthwhile. If one is able to and chooses to embark on it, I heartily support it.

(2) My therapist asked me, when I had told her that I get bad memories, whether I self-soothe in any way? I think that started it off.

(3) For example, as we continue to see how I am growing into myself while trying new things, he says that when we married five and half years ago, I was completely unmotivated to do anything. Well, I suppose this one is not so much that I cannot recall it, but rather about the pain of its remembrance. But I’ve come to learn that it is the same with me speaking Korean. As great as I am at it for someone who has never been; the hard part isn’t the technical aspect of it, but the emotional associations that I have with speaking it. Remembering, speaking, and being have all become rather thorny in some ways, I suppose.

(4) I just haven’t got to unpacking things before that in this way. But also, moments from beyond that far back, on the whole, don’t matter as much to my present being.

(5) Here’s an idea: The Cringe Podcast. It can be hosted and produced by a single person. Guests come on and share stories of moments that made them CRINGE. It is a podcast to induce and share moments of cringe. If you’d like to start it (you’re welcome!), you can send me $500 and a tube of toothpaste.

(6) There is, too, a version of the same with certain unexamined sorts of Korean men when I might see or engage with them in Korean cultural contexts. But thankfully I have not come across these types since the more conservative spaces in graduate school. And still, when (at least) in the broader context of the West, where white supremacy reigns, I know that they have good reason to potentially feel threatened by white men, too.

(7) Of navigating this country as an immigrant other (if not through my own experiences, then felt vicariously through other dear immigrants), of not having given enough of a d*mn, or of simply acting oddly. Sometimes, I have no idea what is the difference.