Yes, it has happened to everyone. There you are, having a nice day when all of a sudden your brain decides that no, you’re having too good of a time. In a fraction of a second, it has selected the most embarrassing, wince-inducing, hindsight-triggering moment from your ever-increasing memory archives and is now presenting it to you with as much clarity as if it were just happening right now. Only one reaction is acceptable.
You Cringe. Imagine what you’ll be cringing about tomorrow.
There’s been a lot of content about these moments, most of them by either #relatable people or the ones that see it as a positive indicator. The former focusing on the feeling itself, the latter reaching the logical conclusion that cringing at yourself must be celebrated. It demonstrates progress. After all, you wouldn’t be cringing if you hadn’t learned from the experience. And while the former camp is very amusing, it makes a lot of sense to accept the cringe and be part of the latter one.
It doesn’t take too long for me to find my own cringe. Some of it is plain to find on the internet. I’ve written on and off on it for over a decade now, and it’s safe to say with the knowledge benefit of all of that time that the quality of my earlier work is…spotty. And the work earlier than that can be barely considered writing. The same goes from everything including code, personal preferences, hairstyles, and even speech patterns. Everyone who attempted to speak in l33t sp43ak back when that was a thing is experiencing that pain even as you read this.
And it’s perfectly okay. People spend their entire lives learning how to do things; sometimes willingly, oftentimes not. Most with a side dish of embarrassment that grows to a main course when remembering it.
So what to do about the cringe moments? Well, the past is in the past so there’s little to do about that. There’s something to be said about laughing at them. After all, you’re not going to be doing them again (you’ll be doing new, more refined cringe moments) and the other people involved with them, rest assured, have either forgotten about them or are laughing at them themselves. As for cringe online, the temptation is hard to basically un-person past you and all its hot takes and poorly thought-out trains of thought. But there’s something to be said about having some sort of yardstick for your progress. If you absolutely must deal with it though, maybe leave a couple in there, the ones that are less likely to cause you to wish to be swallowed by the earth.
Removing them is folly. Chances are you’ve done something embarrassing not that long ago and its effects will truly hit sometime far in the future. Embrace it. Roll with it. I’m doing so right now; I expect this article is going to be absolute cringe (or whatever term we use then for it) by the time I come back to it in a couple of years.
