Cringe

When I click on a random YouTube video and I see that its like, 7 minutes long, my immediate response is almost always an internal "no WAY do I have time for that!". Meanwhile, when I click on a ContraPoints video and see that it's almost an hour and a half, I feel delighted and excited. Rather than not having time for it, I instead look for the first available moment I can fit it in. Her discussions and dialectics transcend the short immediacy of internet time for me.

With regards to the video contents: I used to replay my cringe moments, as we all do, on loop in my head, feeling a visceral and gut-punching shame. Here are some moments that used to trigger it for me:

• The time in eighth grade where I called my science teacher "Mom" in front of the entire class
• That time in high school where I bowed to social pressures and asked a girl to Homecoming even though, as a closeted gay guy, I knew I wasn't interested in her nor the dance
• That time in high school where I didn't want to lead on that girl I asked to Homecoming but would look suspiciously gay if I didn't go to my senior Prom, so I fearfully asked a different girl to that dance, breaking the first girl's heart
• The time, in college, where I walked head-first into a stop sign on a busy street
• The time I, at a concert, tried to get a dance circle going with the people around me and nobody joined me
• That time I continued, for far longer than I should have, to try to get the dance circle going when it was already clear that nobody was interested and people were incredibly put off by both my dancing and my exhortations that they join me
• That time I, at the same concert, decided that in no way was I going to cut my losses and I was stubbornly going to fucking dance until somebody joined me, damn it
• That time I then slinked away under the pretense of getting water or merch or something (I can't even remember my excuse) as an out that let me "save face" for my completely failed social pressuring

I used to relive these moments in my mind and wallow in their depths. And these were but a few. There were many, many others.

I don't remember where I picked it up, but I found a technique that significantly helped me decrease the severity and frequency of these self-cringe moments. Try the following thought experiment: cycle through important people in your life (e.g. friends, family members, etc.) and try, for each one, to identify their cringe moments.

You might be able to come up with one or two, especially if they were particularly momentous or entered social lore so they get retold often, but for the most part you'll likely find it impossible to come up with genuine cringe moments for most of the people you know. The inversion of this applies to you: most of the people who know you, even those that know you really well, likely won't be able to identify your cringe moments.

I had friends at that concert. For a long time, part of my cringe was that people who knew me were around to see my protracted social nosedive, and another part of it was that even my friends didn't buy in to my dancing idea. This produced agonizing questioning on my own part. Did my friends see me like the strangers at that concert, weird, annoying, and lacking all self-awareness? Did my friends actually like spending time with me or were they just putting up with me? I thought this one moment was the surfacing of the tip of a much larger and devastating iceberg. There was a giant truth hidden well beneath the waters, and I had been blissfully unaware of its magnitude until then.

Years later, I brought it up with one of them, and they didn't even remember the concert, much less my painful, embarrassing gaffe! There was no iceberg. It was just a moment, like any other moment -- fleeting and short and eventually lost to time. Like Natalie points out in the video, there's an element of narcissism to self-cringe, and realizing this is actually liberating in a strangely nihilistic way. Nobody cares about you as much as you care about yourself, which also means that nobody's cringing about you as much as you're cringing about yourself (granted, this was before the internet apparently made cringing a spectator sport and video made moments eternal, so who knows if this is still true).

I realize self-cringe is actually a small part of the video, but for me it was the part that was most relatable. I don't really surf cringe subreddits or watch cringe compilations. I always just dismissed them as cyberbullying (which they are). The closest I come to that type of content is The Office, so a lot of what she discussed was interesting but not incredibly resonant for me specifically.

I will say that I'm a firm believer in the idea that reducing self-criticism is the path to the acceptance of others. When I was a fledgling gay in a deeply homophobic environment, raised on a diet of self-hatred and fear, it was easy and gratifying for me to look down on ::turns on megaphone and sirens:: the "bad gays" in our midst, who are not one of the "good gays", like me. Unlike the other cringe moments I shared above and have moved past, reflecting on this period of my life fills me with a sustained, genuine shame that makes my stomach drop to this day. For example, I used to use that common slur for gay men, so often hurled in hate against me, to criticize effeminate or flamboyant gay men. I didn't realize it at the time, but my gay identity was rooted in putting them down as a way of propping myself up.

It's easy to just say that it was a product of my environment and situation, but what triggers my shame most strongly when I reflect back is that there was genuinely some of me there. Yes, societal homophobia trained me to dislike sassy, swishy men, but also part of me really did feel genuine contempt. There was a hatred there, and I owned part of it.

I'm no longer that insecure person, and not in the sense that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. This isn't a false security, in a sort of "the lady secure gay man doth protest too much" kind of way. Instead, I stayed in the self-acceptance cycle long enough to wash out my self-loathing, which had the byproduct of washing out much of my prejudice as well. I came out of the laundry with the sort of self-indifference talked about in the video. Because I'm not insecure in my identity, others' sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions are no longer threatening to me. This, consequently, makes acceptance of them incredibly easy. Like, effortless. Like, invisible. I don't have to consciously decide to accept someone's self-expression because there isn't any barrier for them to overcome anymore. It no longer matters to me how other people identify or present themselves, because, well, that has no bearing on me.

The video talks a lot about obsession, and I think there's a lot more there than just the morbid cringe aspect. I think much of modern internet life enables and promotes obsession, and I don't even think obsession is fundamentally bad on its own. Obsession mixed with insecurity or prejudice, however, is absolutely as toxic as can be. The story of Chris-Chan in the video made my heart hurt in a deeply profound way. No matter what we say or how we say it, there is always an implicit message about our values that is carried in how we choose to spend our time. Or, more succinctly, our obsessions reveal what we value and what we don't. When we speak about ourselves, we're often speaking about our idealized self-concepts, but our obsessions speak a truth for us that we often can't or won't realize, much less confront.