Secondhand Embarrassment: The Moth Podcast

On this episode, we’re embracing the cringe with two stories that’ll you make you feel secondhand embarrassment. This episode was hosted by Emily Couch. Storytellers: Sarah Finucane posts a very unflattering photo to social media. Ceren Ege gives a pretty awful gift Podcast #1002

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Moth. I'm Emily Couch. There's a word in German called, and I'm going to do my best here, fremshamann. It's literally translated as "foreign shame," essentially that feeling you get when you cringe on someone else's behalf. Secondhand embarrassment, basically. We've all felt it, whether you've watched a friend get up on the dance floor and absolutely fail in their quest to boogie, you know, when they've cha-chad real rough. Or whether you've heard a wedding speech from the maid of honor that gave away just a few too many details about their bachelorette trip. There's a humor in it, yes, but also the realization that to be human is to be embarrassing. And pretty soon, you'll be the one out there with your metaphorical fly metaphorically unzipped.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  So on this episode, we're embracing the cringe with two stories that'll make you feel fremshamann. First up is Sarah Finnegan, who told this at a New York City Story Slam, where the theme was "comebacks." Here's Sarah, live with the Moth.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Sarah, thank you so much for coming, Dr. F. I am going to tell you about a time that I did something so embarrassing that I should really never be able to show my face in public again. And for a little bit of context, it's important to know that I am Irish, which means I hate myself. Irish people, we like to have a sort of healthy dose of self-loathing. We're taught it at an early age, and especially about our bodies, and especially as girls. We're told that our bodies are vessels with the potential for lust and sin, and so you

• 1:46Speaker 01

  should be really careful about not falling into that temptation and becoming a whore. So I've really tried to practice this separation between my body, my head and neck, and the rest of everything down below. Even in childbirth, I was politely looking away. None of my business. So you can imagine my embarrassment when I accidentally posted a naked photo of myself on Facebook.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I-- it was Saturday morning, like any other Saturday. And my daughter was playing on my bed with my phone, and I came out of my shower, I had my towel, and I sat next to her, and she was taking pictures of herself, taking selfies with filters. And we started doing it together, "I'm a cat, I'm a dog, how cute." And then my towel sort of slipped off, and I got this eyeful of my naked body through the camera lens, and it was absolutely horrific. And I thought, how hilarious to take the world's worst naked picture and send it to my husband, who was sitting there.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  And so, of course, I don't change my pose, and I am in the worst position, like my shoulders are kind of hunched over, my breasts are, like, dropping away, I have, like, that full melted candle body happening. My unpruned shrubbery is in full focus. My crowning glory of the two white thighs laid out in a kind of V, like a cadaver about to get an internal exam. And I take the picture, and I slap a pair of kitty paws on, as my daughter had just

• 3:57Speaker 01

  taught me, pointing at my who-ha, and I sexted to my husband, saying, "Don't you want some of this?" And I watch as he gets a notification, and he opens it up, and he's like, "Oh, what am I looking at here?" And he's kind of quizzical. And then he realizes, and he screams, and he throws his phone in the air like he's been scalded. And I laugh, and I laugh. 20 hours later. It's a Sunday morning, and I wake early, and I reach my phone out for-- I reach my

• 4:38Speaker 01

  hand out for my phone, and on there is a message on Facebook from a guy I went to college with 30 years ago. And it says, "Hey, Sarah, I'm wondering if you're feeling okay." So I feel a little nervous. "There is a picture on your page that you may not intend to have there." And I jump out of the bed, and I quickly go to Facebook, and you know that story part, that top? There's this little circle, and in that little circle is my bush. And I click on that, and there I am, out.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  I've been up for at least 20 hours, no likes. And I think, "Oh, my God, I'm going to die. I am literally just going to drop dead." I start feeling like I can't breathe. My husband, he's just sleeping peacefully, no idea that I've just broken the internet. And I am thinking, "Oh, this is actually the next natural step. I'm just going to die of shame."

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And then I think, "That's actually really poetic for an Irish person to die of shame." And I start to think about, "What can I do to fix it? Maybe I could put up pictures of myself on a bender or something to explain this." And then I start thinking about all the consequences. And here's where I should probably tell you, I'm a public high school teacher. And I have many former students on my page. And so I'm just standing there, thinking, "Oh, Jesus Christ. I am going to get into the paper, I'm gonna get a call from the superintendent."

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And then I think, "Oh, sweet God, I'm probably going to have to do one of those assemblies with the school about the danger of sexting." And I kind of stand in that same position. Nothing happens. Then my daughter wakes up, the day sort of begins, and I start to call friends, and I tell them, and people see the picture and laugh because I forgot to take it down. And I just move through the day, and I don't get a call from anybody, no journalists at the door, my mother didn't fly over from Ireland. And I start to think, "Oh, my God, I think I'm actually going to survive this." And the more that I think about it, the funnier it gets.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And when I'm telling my neighbor, she says, "You should just put that photo on your Facebook feed, and just put, like, hashtag feminist gold, hashtag naked, not afraid." And by the end of the day, I cannot believe that I am still standing and that I have survived this. And then I kind of think, you know, this is like flood therapy for me. And, you know, who am I? I'm so inconsequential, especially thinking about the stories we heard tonight. It's just me and my bush. Yeah, there's this, like, picture of me, a bad one, out there on the internet forever.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  But, you know, I am just a tiny speck on the planet, and the planet is just a tiny speck in the universe. Shit happens. Move on. Thank you so much.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  That was Sarah Finnegan. Sarah grew up in Ireland and has lived in New York City for 30 years, 25 of which she has spent in Brooklyn teaching high school English. She lives with a chef, an actor, and a yappy little dog. We asked Sarah what she thought of the story and the incident now, and she told us that she often lies awake in bed and runs the most mundane, embarrassing moments of her day over and over, but she's managed to completely release this one into the universe. She thinks it's because of the scale of it. She thought that she would die of shame, but she actually thinks it helped her remember just how small and insignificant we are. I think teenagehood is basically just six years of living in a constant state of humiliation.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Like most teens, I was embarrassed by everything, especially the existence of my parents, such as when my mom picked me up for my sophomore year homecoming dance. I already had a bruised ego from the night. All of my friends had been invited to an after-party, and I wasn't, so I was feeling low. Then my mom arrived at the school, and as I approached her car, she somehow managed to hit the gas and slam into a car belonging to one of my classmates. I was horrified. I stood there with my mouth agape, while my mother clearly embarrassed herself, climbed out of the car to apologize, swap insurance info with a teenager, et cetera, et cetera, only to reveal that she was in her pajamas and slippers. And that was it for me. Hoping no one had made the connection between me and the terrible driver in the fuzzy footwear,

• 9:52Speaker 00

  I just left, face red, crying, and tottering my way home on five-inch heels. I still feel bad for leaving her, and she still feels bad for humiliating me, but we can cringe and laugh about it together now. After the break, a story about giving and getting gifts. Back in a moment. Welcome back. Our next story is from Jaren Ega, who told it at a Boston Story Slam, where the theme was awards. Here's Jaren, live at the Moth.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Gift giving, for whatever reason, never went smoothly in my family. We even dangled the award of the worst gift giver each year. As a couple of examples, when I was 10 and my sister turned 14, I went to the dollar store with my mom and picked out this yellow, sand-filled hourglass and gave it to my sister and said some poetic words about how I was giving her the gift of time. And she later dropped this heavy hourglass on her foot and broke a toe.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  For one of my dad's birthdays, my mom took my dad to a fancy seafood restaurant, and that's when he discovered he had newly developed an allergy to shrimp.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Because birthdays and holidays started to become more of health hazards rather than celebrations, my mom conceded to saying that our love was enough for her. And my dad, once he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, just started to answer that time would be enough for him. I would tell him, I already tried getting that for my sister, and it did not go well.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Because of the terrible gift giving history in my family, I decided for Mother's Day in 2018, which was the first Mother's Day after we had lost my father, I was going to turn our family's fate. At the time, I was enrolled in this printmaking class at school, and we had just learned the process of photo emulsion, which allowed you to perfectly recreate a photo onto the print using tiny black dots, or a different color. And I decided that I was going to gift my mother a print of her favorite photo of our family, which was the four of us in front of the steps of the first home that my parents had ever bought in the States in St. Louis. For the second layer, I put a gold butterfly, where I centered the abdomen of the butterfly

• 12:17Speaker 02

  over my father, so that it looked like the wings were illuminating and protecting over our family. Now, the real kicker was going to be the third layer of the print. Back in high school, when my dad found out that I enjoyed poetry, he had grabbed his wallet and taken out a piece of paper and gifted it to me. In it was a handwritten poem that he said was back from his college years. It read, "To look into your eyes is to stand deep in the forest, surrounded by peaceful silence, shadows and sunlight, and joy." So I remembered this poem, and I was like, this is it. I'm going to print the words of this poem around the butterfly, and the words are romantic,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  and I don't think my mom knows this poem exists, and it'll be perfect. Best Mother's Day gift ever. I even told my sister not to try getting a gift that year, because mine was going to be that good. So it's May 13, 2018, and I eagerly hand my mother the wrapped print. She grabs it, unwraps it, smiles at the photo of the four of us, registers her fingerprints into the gold, and then pauses at the black words. "Is this your poem?" she asks me. And I'm so excited to tell her. Baba gave me a poem back when I was in high school. It was a poem he wrote from college. And I await her waterworks, but instead, her expression flattens, and without looking

• 13:45Speaker 02

  up, she goes, "That's not your father's handwriting."

• 13:52Speaker 02

  I let out a nervous smile, just like that one. And I go, "What do you mean? Yes, it is. He wrote this." And she goes, "No, it's not." And I get defensive, and I find an old notebook of his, and I open it next to the print. And the longer I look at the letters, the less they look like one another. And at this moment, my mother proceeds to tell me very important information, that when my father was in undergrad, he went to Germany, where he took poetry classes and had an American girlfriend. And up until this point, I had not considered why my father, who was a Turkish man and

• 14:35Speaker 02

  went to college in Turkey, would have written a poem in English.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  And before I can process the plausibility or pain of the fact that my father would have gifted me a poem either he wrote to his ex, or a poem written to him by his ex, I realize that I have just gifted my grieving mother a print with the romantic words of her late husband's ex circling over her favorite photo of our family.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Mm, me too.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  So at this point, I turned to go dig my own grave, and my mom grabs my hands, pulls her heart into mine, and thanks me for the print. Sometimes I think about how I gifted my sister an hourglass long before I knew time would be so valuable to our family, wishing that I could have gifted time instead to my mother to spend with my father, or wishing I could have gifted it to myself that day to go make a new print.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Although I will never know who actually wrote that poem, one thing is for certain. As of May 2018, I am the worst gift giver of our family. Thank you.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  That was Jaren Ege. Jaren is a Turkish-American writer and lawyer, currently living in New York City, playing around with new creative pursuits as time allows, posting her work online in hopes to connect with other artists. Jaren tells us that despite the mysterious source of the poem, she still loves catching a glance of that print when she's home, sitting in her family library. To her delight, her mom put it somewhere visible, and you see it shimmer when the sun is just about to retire from the day. She's grateful to this mystery for teaching her to be more okay with the unknown. We'll have a photo of the poem on our website, themoth.org/extras. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thanks so much for listening. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope all your embarrassments are either easily

• 16:55Speaker 00

  forgotten or make for great stories.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Emily Couch is a producer on The Moth's artistic team. She loves to work behind the scenes to spread the beauty of true, personal stories to listeners around the world. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Gina Duncan, Marina Kluchay, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardenale, Caledonia Cairns, Kate Tellers, Suzanne Rust, and Patricia Uranya. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.