You know that feeling. That sudden flash of memory that makes you physically cringe, maybe close your eyes, possibly let out an involuntary groan. It happened three years ago, or maybe last week, but your brain has decided to replay it in full HD at the most random moments: while you’re brushing your teeth, sitting in traffic, or trying to fall asleep.
Maybe you called your teacher “Mom” in front of the entire class. Maybe you waved enthusiastically at someone who was actually waving at the person behind you. Maybe you spent an entire meeting with something stuck in your teeth, or sent a text complaining about someone to that exact person, or tripped spectacularly in front of your crush. The specifics don’t really matter because we all have our own personal highlight reel of mortification.
Here’s what I want you to remember when that memory surfaces again: right now, in this very moment, you are living in someone else’s “remember when.” The embarrassing thing that happened to you has already faded into the background static of other people’s lives. That audience you’re convinced is still judging you? They’ve moved on. They have their own cringe-worthy moments occupying valuable real estate in their minds.
Think about it this way: can you vividly recall the most embarrassing thing that happened to your coworker two years ago? What about that awkward thing your friend did at a party last summer? Chances are, you’d have to really dig to remember, if you can remember at all. And if you do recall someone else’s embarrassing moment, I’m willing to bet you think about it with far less intensity and judgment than they do. You probably found it endearing, or you felt sympathetic, or you honestly just forgot about it five minutes later.
Time is strange in how it handles our embarrassments. While you’re living through the moment, it feels eternal, like the universe has paused to spotlight your humiliation. But time doesn’t actually stop. It keeps moving at its relentless pace, and with each passing day, your embarrassing moment gets buried under layers of new experiences, new conversations, new concerns. What felt like a defining moment of your existence becomes a tiny blip in the grand timeline of your life.
Five years from now, you might struggle to remember what you’re agonizing over today. Ten years from now, it might take you several minutes to recall the details, and you’ll probably laugh about it. Twenty years from now, it’ll be a funny story you tell at dinner parties, if you remember it at all. The sting fades. The significance diminishes. The world keeps spinning.This isn’t to minimize what you felt in that moment. Embarrassment is a real emotion, and it can be genuinely painful. But it’s also temporary. The gap between how big something feels right now and how small it will seem in retrospect is enormous. You’re living in the immediate aftermath where everything is raw and magnified, but you won’t always be here. Time is already carrying you away from that moment, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.The truth is that being human means occasionally doing awkward, clumsy, ridiculous things. It means misspeaking and misstepping and misreading situations. Everyone does it. The cool, collected people you admire? They have their moments too. They’ve just had enough time pass to gain perspective on them.
So the next time your brain decides to torture you with a replay of your greatest hits of humiliation, try to remember that you’re not stuck there. That moment is already receding into the past, getting smaller in the rearview mirror. Time is doing its work, quietly and constantly, turning your catastrophe into a footnote. One day, you’ll search for this memory and find it’s faded so much that you can barely feel it anymore.
And isn’t that a relief?