Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this almost-visceral reaction to doing anything even faintly cringe. In fact, growing up felt like one long reckoning with how profoundly embarrassing it is to be a person. I remember once I wrote a poem, added a random published author’s name to it, and asked my dad what he thought. When he said it was rubbish, I immediately went, aha! I knew you thought I was an idiot. Of course, the real humiliation wasn’t the poem but the idea that I’d ever believed I had talent. My dad was horrified; both by my trap and by how thoroughly I’d foiled his attempt to install some creative self-esteem in his kid.
By thirteen I was making lists of every possible flaw to dodge cringe-induced shame. As a teenager, I only tried things I already knew I could excel at; anything I genuinely cared about but couldn’t guarantee brilliance in, I abandoned. Living under a gaze like that inevitably led me to seek a specific kind of male gaze that could hold out the ‘cool girl’ carrot in perpetuity.
Now, at the ripe old age of thirty, I’m seeing the paradoxical bed I’ve made: a lack of self-awareness is the most cringe of all, yet the more self-aware we become, the more alienated from ourselves we are. In other words, the more I try to avoid judgment, the more my social persona takes on a curated hyper-vigilance that is void of any substance if the person I’m speaking to hasn’t first authorised it. And being absolutely empty of any actual personality is, of course, the cardinal sin of cringe. What I thought would protect me has basically turned me into SpongeBob in that episode where he refuses to leave the house and lives on air. Except my ‘air’ is an inability to tolerate myself.
So, what is it to be cringe? And why are some of us barely living our own lives in fear of it?
From a dictionary point of view, cringe is doing something embarrassing or awkward. But the dictionary is useless here: saving a drowning puppy is awkward and not cool, but it isn’t cringe. You might say that’s because it’s sincere and kind, but then I could post a long, earnest caption on Instagram about saving the world and setting up a GoFundMe, and that is cringe.
Psychoanalytically, cringe could be argued to be the moment the subject confronts the gap between who they wish to be seen as and who they actually are; a kind of psychic jolt when the curated self-image collides with some small, undeniable reminder of their messy, needy existence. But then again, I don’t think cringe is simply a sincere truth we hide from ourselves; the thing that makes my GoFundMe embarrassing isn’t the cause, it’s the performativity of it. It’s my lack of awareness of how I might be seen, how desperately I’m trying to control that gaze. Cringe is, in part, an inability to dialogue with the Other’s gaze, but does that mean it functions as a kind of social capital?
For instance, the line between wit and cringe is razor-thin; most ‘self-aware’ jokes rely on it. In that sense, is cringe simply self-awareness masquerading as a clue to how culturally literate or intellectually savvy someone is? Existentialist philosophy… cringe if you’re over twenty-seven. Lacanian psychoanalysis? Cool if you’re an actual analyst, cringe if you’re just a theory guy. Jazz? Only not cringe if you truly understand it. Fine dining? Only not cringe if you can genuinely pay for it. Choosing these on-the-nose intellectual examples? Pretty cringe. Paradoxically, in all of these instances, cringe functions as a neoliberal brand-checker, constantly monitoring the legitimacy of our enjoyment as uniquely ours and not dependent on the gaze of the Other.
Then, cringe always flares up where we care most; acting as a kind of passage, whereby I want to enjoy something without the Other’s authorisation and yet I desperately want that enjoyment to be legitimised, too. And then, on top of that, opening up our most guarded traits to the Other is not only brutal, its kind of religious. At least God is supposedly all-loving; the gods we create are usually memories of those schoolmates who laughed at us and who now run their dad’s companies.
So, in that sense, I think ‘cringe’ acts as a kind of psychic tremor that reminds us of our division between the messy, divided, wanting parts of ourselves and our equally messy wish to be seen as unified, free-from-your-gaze creatures. And yet, my existence is as sincere as it is performative; to try and live a life free of that contradiction seems like it might be to not really live a life at all.
In other words, the things that make us cringe – wanting approval, posting a sincere GoFundMe, admitting we care – expose this division. So, maybe those of us desperate to enforce the social laws of embarrassment are really those of us struggling with the terror of that division. Or more specifically, with that fear that our division makes us truly strange, unlovable, incomplete. But, I’m growing to think that the only way to tolerate it is to lean into it: to let ourselves want, to let ourselves be seen wanting, and to endure the seismic embarrassment of being a person.
Written by Molly Fitz