Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in years (and I was never any good at it). I did very poorly. Small children zipped by me on the ice. It occurred to me that this situation could have been embarrassing, but I didn’t happen to feel embarrassed. I vaguely remember consciously editing out that reaction to that sort of situation, and think it was in response to my dad reacting badly to expressions of such embarrassment when I was years younger than I am now (maybe 12-15) but still older than others who would have been in beginner-classes-of-things I could have joined.
Interesting. It must be a nice cognitive situation to be in, or rather I guess I do remember what it was like. I spent many years almost utterly asocial and unaffected by what most people thought of me (at least in most ways), and it was certainly instrumental in allowing me to change life paths and develop new skills from the ground up, especially when it made me sacrifice a lot of perceived competence in the short term.
But since that time, or more specifically since I started being social again, this strategy has become defunct, and now I’ve re-acquired the standard, crippling fear of embarrassing myself in front of others. With anything I’m not already adult-level competent in, I have a hell of a time getting myself to go out there and not be afraid of screwing up and being judged by people.
This really sucks because there are at least a few things I’m unusually bad at that are highly important to me, and where the path to competence requires being around other people. I need to figure out a new way to avoid the fear of making mistakes, and specifically one that doesn’t require staying away from people (which is how I used to handle it).
Oddly, I feel slightly embarrassed when I’m reading a textbook printout (in English, which most Russians can’t read) during a commute, and it’s only undergraduate or first-year graduate level pure math, and not something more advanced...
Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in years (and I was never any good at it). I did very poorly. Small children zipped by me on the ice. It occurred to me that this situation could have been embarrassing, but I didn’t happen to feel embarrassed. I vaguely remember consciously editing out that reaction to that sort of situation, and think it was in response to my dad reacting badly to expressions of such embarrassment when I was years younger than I am now (maybe 12-15) but still older than others who would have been in beginner-classes-of-things I could have joined.
Interesting. It must be a nice cognitive situation to be in, or rather I guess I do remember what it was like. I spent many years almost utterly asocial and unaffected by what most people thought of me (at least in most ways), and it was certainly instrumental in allowing me to change life paths and develop new skills from the ground up, especially when it made me sacrifice a lot of perceived competence in the short term.
But since that time, or more specifically since I started being social again, this strategy has become defunct, and now I’ve re-acquired the standard, crippling fear of embarrassing myself in front of others. With anything I’m not already adult-level competent in, I have a hell of a time getting myself to go out there and not be afraid of screwing up and being judged by people.
This really sucks because there are at least a few things I’m unusually bad at that are highly important to me, and where the path to competence requires being around other people. I need to figure out a new way to avoid the fear of making mistakes, and specifically one that doesn’t require staying away from people (which is how I used to handle it).
Oddly, I feel slightly embarrassed when I’m reading a textbook printout (in English, which most Russians can’t read) during a commute, and it’s only undergraduate or first-year graduate level pure math, and not something more advanced...