A Lesson on Embarrassment

When I was young, say 8 or 9 or so, I was in the waiting room of a doctor's office. I don't remember whose appointment it was, or why, but it doesn't really matter, I guess.

It was a long waiting time, and they always have those awful fluorescent bulbs. They use to bother me more when I was a kid, giving me headaches and making it hard to focus and process information and whatnot. The effect is the same now, but to a lesser degree.

There were other kids around. They played by the corner, where the kids' toys were. I wanted to go join them, but my mom said I was too old.

I love that thing where there are the beads, and there are the thin, plastic tracks they can follow in curvy paths to the bottom. I liked to envision it as an advanced public transportation system. Please board the Green Bead Line on its way to Chicago. Now boarding. Please have your ticket ready.

But I was too old, and certainly my sisters, one 2.5 years older than me, approximately, and one almost exactly 5 years and 4 days older than me, were too old, though they didn't express interest in these toys. When I was 13 visiting a neurologist for my seizures, there was a picture book about a Brain Cell. Or something like that. I should write fanfic for him.

The lights continued to glare, and people's names would be called, people picking up and flipping through magazines, babies crying. It was all so much. So, I made a dive for it, and I burrowed myself under the chair I had been sitting in and pretended I was in a Bomb Shelter, hiding from horrible and yet unknown threats from above.

My mom tried to get me out from under there, and tried to recruit my sisters for help. But no, they must be only clones of my family, trying to get me out of there so that I wouldn't be safe from the attack!

My sisters ended up joining in my play. Or at least, I thought so. Turns out they were just making excuses to be rowdy, but I didn't know, and I thought of them as the intruding army. I covered my ears so they wouldn't use their brainwashing propaganda tactics to turn me into a vampiric zombie. As presumably they would.

So I got out of the shelter and started pacing about in circles, humming to keep their threatening broadcasts from reaching my ears.

My mom whispers loudly, in that frantic-type voice, "Melody, you're embarrassing me!"

Without pausing in my circuit, I say, matter-of-factly, the wisest thing I believe came out of my mouth during my youth: "I can't embarrass you. You can only embarrass yourself."

Of course, what I meant was: The fact that I'm doing something doesn't embarrass you. It's that the thing I'm doing is something you don't look at as socially acceptable, because of what others might think, and so because of your attitudes, you are becoming embarrassed.

I thought of this as I took my written exam for taekwondo, and there was a question about attitude, and how it's important how you react to stuff.

"Life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it."

I knew how I would react to it. My mom now knows how she will react to it. How will you react to it?