Still Here

I am not anti cringe, like truly you can miss me with all the phrasing of cringe is dead or whatever because for me, like at least in my head and the world around me, cringe is alive and that’s really fine actually! you don’t need to scrub the feeling of 😬😬😬 from your brain in response to you or anyone else, you can find something that you do to be cringe, you can find something that someone else says to be cringe, like it’s literally fine you just need to disconnect the “this feels cringe to me” feeling from the “therefore I need to ridicule or avoid it” reaction

I love to do things that make me cringe! I love to make silly earnest mistakes and go oh boy! 😬 oh no! I love to invite friends to my novice improv shows and write self indulgent poetry and be embarrassed at myself and know that other people might find what I say or write to be cringe because honestly that is part of the fun for me! Because when you do something in spite of cringe you get to go “oh well, me having a little bit of fun is more important than that bad feeling” and in my experience that is actually very good for self esteem. But if you try to pretend like cringe doesn’t exist then you don’t get to make that kind of decision consciously and you don’t get to celebrate it consciously either

this is not something that I’m trying to say everyone needs to live by but I’m just saying if you feel like in order to live joyfully first you need to put a bunch of work into never cringeing at yourself or someone else and in the meantime you are struggling to be a silly little goose because you haven’t therapized yourself enough yet then maybe you should just get rid of that hurdle entirely and just vibe whether or not cringe is a part of it

tldr: cringe doesn’t have to be dead it can be alive and something you live joyfully in spite of if that works for you