What Is Embarrassment?

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Many people are conditioned to be their own harshest critics.

This leads to easily becoming embarrased.

Embarrassment serves no useful purpose and can be overcome.

Several decades ago, I was horribly embarrassed. I lived on an apricot ranch near the university. I brought in much-needed income by working in the apricot drying shed in the summer.

One morning, in excitement, I shared with a co-worker that I’d found out I was pregnant. After our lunch break, she approached me with something pretty in her palm and said, “This is to celebrate your pregnancy.” Thinking it was a pretty rock, I took it out of her hand without delicacy. Suddenly, it started oozing fluid on my fingers. She looked at me in horror and yelled, “What are you doing? That’s a chrysalis!”

A chrysalis is the hard skin covering a caterpillar as it metamorphoses into a butterfly. If it becomes detached from the silk spun by the caterpillar, but is handled gently, it can be reattached and still become a butterfly. This one would not. I’d seen to that. I was horribly embarrassed and spent the rest of the day in painful self-recrimination. I was convinced that my co-worker was telling others what I’d done. This only intensified my embarrassment and self-blame.

But what crime had I committed? I’d accidentally mistaken a chrysalis for a rock. For years, whenever I recalled that incident, I’d suffer embarrassment all over again.

What is embarrassment?

In general,........

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