the power of cringe
or, learning to love the parts of yourself the world wants you to hide
Before we start this very long essay, I just wanted to say that today marks five years since I released my poetry collection Water Runs Red. So many amazing people have taken the time to read it, and it means so much to me that anyone would read my words - either in a book or in a newsletter. If you’ve already bought it, thank you for appreciating my cringe. If you haven’t read it and you want even more cringe, it’s available to buy in paperback on Amazon.
(It’s also my mom’s birthday again - happy birthday mom!!)
Thank you all so much!!!
For as long as I can remember, people have told me I have bad taste. (They’ve also told me I have really great taste, but this post is not about that!) I cannot tell you how many times my friends have sent me an exasperated text message because of a song I was listening to or a show I was interested in. There was a phase when I was a teenager where I called myself names like “nerd” because I thought if I was self-aware about my bad taste and unpopular interests, if I owned it and pretended like the ridicule didn’t bother me, maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad when people inevitably made fun of me for it.
(Somewhere underneath the surface of this post there is commentary on how I may or may not be neurodivergent with autistic traits and a tendency for masking, but that’s a post for another day.)
The truth is, as I’ve entered my late-twenties, I’ve tried to get better at embracing the cringe. I have spent a lot of my life hiding myself and hiding the things I care about - this all started in 2006, when I spent every waking second outside of school on Neopets, and I didn’t want any of my friends to know - but thankfully, I’m starting to feel more confident about just liking what I like. I think embracing cringe has been a huge factor in my own journey with self-love, and in hindsight, it is one thing that has really boosted my self-esteem. Strange, I know, especially since so much of my teen years were spent feeling like garbage for enjoying something as fun as High School Musical.
Self-love is a process, always and forever, but I’m so grateful that I’ve reached a place in my life where I not only love myself, but I am also kind of proud of all the weird things I love.
A lot of people like to ask “what’s your guilty pleasure?” And back in the day I always had an answer lined up because I felt bad liking just about everything that interested me. I was too old to be watching Disney Channel. I shouldn’t be spending all my time coding HTML pages for a kids’ site like Neopets. I liked Taylor Swift a little too much. The list went on and on forever, and I often stopped finding joy in my favorite things because so many people looked down on me for enjoying them. My favorite things became secrets I hid under my bed, only taking them out in the comfort of my bedroom or the anonymity of the internet.
Sure, most of this comes down to the fact that middle schoolers are vicious and adolescence makes you feel like there’s a spotlight shining on you in your underwear, but even as I graduated and entered my twenties, I still found myself hiding pieces of myself away. I couldn’t enjoy things too much or else someone would throw it back in my face. My favorite things could be used to hurt me, to make fun of me, to turn someone against me. Because in all honesty, I do have very weird taste. I am a firm believer that I can enjoy almost anything if I put my mind to it, and the older I get the more things I want to learn to enjoy.
And to some extent, everybody likes weird shit. Everybody is cringe in their own way, and that’s why I try to be open-minded about as many things as possible. I’ve done a lot of work to grow and change and adapt, and most of that comes down to the fact that so many people have made me feel like shit for enjoying things. Now obviously there are some things that nobody should enjoy (Nazis, the 45th President, etc.) but those things aren’t cringe, they’re just Evil. The cringe I’m talking about here is, well, let me give you some personal examples.
An incomplete list of things people have made me feel embarrassed about enjoying (some of which are more problematic than others): “End Game” by Taylor Swift, Sam Hunt, 100 gecs, the Donny Osmond Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat production, Neopets, High School Musical, Taylor Swift, Twilight, Sarah J. Maas, The Mortal Instruments, Sleepover (2004), twenty one pilots, “All You Had to Do Was Stay” by Taylor Swift, Addison Rae’s debut EP, Dad-Rock bands (3 Doors Down, Nickelback, etc), Big Brother and other reality TV shows, Ed Sheeran, The Greatest Showman soundtrack, Kesha, DCOMs, Selena Gomez, Taika Waititi movies, Hannah Montana, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021), Charli XCX, Kim Possible, Beyoncé (yes, even her), Teen Titans (2003-2005), 5 Seconds of Summer, Tumblr, country music, Demi Lovato, Dua Lipa, Glee, pop music, metal music, emo music, Hold the Girl by Rina Sawayama, Imagine Dragons, Our Flag Means Death, books written by white men (especially fantasy), horror movies, any Marvel movie post-Endgame, movie musical adaptations (Russell Crowe in Les Mis), covers of classic songs, Nicholas Sparks movies, Dakota Johnson movies, Starkid, reading classic literature, reading non-fiction books, this song…
Upon writing that list, the main feeling that comes up is anger. Because even though I know not all of these are accessible or mainstream, a lot of them are super broad. Whole genres of music, entire categories of books or movies, a variety of people and artists who make all kinds of different things. And more than anything, I’m realizing just how often I’ve hung out with people who straight up did not respect me or my interests. I get it if you don’t like what I like, I’m not asking you to become the next 100 gecs stan, but some of these things elicited vehement responses every time I mentioned them. I’ve known people who always make me feel bad about enjoying things, regardless of whether it’s a Nickelback song or a Taylor Swift song or a movie I used to love when I was in grade school.
And that is the reason why so many of us grow up hiding and shrinking ourselves for other people. We are taught from a young age that we should not be too much. Don’t play your music too loud, not everyone likes that song! Don’t talk about that TV show, other people don’t like pirates! Don’t get interested in something after everybody else does, people will lose interest and stop engaging with you! Do not care too much about anything because your joy is less important than other peoples’!
Because at the heart of this, that is the issue. It’s not that it’s bad that I like listening to country-rap music. What’s bad is that other people do not like country-rap and they do not want to hear about it, and therefore they cannot suspend their dislike long enough to hear why it’s so enjoyable to me. And this goes both ways, by the way. I’m not immune to this behavior. I’m so sorry to my brother but I just do not have the patience to listen to him run on about his sports stats. However! I think the big distinction here is that some people take other peoples’ interests as an opportunity to insult the other person rather than giving them the space to talk about something they enjoy. It’s all about respect, actually.
When people talk about “cringe,” it’s this dark, embarrassing thing. It feels very middle school to see that someone is interested in something and immediately try to tear them down and act superior just because you personally hate (or don’t understand) that something. And sometimes, I don’t even think it’s about the thing that that person enjoys. I think we as a patriarchal society that has spent generations conflating “hysteria” and “being emotional” with womanhood and inferiority, treat all kinds of non-neutral reactions to things as something to be ashamed of. If you’re too excited about something, you’ll be ridiculed. (Taylor Swift accepting awards in her coming-up is a perfect example of this.) You can’t care too much or else you’ll be seen as unstable. You can’t enjoy something too much because you’ll be seen as childish. You can’t talk about the things that interest you too much or else you’re selfish.
And again, there is something ableist underneath all this in relation to neurodivergent people and people on the spectrum who do have special interests, who hyper-fixate on things, who experience the world in a “non-typical” way. If you get too interested in something, suddenly you are not normal and the world is worried about you. And that’s just not fair.
In some ways, no matter what you do, you will be shamed for whatever you are, especially when you’re going through puberty. (Maybe this has changed for the current generation, although I doubt it.) It actually doesn’t matter what you enjoy because unless it is something that is part of patriarchal heteronormative white-supremacist norms, people will immediately judge you and shame you for it. If you’re someone who enjoys American football or basketball, or movies by respected (white male) directors and creators, or music by old-school white male rockstars (think The Beatles or Led Zeppelin), then hey! Congratulations! You will probably not be criticized because our society has decided that you officially pass the test of Straight White Christian Middle-Class Neurotypical Cis Man!
The part where this all starts to get dicey is when you flip the script and surround yourself with people who are trying to break out of the Norms Box. Because yes, even though I do love Sam Hunt - who is the perfect example of a stereotypical all-American White Man, who is beloved by all the people who fit the norms stated above - I also surround myself with a lot of people who go against those norms. Suddenly I am shamed for liking something so typical because so much of my world aims to be divergent. When I was growing up and going to school with a lot of typical people, I was shamed for enjoying girlie, “childish” art when I was “old enough to know better,” like Twilight or Hannah Montana.
More than anything, I just find this interesting. For as often as people outside the norm are hurt by “normal” people shaming them for their interests, these people have no problem shaming the people who do gravitate more towards the norm. Which is to say, we are all stuck in this horrific cycle of criticizing everyone for the things that bring them joy because we want to claim superiority. And obviously there is nuance needed here. Minorities deserve better, the norms should be challenged, etc etc. But I can root for systemic improvement while also recognizing that sometimes we don’t have to leap down other peoples’ throats for enjoying things that we personally don’t like (within reason).
All this shame starts to affect people and their self-esteem, especially because we start shaming people at such a young age. Pretty much by the time you enter your pre-teens, the people around you start judging you seriously for your interests, your appearance, and your self-expression. If you try to deviate from the norm (and sometimes the norm in certain settings is diverging from the norm, if you know what I mean), you are ridiculed.
Growing up I wouldn’t say I was a victim of bullying. I had a lot of friends, and a lot of the popular kids at school were kind to me when we interacted in class. I didn’t run home crying or feel traumatized by people talking shit about me behind my back. I had some weird friend-break-ups and there were girls who weren’t always nice to me, but overall, I had a great adolescence. (I mean, aside from raging acne, the constant belief that I was way too fat to be pretty, and the intense shame of enjoying things.)
My self-esteem was never super high because…why? Because girls are conditioned from birth to hate themselves. For as much as I enjoyed my own company, I grew up believing I wasn’t one of the pretty girls. I always felt like an outsider, like I never fit in with the stereotypical popular crowd, and I always felt awkward at school. Boys didn’t chase me, so clearly I was worthless. (This is a joke, but actually no it isn’t.) I went on with my life trying to convince myself I was loveable and beautiful, and people told me that all the time in various ways, but I couldn’t actually believe it. Surely I needed to fix myself. Surely I needed to stop being so cringe.
I think teenagers are destined to have low self-esteem no matter their circumstances. In every generation, there is an image we are told to strive for, sometimes subconsciously through marketing or art or celebrities, and none of us can ever reach it. We twist ourselves into shapes, hurting ourselves and our brains and our bodies, berating ourselves for not fitting into the smallest box in the universe, and when we fail, we shrink ourselves. We keep shrinking ourselves until we no longer recognize who we are, and we pray that if we can’t recognize ourselves any more, maybe then we’ll like the reflection staring back at us. But we don’t. We just feel smaller. And the cycle goes on and on and on until you not only do not fit into the box (it’s gotten smaller just like you), but now you’re not you anymore and so you not only lost yourself but you lost your joy.
You may be wondering how I went from that sad little teenager to the loud and proud person I am today. I was trying to explain my self-love journey to a friend the other day because she’s struggling to love herself at the moment, and I found it difficult to articulate but even more difficult to use as a guide for her struggles.
The answer that is helpful to nobody (but is also the truth) is that one day I just woke up and I didn’t hate myself anymore. (Okay, not true, I still have days where I am crippled with self-loathing, but that’s not what I mean.)
For as long as I could think coherently, I’ve spent my life with an underlying feeling of “You are the most annoying person on the planet and you’re so ugly and cringe, you are unimportant, irrelevant, and gross.” It was this sense that at my most basic level, I could create as much art as I wanted, make as many friends as I was able, but at the end of the day, I would never believe anybody would find me good enough to be around for more than a few days at a time. I believed that I mattered less than everyone else around me. I believed I would never be enough for someone to be attracted to me. (That’s probably the heart of the situation, actually.)
So much of my low self-esteem was held in the fact that I believed I was ugly. Which sounds ridiculous, especially because this post is all about having cringey interests, but it’s the truth. The reason I felt embarrassed about liking High School Musical in 2007 is because I wasn’t pretty. If you were pretty, you could like anything and everybody would love you for it. If you were awkward and you had acne, people would think you were weird for liking “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha. (It doesn’t matter that a few years later it would be one of the biggest hits of the decade. You had acne! How gross!) And as someone who has always had social anxiety and skin problems, I was pretty much destined to hate myself.
And I did hate myself for a long time. Middle school was terrible. High school was a little better, but still rough. By the time I entered college, I had accepted my status as self-proclaimed “ugly girl,” and I decided it didn’t matter so much. I could be ugly, who cares. I still had friends. I could listen to my iPod whenever I wanted. Maybe things were okay! Eventually I got desensitized to it and I stopped thinking about it every second of the day. Being ugly was not the worst thing in the world, and I wasn’t even that ugly. Or ugly at all!
My skin cleared up for a few years and I started wearing a wide variety of new clothes, testing out my self-expression and deciding that actually, sometimes I am kind of pretty in my own way. I lost weight. I gained weight. I made new friends. I read a lot of books. I started gaining an internet following, and by some strange twist of fate, people really loved me and all my oddities. I started to embrace all the things that made me cringe in school because people online loved when I talked about Taylor Swift or YA Books or my favorite music. I let go. I allowed myself to just…be. To enjoy things.
I went on my first and only date when I was twenty-four, and ten seconds after walking in the door I decided it was not at all what I wanted. When I was twenty-five I realized I was aroace and I freed myself from the trappings of hetereonormative society. I realized I did not want a partner. I had long ago understood that I am not only attractive and desirable, but I could probably find a partner if I really wanted one. It wasn’t an issue of being ugly or awkward or gross…I just did not want to date anyone. What a relief! But I still felt sad on Valentine’s Day. I still thought I was worthless. I still felt cringe.
And then I entered my late-twenties. Everybody has always told me that when you enter your thirties, you stop caring about what other people think. Obviously I’m not there yet (next year…oh god…), but two months out from twenty-nine is pretty close to thirty, and these past few years I’ve noticed a huge change in myself. It’s probably a combination of all of these things I’ve talked about, but back to the original truth: one day I woke up and I could finally breathe. I didn’t feel the weight of the universe pressing down on my flabby stomach. I didn’t feel intense dread looking in the mirror. I didn’t feel like I had to hide myself and my joy under the bed. I just decided, fuck it. No, it was different than that. I didn’t decide anything really. I just stared at myself in the mirror, my cute little nose, my strong shoulders, my eyes that have seen a hundred thousand treasures, and I smiled.
I am stuck with myself for an indeterminate number of years. Could be upwards of fifty. Fifty more years! In this body! I’ve barely lived through twenty nine! And maybe it’s the fact that I watch my parents age every time I see them or the fact that I have a ganglion cyst on my wrist (yeah, what the fuck) or the fact that I just do not have the energy to keep hating myself anymore, but I am so tired of feeling like the worst person alive. I’m tired of not being able to have fun. To enjoy things. To discover new things. I want to sing at the top of my lungs and dance in the car with the windows down. I want people to see me and think, “Wow, she looks happy.” I want to stop spending so much of my precious time on this earth worrying about how other people perceive me when the only one that matters is me.
Unfortunately, all of that is unhelpful. It’s the age old saying of “the only way out is through” because the only way you love yourself is just…loving yourself. I can tell you how it happened for me, but there is no how-to guide. My life is my own and you will have to find your own path. But the thing that has been most helpful to me is leaning into the things I love.
The great poets of our time say “you are what you love,” and while that may or may not be true, it is a motto I live by. Or rather, “you are how you love.” It does not matter what you’re interested in. I’ve met people who love lizards, people who love crocheting women’s genitalia, people who like fucked-up horror movies, people who really love computer music. What matters more is how you love these things and how you love the people around you. Let’s stop calling anything a “guilty pleasure” because actually I refuse to feel guilty for loving what I love. It isn’t hurting anyone if I play a twangy country rap song on repeat for three days straight. The world isn’t going to end because I keep watching Marvel movies even when they’re not as good as Thor: Ragnarok. And my life is completely unaffected if you decide you want to get season tickets to the Lions’ games.
But we have to stop forcing people to shrink themselves to make ourselves more comfortable. You can sit through your best friend yelling about a new song they love. You can keep eating your dinner while your brother talks about baseball statistics. And you can attempt to ask questions when your friend starts giving you details about something like the Chernobyl explosion. Cringe is not about bad art or bad taste, it’s about superiority complexes and society’s overall inability to be uncomfortable. It’s about putting people down in order to maintain some weird kind of control over them. It’s about perpetuating harmful stereotypes and confining society to norms it never needed in the first place. It’s about equating immaturity to liking certain things. It’s about ableism and sexism and ageism and racism and so many other isms. It’s about capitalism.
I can’t make you feel beautiful. I can’t give you the magic secret for how to not feel embarrassed about being a person who exists with needs and desires and dreams and regrets. But I can give you permission to love what you love. I can tell you that being cringe isn’t a bad thing, and it’s actually a social construct anyway. I can tell you that your shame is suffocating you and only you can free yourself from it. And I can tell you that loving what you love unabashedly will one day set you free.
And if you don’t know what you love anymore, either because you never figured it out or you had to bury pieces of yourself in order to survive, then this is an invitation to figure that out. It takes practice to find joy, but I promise it is out there waiting for you. And you don’t have to subscribe to the stereotypical interests or constraints, by the way. Maybe you don’t need more hobbies, you just need to be okay with the hobbies you do now. Maybe you need more time to watch TV. Maybe you need to cook more. Maybe you just need to listen to a few songs on your way to work. There isn’t a minimum or a maximum you need to fulfill. Everybody is different, and you do not have to hyper-fixate on something to call it an interest. (I know, shocking.)
I’m still working on overcoming the aversion to cringe. I still get sad when my friends make fun of me for enjoying things, but I’m getting better at blocking it out. I went to a Sam Hunt concert the other night and I had so much fun by myself. I am very excited to see the third Venom movie when it comes out, even if it’ll probably be three stars at best. I still turn my Taylor music to full volume when I’m driving so I can bless everybody’s ears at the stop light. I’m learning how to let myself be, even though I’ve known how to be myself for a long time.
Long live the cringe, may she give us back our joy.
And hey, the next time somebody is really excited about something, maybe don’t roll your eyes or make fun of them for it. Life is short, and the whole world is dying, so maybe we can all just let people enjoy things.
Bonus content: I made a playlist on Spotify of the songs most likely to be labelled as a “red flag” depending on the audience aka my favorite cringe music that people have laughed at me for enjoying.
"Let’s stop calling anything a 'guilty pleasure' because actually I refuse to feel guilty for loving what I love." YES, EXACTLY!! I've been saying this for years, so thrilled to hear it through someone else.
Lovely post, warmed my heart seeing all the sweet old photographs <3
I can totally relate to this as an aroace autistic person! Growing up, I was often shamed for having certain special interests, especially fantasy books. My parents kept insisting that I read less and interact with people more, but as a socially anxious and unknowingly neurodivergent teenager, my special interests helped me to cope with life. It is amazing to look back at my younger self who was so lost and confused and to see where I have become, now being a book blogger who writes about fantasy books that my parents never could stop me from reading.