Let’s talk about awkward moments.

They happen to everyone, as far as I know. (wait, that’s an assumption on my part. If you or anyone you know never has awkward moments, I want to get to know you! How do you do it?) Ok, aside from possibly-mythical, never awkward people, everyone has awkward moments. Some of us are lucky enough to have LOTS of awkward moments, or to even feel awkward all the bleeping time in certain social contexts.

In the first half of my life, awkwardness permeated more or less all of my social interactions. Good ones, bad ones, indifferent ones, all had SO MUCH of the awkward. Fixing my social skills to the point of not having so much awkwardness was a never-ending journey (still is, really), so eventually I went and found a way to deal with the awkward directly. It goes something like this:

*awkward moment happens*

“Boy, that was awkward!”

*move on to something else*

Simple as that.

I think ending here might make for an awkwardly short blog post. I know! I’ll make more words!

Ok, you know what is NOT in my script? Dwelling on how awkward that awkward moment was. My old script used to be more like this:

*awkward moment happens*

“Boy, that was awkward!”

*fidgeting*

“So… uhh…”

*awkward face*

Ack, what do I do now?! This is so awkward!

Ad infinitum.

Let me tell you, from way more experience than I’d like to have, that doesn’t work. Not at all. Now I think that awkwardness is some kind of cannibalistic monster that feeds on itself. Dwelling on the awkward just feeds that monster and makes it grow to ridiculous proportions. But a small awkward monster can even be cute, provided we make sure it stays small.

Thing is, awkwardness does not have to be horrible. Feeling shame about feeling awkward does not actually help me learn to not be awkward. It just helps me to feel SO AWKWARD in ways that get progressively more difficult to deal with.

So basically I have decided that:

1. awkwardness is ok and

2. it does not actually need very much of my attention

So far this method is working really well for me.

How do you deal with those moments of awkwardness?