So I’m trying to start a movement. I think I’ll call it the awkwardness appreciation movement. In short, I believe that the emotional/affective/psychic experience that we often call awkwardness is beneficial, necessary for personal growth as well as social change, and should be courted rather than avoided.
In critical theory, much attention has been paid to the experience of shame. Shame, theorists say, is a moment of intense awareness of how you are different from other people, often accompanied by the fear that your difference is unacceptable. In this way, shame simultaneously creates the sense of differentiated individuality and the desire to re-aggregate with the whole. In shame’s hot intensity, you see yourself from a new angle. Your perspective on yourself expands to include the shared context of others.
The problem is that shame has a stopping force. It can freeze you like a wild animal sensing the rifle sights. It’s hard to let your perspective on your own significance shift when you’re afraid you’re going to be annihilated. In the face of shame, childhood defense mechanisms (however useless) rush in to protect you: fight, flight, freeze, play dead.
Awkwardness, however, is shame lite. If shame is the terrifying fall into the cavernous gap between self and other, awkwardness is the giggly, heart-racing fear you feel when peering over the edge. There is space to move and breathe inside awkwardness, but it is still a meditation on the sometimes-precarious experience of being a self surrounded by other selves that are constantly affecting you and being affected by you.
In awkward experiences, we sense the precariousness of our ego boundaries as well as the sheer randomness of the social conventions that regulate our interactions with each other. In that heightened sphere of awareness, you wonder how else you could be, other than the way you are right now, and how else we could be together within the grip of this strangely funny, embarrassing, uncomfortable moment.
Awkwardness is vulnerability with its fly unzipped.
Awkwardness is a prologue to transformation and invitation to grace.
I love this. My bachelorette party was last night, and it started out awkward, like any event that is sort of loosely designated to be a transition moment. I caught myself savoring it: the feeling that maybe I was supposed to say something, or make a speech, but not really sure; the rituals that Claytie led us through were ones my friends were unpracticed at but dove into with a good will and lots of heart; and the intermittent pain of social blockage kept breaking through to intimate conversation. Viva the awkward.
ReplyDeleteI love this!
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