Who Gets to Be Cringe?

On Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, and Instagram posts

Billie Eilish

I always find myself self-censoring. Whether it be with my writing, like thinking a passage in my book draft is corny… or will get me dragged online. Or even an Instagram story, where I'll be embarrassed to post a clip from the latest episode of housewives or Days of Our Lives that thrilled me. Never mind the fact that my followers are loooonnnnngggg used to my obsession with Bravo and the hourglass show. Never mind that I have an editor (not on this Substack tho, because that’s expensive!) who will tell me if a passage in my book needs sprucing up. Never mind that I'm being a bit narcissistic assuming a passage from my book would even "go viral." The days when Keep It was a number one podcast and I had half a million Twitter followers are long gone, thanks to Beto O'Rourke!!

Self-censoring has always been the root of my procrastination. Okay, maybe not the root (there's some ADHD in there too), but it's definitely a symptom. It what's keeps me from editing pieces I've written years ago, as if my years as pop culture critic and television writer have somehow made any idea I had in my early 20s null and void. Too cringe to revisit.

I had a reading on Monday of a play I first began working on in 2010. It was my playwriting thesis at NYU and at the time titled Double Feature. After I moved to Los Angeles, I mounted a two-night production of it re-titled Gay for Pay. Quite a bit changed in rewrites before the Los Angeles production, but the plot remained essentially the same. Twin brothers Vance and Caleb are reunited in 1979 San Francisco, where closeted Vance is jealous of his straight brother's career as gay for pay porn actor. Both were what I considered a success, so why did I then feel uncomfortable attempting to revive the play a decade later? Why did I cringe at every piece of dialogue I'd written back then and think it would be received poorly?

I hosted a reading of the play at my apartment last weekend with a few close friends reading the parts. Though I was uncomfortable hearing most of it aloud at first, that anxiety drifted away as I could tell my friends were enjoying it. And when I got positive feedback afterward, I began to wonder why I stopped sharing work-in-progress like I used to do before I got it into my head that everything had to be perfect before anyone beside me laid on eyes on it.

A tweet I read this week said, "creating is cringe." The entire art of spilling your thoughts onto a page should be uncomfortable and messy. How else are you going to clean up something if there's not a mess to begin with? Basically, as my friend and writer Bolu Babalola said, you have to get over yourself!

I think we become focused on what we think is "cringe" because of how others react. Is it cringe for a grown man to post Taylor Swift lyrics for each of his Instagram captions? Well, yes, even if he's hot (and it's usually the hot ones, but they're white, they can't help it). But the insistence on labeling her lyrics "cringe" is a bit too egregious online, where everyone thinks any instance uncomfortable outpouring of emotion is cringeworthy. Take the song "Down Bad" on Taylor's recent album The Tortured Poets Department. "Now I'm down bad / crying at the gym / everything comes out teenage petulance" was dubbed one of the album's worst lyrics by The Cut. But I don't know, if you cried at the gym, then you cried at the gym! And acknowledging the teenage petulance is actually pretty self-aware for Taylor.

Why do those lyrics come off cringe when some of the emotional diary entries from Billie Eilish on Hit Me Hard and Soft don't? Is it because they're not wrapped up in a bright, pop sheen of a blonde performer? Does Billie's persona and the horrorcore of her music somehow make her emotions more palatable and less cringe? Maybe so, but then why yesterday on the anniversary of my meeting the only ex in my life I could say that I actually loved, and still love to this day, did I feel cringe wanting to write out those sentiments using lyrics from Billie's album? 

Somehow, acknowledging that these lyrics meant something to me and also represent a moment in my own life felt completely embarrassing to me. Even in the confines of my finsta, where only my close friends would see it anyway? I posted it anyway, wondering if I'd ever be in a relationship again with someone who cares about me as much as he did. And then I went to sleep, only to find that my friends responded in a perfectly normal way and no one accused me of doing anything embarrassing. 

Falling in love, falling out of love, yearning for past loves, and wanting to fall in love again are all completely human emotions. And yet, we only find them comfortable in the confines of consuming art. The minute we try to relate the art to our own lives, it becomes uncomfortable. Cringeworthy. But isn't that why you create art in the first place? So someone relates to it. Maybe learning how to get over yourself is a process that never really ends. Until then, post the song lyrics on your Instagram. We all used to do it on AOL Instant Messenger when we were teenagers, a time when we should have been even more worried about coming off cringeworthy and embarrassing. Now that we're adults, who gives a fuck besides you? And if by chance your friends do find you cringeworthy, your real friends will never tell you. They'll leave you out of the group chat where they make fun of you. And that's real friendship.