On vulnerability, control, and the strange grace of losing your footing
Table of Contents
I came to Mexico for music. For joy. For the improbable pleasure of hearing Noah Kahan sing into a warm night with the Caribbean behind him.
I did not come to discover, in a very public wristband line, that my digestive system had decided to revolt.
There is a particular kind of humiliation that arrives when your body stops cooperating in front of strangers. It’s fast, intimate, and completely uninterested in your dignity. One moment you’re a competent adult, wearing all white, and waiting your turn. The next, you’re urgently aware of how little control you actually have.
It was not dramatic or dangerous. It was simply unavoidable. I sneezed and learned something about myself that I would have preferred to discover in private.
This happened while I was in the middle of writing an essay called Humiliations Help.
The timing felt… instructional.
Avoiding Humiliations
We spend a lot of our lives trying not to be exposed. We build competence, self-control, routines, and reputations. We become very good at being capable. Especially those of us who grew up in households where emotional chaos was the background music.
I was raised by a mother who lived in a permanent state of grievance. Pain was her primary language. Victimhood was her home base. Every story ended with how she had been wronged. I learned early that I wanted nothing to do with that posture. I decided, somewhere deep in my nervous system, that I would rather be strong than needy, competent than fragile, composed than exposed.
That decision served me. It still does.
It also cost me.
I have run marathons on broken toes. I have stayed in friendships that hurt because stopping felt like failure. I have spent entire relationships feeling unseen, unheard, and ultimately, unknown.
Because when you train yourself to never need anything, you quietly learn to never receive anything either. You endure rather than ask. You grit your teeth instead of opening your hands.
Humiliation short-circuits that strategy.
When something goes wrong in front of other people, especially something bodily, you do not get to curate the story. You do not get to spin it. You are just there, human, needing a bathroom, needing grace, needing people to give you tolerance and patience when you feel least deserving.
I was forced into the very thing my younger self swore off: vulnerability.
You Never Forget the 1st…. Humiliations
One of the most formative moments of my childhood was deeply humiliating in a similar way. I was pretend-dating a boy in middle school. We agreed that we were boyfriend/girlfriend, talked endlessly on our long-corded wall phones, and sat near each other in the bleachers passing notes through our buddies. That was as good as dating got in seventh grade.
He was a dreamboat. But one fateful afternoon in my backyard by the badminton net and beside my golden retriever, he asked to end it. I stepped forward on the grass, prepared to make my case. Instead of meeting grass, my sneaker hit a pile of dog mess. My foot slipped out from under me and sent my cute gingham shorts straight down into the wet mound. I landed in it, round-mouthed, and shamed into silence.
Too sweet to stay, he turned around, collected his bike from my porch, and spent the rest of his life pretending we’d never met. I wish I could say the same for myself. It was a major story I used for years to come, always to get a laugh – erasing embarrassment with humor.
At the time this incident felt cruel. In retrospect, it was one of the few moments that interrupted my slide into utter emotional self-sufficiency.
It taught me something essential.
Humiliation, when it does not become shame, becomes humility. It makes us porous.
It reminds us that we’re not machines. That we’re not perfectly packaged products. We live in bodies that malfunction and hearts that bruise and minds that do not always follow the plan.
Today, standing in a marble lobby line with a pair of sunglasses in one hand and a sudden emergency in the other, I wasn’t impressive, polished, or in control.
I was a person who needed a moment.
And strangely, it’s a nice reminder that I’m just a human.
There’s a version of strength that looks like holding everything together. And then there’s a deeper sense of resilience in a messy world. This latter feeling boldly lets you be still and maybe even held (if you’re lucky) while everything seems to fall apart.
Humiliation helps because it gives us access to that second sense.
It makes us softer in the places where we were once armored. Kinder in the places where we were strict. More willing to accept that being human is not a failure of character but the condition of truly living.
Even in your backyard, with a golden retriever licking your face while you sit in it.
Especially there.
