Moments of chagrin/mild humiliation!

Post Reply New Topic

Here are some of my moments of chagrin:

Talking too loud-- reason why I did this I mentioned in my "Do you mumble or shout?" thread, but I realized too late how horrible I sounded when I talked like that.


Slouched over desk-- the whole class in grade 3 did it and I was one of the only two or three people in the class who didn't. It was so ugly. Their elbows and forearms were on the table and they were hunkered down, with their heads down. But a year or two later, the teacher picked on me, the ONE time I was slouched like that, and said "That's not the way to be siting, slouched over it like that.


Another time I did the same thing at home at the kitchen table and my father said it looked ugly or ridiculous or something and told me in an annoyed and disgusted way to straighten up, basically.


Sometimes I look like I'm winking but I'm not. Not anymore, actually. Sometimes I had a tired eyelid; my mother has that too in the sun. Sometimes I have it if the sun is shining sa cetain way and extreme. Once someone thought I kept winking at her for no reason or a stupid reason and winked back.

Sometimes I looked away into a corner when watching TV and my mother commented on it, and when I said whatever she INSISTEd I tell her why I did it. It was just a stim, I don't know or remember or can't explain why.


Not swinging my arms when walking-- I was afraid people will think I was showing off or something if I swing my arms too much, and then I got horrible social anxiety besides and didn't know what to do with my hands. Sometimes I felt like I had to be ready for a fight.


Funny looks on my face sometimes-- sometimes it's a stim to try and arrange my face like people I identify with look like in pictures I see of them-- a lot of depressed or traumatized people with funny looks on their faces.


The way my hands are or were built, sometimes I appear to be doing the thumbs up when I'm not, and once I got so anxious about it because I thought I had to be careful what I did with my hands now! Twice people thought I was doing the thumbs up and they did the thumbs up back to me. For silly reasons. Because my expression didn't match the gesture. Because I wasn't doing it!


Dropping stuff-- everyone does that once in a while, yet my mother made a big deal of it when I did. And I never, usually.


Eating too loud-- I ws careful not to do this after I was eating chips in class once and the boy beside me said "You can crunch, girl!"


Walking down the street eating-- my mother siad it looks like I have no class when I do that, but I saw on asd-forum.org that parents were all saying that they were explaining to their autistic kids who had a problem with people eating in the street that it was okay, it was acceptable, that people got hungry and then they ate! Why couldn't I have had one of those parents?


Sometimes I tried to get the last drop of a drink, because I knew better than to waste. My mother thought I was shaking the cup over my mouth because I enjoyed it and found it fun or something. The first time she did it she got SO mad at me and said it was childish to do that. "I swear, sometimes you forget how old you are!" I wanted to hang the b***h! The second time she also got mad and said not to do it, it was childish, I was this many years old. I was embarrassed and angry, but I let it go. Another time she simply said "Don't do that, you're this many years old!" As if I was doing it for fun like a little kid would. I never knew how to explain it. Thankfully, FINALLY she realized why I was probably doing it when we got a lot poorer and couldnt' afford a lot of stuff, and she said simply that some people may think it odd that I at this many years of age would be doing something that looked so childish. But she knew this time, she understood.

Once in grade 8 a girl who lead others picking on me had sensed my ignorance or something and asked me if I had a song I liked, if I had one that was my favorite. She kept pestering me. By her expression and tone I knew she would find it amusing if I was ignorant like she suspected me to be.

In grade 9, at the next school, the same thing happened except with a whole group of people pestering me even more. When I said I didn't have a favorite, they pestered me to just say the name of any song. Putting my ignorance on display. Absolutely PATHETIC and HUMILIATING.


Another time two girls at the first high school, in grade 8, asked if I even knew what their names were, or what their names were or something. I told them their names. I wasn't THAT ignorant. I had been there for two years, grade 7 and 8, and it was the end of grade 8.


The same thing happened in grade 9, toward the end. How could I not have known their names? This gorup of girls had been picking on me all year!


Now post some of yours!

MAN, are you guys spying on me, or WHAT!?!? WIERD!! !!


I ALSO vary the sound of my voice like that!

I ALSO SLOUCH! And I look at the ground when walking.

I had a droopy eyelid. It is FAR less obvious now, but when I was five....

I was laughed at in HIGHSCHOOL for not swinging my arms!

GEE, I can eat and walk, so I DO!

While I am at it, I have this funny way of sitting. Sometimes I STILL do it even in a seat. I did it originally so I could rest and get up quicker without changing my center of gravity much. Still, I have done it since I was about 6, and always laughed at or looked at oddly for it. It isn't stupid, or wierd looking, it is just odd.

I can't eat and walk. I'd walk into a lamppost or something. I need to concentrate while walking.

Once on a field trip in grade 10 we ran over something, or the bus just went funny, and some people were talking about how we might have run over a squirrel, and I asked if we had run over a squirrel, and I said it maybe a bit too loud, and the teacher said "I don't know, Katherine," trying to calm me down, thinking I was about to have a panic attack because we might have run over a squirrel! Oops.


In grade 7 each of us in my class was given a high school student in the Dominican Republic to write to. Mine sent me a nice letter with a picture of her dressed up on her birthday in front of some fancy-ish building. I wrote back, I said true stuff and wrote a lot and it was all nice and looked nice, and was in a nice envelope, but then I lost it! I found it way later. But because we were hurried up and I had to give mine in that day, I scrawled what I remembered from my letter on a looseleaf with my dull pencil. She wrote back saying more nice stuff but "I'm not sure if you like writing these letters". To make matters worse, I wasn't able to write back... the teacher asked, "Didn't she give you her address?" I hadn't given her mine either.


Once my mother said that I didn't tie my shoes properly until I was 10! That is not true! And the way she said it, "She didn't tie her shoes until she was 10", made it sound like I couldn't tie at all! [She rounds out everything to age 10... she said me and my best friend called America's Most Wanted when we were both 10, and insisted I had been 10 when I did that (my friend was 10 and I was 11 or 12), she said I was overweight since I was 10 (it was since I was 9), and I was complaining about her since I was 10 (I was 9).]

Too many to list. Just this week alone, I have done so many things that would make me appear ret*d.

I get away with stuff sometimes too, because as I said to a friend, "if anyone asks me about it, I'll just act stupid. Most people think I'm stupid anyways; so it's not too hard to act like it."

I walk weird. I've always told people that if I were ever to get a tattoo, I'd get a 7/8 figure, like in music. When asked why, I say, "because that's what time I walk in." 1 2, 1 2, 1 2 3. Step Step Steeeeeeep. And if not doing that, I'm bouncing along weird. I like to think of it as my happy to be in the world walk/I'm not afraid of anything walk, but most people just think I'm a dolt.

I don't think I swing my arms enough, but haven't really thought about it.

People never believe my emotions for what they are. They think that either I don't look interested, or I'm not sincere when I'm sad or sad for someone. What would you like me to do? Cry? I don't see how much sadder I could be without crying. And then sometimes I'm horribly sad for someone's loss, but while everyone goes to them comforting them, I stand in the doorway all stiff and awkward and finally volunteer to do something like bring them a glass of water or something. *headdesk*

And then there's the fact that I can't ever clear a doorway. I'm constantly hitting door jambs, doorknobs, other people, the floor . . . Same goes for tables. And counter tops. And tree roots. Changes in elevation. Yeah, most things.

Plus, you add in the fact that I talk too fast and too softly and then we have another issue all together.

Oh and when some aspies were obsessed with some things as kids, I was obsessed with toilets. Not how they worked, but where they were . . . in like every building I'd ever been in. It got so bad that I used to ask people how the bathrooms were in buildings that they'd been to visit . . .

To this day, my brothers bring it up; like as if I'm still 6 . . . or 9. I'm 23.

Or I can't understand someone's words and I ask them to repeat themselves and they smirk and say nevermind. GRR. Most annoying thing ever. That's right, just because I do better at hearing music than people's words, I'm an idiot. Come out and say it, why don't cha? I'm an instrumentalist after all. I'm trained to hear instruments.

I do foolish things all the time; it's not even worth trying to remember all the things I've done just this past week. I don't think I've done anything too foolish today (or if I have, I'm blissfully unaware of such); well, I went over the side of my heels again, but I tend to do that. I was born with my feet turned entirely in, and it didn't quite correct right, I guess, which is why I'm prone to such (that and general clumsiness anyway).

Let's see... Yesterday, in Spanish class, I managed to get called on to answer the one question I didn't know (through the entire period, there was one question I didn't know the answer to; one). It was supposed to be answered by people who put up their hands, but I put down my pen the moment after she asked the question (not on purpose; I just put it down), and she all ready thinks I'm not assertive enough to do things like raise my hand when I know the answer (she's usually right, although part of it is due to apathy), so I got called on. Naturally, I fumbled around for the answer and got it wrong, even with her hints. (I got one right later ("assertive"), just so I wouldn't appear as a complete ignorant.)

Then I got home and did something stupid. My hair is long and my backpack (which isn't a traditional backpack; it's more of a shoulder bag, I guess, but it's meant for business traveling and whatnot) is heavy (it was about forty pounds when I weighed it last year). Thus, when the straps are on my hair, putting it down slowly doesn't work too well, if I wish to keep my hair intact. I dropped it down next to my chair like always... And somehow miscalculated and slammed my nose into the table. It wasn't hard enough to draw blood or anything (it only smarted for like a minute), but it was such a foolish thing to do. Fortunately, no one else noticed.

i copied bands when i was a kid. and still do

Sometimes I would feel like I had to say something when taking to my parents, especially my father, whom I have felt intimidated and self-conscious and anxious around for the last few years. I'm very ignorant of world issues that he and my mother talk about, so I would chime in with something obvious or something stupid. Once day when I actually had something to say he drowned me out saying loudly "She doesn't have anything to say." Just because I was stuttering, because I knew he'd probably say that.


Once when my grandmother asked me what I wanted for Christmas (though she had already GOTTEN everyone's presents) I said "I would have asked for more Charity bears, but--" and without letting me finish, she said "Oh, you're too old for that!"


I would deliberately not look in the peephole before opening the door to my parents because I didn't want them to think I was doing it because they told me to... if they hadn't kept bringing it up I would have been looking in the damn peephole!


Once my father accused me of "throwing my coat on the floor like a little 2-year old" and he said it very maliciously and angrily, when I put it on the back of a chair and the cat must have knocked it down.


Once I was in a boat at sailing camp with one of the instructors, and their boats were docked away from the others, and I started walking slowly away, not knowing if I should wait for him or say goodbye or just go and help the others derig. He told me to go help derig so I did. My hesitation was embarrassing though.


I could have bailed water out of my boat way faster a few times.


Once I had the whole lunch hour to dump the water from my boat after I had capsized but didn't; I forgot or something... so I sunk...


One girl at school asked me "Are you getting help in math?" in the tone kids used to ask people embarrassing questions to pick on them... she made it seem like only ret*ds went to the resource room or like I cared and was embarrassed about it. Which made me care more.


The same group asked if my parents grounded me. No? Why not? Because I was good. Then one of them brought up how she had seen and heard me telling my mother to shut up once! So now they knew there was no excuse for my wierdnes; I was a spoiled brat with AS (and I was but I wasn't in the way they thought!)


Mopping up food with bread, scraping the bottom of the bowl-- why not do it if I'm not out somewhere? I don't think my mother really minds me doing it; she just mostly thinks I need to be taught not to do it.

I have walked wierd when angry or happy or for a stim, but that's the fault of the people who made me self-conscious and introverted and receding into my fantasy world because the real world was too unpleasant for me.


"Not holding a fork right"-- I finally told my mother "I'd like to see you try to get food from the edges of the plate holding the fork like THAT!" She relented. One little success amidst an ocean of failures.

Messy handwriting-- sometimes people are in a rush when writing in their DIARIES... which you SHOULDN'T BE READING... so don't say I write like a 2-year-old... it's partially thjese fancy but non-functional pens they gave me and I had nothing else to write with! I can read my own writing, I don't need a practical lesson, thank you very much, and some days I just don't wriote neat, other times I'm perdfect and have "beautiful" writing...


That "props" thing from across the hall was MEANT to humiliate me and exploit my scail anxiety, and the "Props" and then "flops" thing just as bad.

Teeth-grinding-- oops. At least one of them thought I was just playing around once and said "Yeah, it's really cool to do that, Katherine." And I didn't grind my teeth for long; it was a very short-term habit.


I told my enemies at school that my boyfriend was my cousin... that he had only one friend... that I was dating his friend too... long long story.


I didn't say "Trick or treat" when I was a kid because I guess I wanted something more creative, and it wasn't like I would be playing tricks on them if they didn't give a treat, and when I was really young I didn't know what it meant, just that you were supposed to say it, but why?

I hung out with the little kids at sailing camp because they were smaller than me and I therefore felt much safer with them. The kids my age I could never even talk to most of the time. Horribler awful anxiety. I sat alone during lunch that last year and sometimes without a book or other excuse to be alone! Aaaah! And they noticed!

Once a bunch of kids and I were making a noose out of a rope at sailing camp, someone put it around a boy's neck and someone else threw it over a pipe in the ceiling, all in good fun, and we pulled a little but were never going to even go close to hanging him, but the instructor intervened, said don't do that, gave the main boy a talking-to while my quasi-enemy from school who was also at the sailing camp gave me a talking-to about that.

I was always too shy or permissive to tell the kids to behave, not to throw rocks at ducks and that, I encouraged a little kid to steal the "crash boat" once, I tried telling them not to drop rocks on frogs and kill them because they were an endangered species and the boy said "Yoou think everything's an endangered species" and that was it...

I was in the "crash boat" with the instructors; there weren't enough boats to go around so we took turns being in the motor boat with the instructors, and I would just try to strike up a conversation with them saying stupid stuff about how the water looked like wrinkled clothes and that. I knew it was stupid but I couldn't think of anything else to say!


I resent some people. And the rest, I wish I could point a magic wand at and say "Obliviate!"

i do what's called "sub-vocalizing". that's code for repeating something i just said or something else said under my breath after i or they have said it. it makes it look like i'm talking to myself a lot.

Ooooh! Fun thread!

- My mother is constantly yelling at me to do things "like a lady". Unfortunetly, I'm 25 years old and I think I'm not really going to get any more graceful or feminie.

- I'm always dropping or fumbling with objects, and the problem seems to get worse in public or around people I'm not comfortable with. I've even started replacing our drinking glasses with plastic ones because I have a way of breaking glasses left and right.

- I sneeze very, very loudly. So loud that if I sneeze in a store people turn around and stare at me.

- When I go out in public by myself, which admittedly isn't too often, I talk to myself almost non-stop. Usually just under my breath, but obviously people see my lips moving and no one around me. Another reason people stare at me.

- I apply too much pressure, bend things too far and other heavy handed things. It's surprising that I'm a craft artist by trade considering how obnoxious my hands are sometimes!

- I scrape my teeth with my fork when I'm eating. Another thing my mother is always reminding me of, which usually ends with "be more like a lady!"

One time I tried to kiss a teacher in school. We were hugging each other and I pulled away slightly with my lips puckered. She gave me a funny look, and I ran away.

I have NO idea what I was thinking.