749: My Bad
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm on the Baker, sitting in for Ira Glass. Kids have a stage where they learn to be embarrassed. It begins when they're toddlers, but some of us don't seem to take the lesson to heart. Like my friend Jane Marie, I've known Jane for years. She used to work at the radio show, and her shamelessness was the quality I most admired about her. Especially as a woman, you know, she didn't care what people thought, am I acting nice, am I dressed too sexy, am I being loud, she didn't ask those questions. She was totally opinionated and scrappy. Jane was never embarrassed. And for a pretty specific reason, the way she grew up, she was methodist, she was taught, you are not the center of the universe. Which made her feel free, like no one was watching. To be embarrassed would be to assume that anyone in this room or anyone who witnessed this actually spends more than five seconds thinking about me, and they don't. Why would you think anyone but God gives a shit about anything you're doing ever? They don't. Like you are nothing. You mean nothing in the world. It's obnoxious basically to think that like any of your actions that anyone's actually looking in your direction. This worldview that others weren't judging her helped her not judge herself. Those thoughts just didn't occur to her. Did you have an inner critic? What do you mean by inner critic? Like a voice that's actually, sorry. I'm like, come again. So I was surprised when she texted me and said she'd heard I was looking for embarrassing stories to put on today's radio show, and that she had one. A big one. That she'd never told anyone but her therapist. Something that changed who she was. And I'll get to that story in about a minute. But first, let me just say, I love embarrassing stories. I always ask for them at parties. If I hear a good one, I'll retell it for years. Some of them, so funny. But that's not the only reason I like them. I think the best ones say so much about us. Reveal sides of ourselves, maybe we'd rather not see. And to prove the point that embarrassing stories have a lot to teach us, I decided to harness the power of the radio program, and we asked you for your embarrassing stories. People send in over a thousand of them. Today we'll hear some of those, and talk about what they reveal. But we're gonna kick things off with Jane's story. Because, honestly, of the hundreds of embarrassing stories that I've heard, I've never heard another one like Jane's, where it changed someone so deeply.
Transcription truncated.