I have the best tits in Argos
It’s not about my tits, or Argos, it’s about the friends we didn’t make along the way (and feeling like you’ve been deep fried in shame your whole life)
It’s not about my tits, or Argos, it’s about the friends we didn’t make along the way (and feeling like you’ve been deep fried in shame your whole life)
On New Year’s Day 20-whatever, who remembers, a customer came into Argos Sauchiehall Street to return a hoover. Not everyone works with the Gregorian Calendar, so I have to acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t an unusual day for them to come to the centre of Glasgow to return a hoover, and it certainly wasn’t unusual that I was extremely hungover for work. But I wasn’t regular hungover, I was Hogmanay Hungover, to the point that as I processed their £87.99 onto a giftcard I was sick all over them. I managed to get some in the bin, which is the part of the story people picked up on, and for the rest of my time at Argos I was ‘Lauren, she’s the one who was sick in a bin.’
That’s the sort of thing that would really embarrass a person, but it honestly didn’t bother me. Largely I was a 20 year old shell of a woman who had stopped caring about absolutely anything. Additionally, I was in my rolling rock bottom, and if I was embarrassed it was buried somewhere deep down under alcohol, pills, sex and other escapism behaviours, where I couldn’t find it. Embarrassment would come at me like a jump-scare when I sobered up, and what was left of my dignity said ‘what have you DONE?’ but I’d work around it.
Embarrassment just seemed like par for the course, I could beat it if I owned it, it couldn’t touch me if I disconnected myself from everything that was me - it was happening to my avatar, not anything that could actually effect me. It was nothing compared to the rot of shame. Embarrassment came in flares and electric currents, largely firing from things which are categorically embarrassing. Shame was the hollow rattle at the end of a dark corridor, it was a structural defect, it was salted soil, so that nothing could grow on top of it, and I would never be free of the thing inside me that said ‘You are unacceptable, unless you change everything, no one is going to love you.’ I’d never known a life without it - I didn’t even know how painful it was.
