In my twenties, a good friend gave the best single piece of advice I ever heard: Embrace your embarrassment. I have repeated it often to others, it is a guiding wisdom in my work as a psychotherapist, and a principle I strive to personally practice. Embarrassment, when allowed to fester in silence and secrecy, corrodes into shame, which can be the most crippling force in our lives. The acceptance of the embarrassing story and the feelings it evokes in us can be both liberating and enriching.
Michael Mayer, the director of Mortified Nation, captures the phenomenon of everyday folks publicly reading aloud from their childhood diaries. The film captures these live performances and intersperses them with short interviews with the performers and the producers. Fortunately Mayer does not fall into the trap of mucking up his documentary with expert-talking-heads analyzing people’s motivations and meanings. Rather, the analysis is kept to a minimum and center stage is reserved for laughter, wit and warmth.
The producers of these stage shows came upon the idea by sharing their own childhood writings with a group of friends. Private parties evolved into public events in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Sweden, among other locales. After watching just a few of the performed readings I understood why the phenomenon appears to be growing. They are often hilarious, occasionally touching, and consistently engaging.
At the heart of the Mortified performances is the simple, silly joy of laughing at our foibles as children. Teenage angst, alienation and the exaggerations of the adolescent poser are exposed in a room full of adults who recognize and identify with these embarrassing patterns of thought and feeling – and the laughter swells. There are fantasies about dating and having sex with schoolyard crushes, imagined verbal barrages of insult and curse thrown at unsuspecting parents, and passionate commitments made to chastity, righteousness and justice.
The audience’s laughter is not mocking or shaming. The strangers, to whom readers expose their vulnerability, appear open and eager to celebrate and acknowledge what they share in common with the diarists, allowing diarists and audience alike to unite and support one another – all as survivors of a period of life dominated by rejections, bullying, and feelings of isolation and fear.
Where are the opportunities to join together and face those things from which we tend to turn away? Why does the lightness of spirit embodied in this documentary seem so evasive in many of our lives?
Perhaps it’s as simple as the approach of the Mortified shows suggest: identify what is funny about what mortifies you and then share it with others. For many of us, this could be a daunting task – to say the least! But Mortified Nation emboldens the viewer with a vision of rooms full of people who respond to the embarrassment and foibles of one another with respect, support and most of all, a laughter that strips the power from shame.
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