1st May 2026

 

I got the idea to create this blog over two years ago now. It was May 2024 when I then started putting a concept together and building a website, but I didn’t actually make it public until the end of October, almost six months later - not because it wasn’t ready, but because a part of me was actually just embarrassed. Let’s unpack that. 

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background

 

I am from a very very small village, right next to the town of Skegness (#neverforgetyourroots) which has around 20,000 people in it. Like many others places, ‘small-town mentality’ is rife here. Most people do the same thing, wear the same clothes and have the same trajectory for their lives. As a teenager, it's subconsciously ingrained into you to kind of follow this path. 

 

And then moving to Australia three years ago, where 'tall poppy syndrome' is very dominant (I wrote about this here), doing something against the grain is similarly quite frowned upon, particularly in the Gold Coast, why? Because it’s deemed embarrassing. 

 

oct 2024 

 

With these environments in mind, let's set the scene: my blog has been ready for weeks now, and yet I’m still procrastinating posting or telling people about it. I was moving from the Gold Coast to Melbourne and for some reason I couldn’t face doing it whilst I was still living up there, it felt too close to home with too many people to judge. So, with my fresh start, and I guess fresh identity in Melbourne, I decided it was finally time and bit the bullet. 

 

I was so unbelievably nervous, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and didn't go on it for two hours. All I expected, when I posted that on my instagram, was to receive a stream of messages from people from home or QLD saying what the fuck are you doing? this is so embarrassing. Yet, surprise surprise I didn’t get a single one and still actually haven’t to this day. 

 

In the months afterwards, even being in Melbourne, I told essentially no one I was running this blog. With all the new friends I’d made, I just thought they were going to judge me. When I first told one of my new work friends, I felt like a (less-dramatised) version of Hannah Montana living this duel life. ​

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​everyone cares what people think of them

 

I really am so dramatic. But the reality is, almost two years later, no one has made remarks to my face or to me online. Whilst some people in Skegness, including some particularly nosy women in their 50s, have most definitely spoken about what I’m doing, seeing as I haven’t heard it directly from them, I don’t need to care. Inevitably though, this is going to happen at some point and there's nothing I can do to stop that, but the point I'm trying to make is that the fear of receiving an ambush of slander when you initially put yourself out there is predominantly in your head. ​

 

With that being said, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I don’t care what people think of me full stop, when I absolutely do. I honestly believe people are lying when they say they do not have a single care for what anyone in the world thinks of them - to some degree everyone does, sorry! For me, there are things I really, really care about and spend too much time ruminating on, and then there’s some things I really don’t. I care what the people around me think of me: whether I’m being a good friend, a kind person etc, but for small minor incidents that could be deemed embarrassing, I’m trying to give less and less of a fuck. 

 

cringe is subjective 

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Over the years, I've learned how to turn said incidents and scenarios into funny stories, whether that was just to tell my friends the next day, or now, to write an article or make a TikTok about it. So many quote-on-quote embarrassing things have happened to me over the years that it kind of ended up becoming my brand, this is called Tits Up for a reason. ​

 

Naturally, there are fine lines between these things: some occurrences I still find mortifying and would never share online. But nonetheless,

 

things are only embarrassing if you let yourself be embarrassed. REPEAT. 

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There are so many times where I've heard people say oh, that was embarrassing and I just think really, is it? Cringe is subjective and it has double standards.

 

Yet, I knew that making a blog, and subsequently filming myself talking about said blog on social media, was something that could be deemed 'cringe' by many, many people, even myself. But why is that? 

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baring your soul 

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It's no revelation that a big element in the arts, whether that’s music, poetry, painting, is creation as a form of self-exposure, it’s baring your soul to a degree, for anyone to view. So whilst I’ve always been a very open person in my personal life, particularly about how I was finding travelling and moving to Australia, I couldn’t really digest dissecting my experiences and feelings in the same way on a public platform. Essentially, jumping the boundary from the personal into the online, and namely public, space felt like an entirely new added layer. ​But that's exactly the reason why I felt compelled to do it.

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​It's twofold. First: finding it cringe to start a new venture and second: finding it cringe to be honest and vulnerable for anyone to access. 

 

verdict 

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So, is to be cringe to be free? Huge yes. Cringe isn't necessarily a negative emotion, it too can be a positive feeling. Does buying a mini microphone and filming yourself talking about hinge to put on the internet when you have 1500 followers have a degree of cringe to it. OF COURSE IT DOES. But also do we really need to give a fuck about it? We all have (or should have) bigger problems to be dealing with. As Austin Butler quotes: "embarrassment is an unexplored emotion", go explore it.