I'm tackling the topic of "cringe" for my senior design thesis, and arguing that we should embrace the cringeworthy moments/memories rather than push them away from us. After all, we're always going to look back at ourselves at one point and cringe, so what's the point in distancing those memories? To some degree, they've made us who they are. I also hate cringe culture, so there's that.

Anyways, I've been on this site since 2005 when I was 9 years old, meaning I have definitely done/said some things that make me cringe. I used to be such an edgy troll on some forums, which I now realize is super lame, haha. I also used to draw a lot of awful-looking anime. I found one of the comics I made years ago where I tried to write in Japanese. Of course, I had no concept of how their alphabet worked, so I assumed it all corresponded to the English alphabet. So it's just a bunch of katakana gibberish, basically. Not to mention that the comic looked really bad. Though, if I hadn't gotten this out of my system, I might not have gone into art/design as a profession.

So I'm interested in hearing about everyone's cringy memories, be it angsty poetry, Christopher Hart-inspired anime, AMVs, internet behavior, etc. What'd you guys do?

In early high school I spit a big gob of phlegm out the bus window and hit a man's hat brim. He yelled at the bus driver, who stopped the bus to investigate. Some goody-two-shoes girl up front ratted me out and I was kicked off the bus. Had to walk about 10 miles home. Boy, did I ever cringe at that!

Byker that's just disgusting tbh.

Anyways, I did too many things to name. Like, I would make up songs about random things, then sing them out loud in school and in public. Like I made up a song about having a tummy ache, and I'd sing it whenever I did. Or I'd take songs on the radio and change their lyrics. Like if my brother was playing a video game, I'd sing "It's my turn, my turn, my turn!" to the tune of "My Girl" by The Temptations.

From the Collins English dictionary.

cringe

Word forms: 3rd person singular present tense cringes , present participle cringing , past tense, past participle cringed
verb
If you cringe at something, you feel embarrassed or disgusted, and perhaps show this feeling in your expression or by making a slight movement. [/i]

Ard; However disgusting it was, it was also cringeworthy!

I used to write stupid stories then make flipnotes about them on my ds. Then i used to write really bad songs.

Bad grammar during my first year here which I struggle to look back on now. Also, me nearly using a bad word as substitute for "Attack" in a fanfic I wrote due to not knowing the meaning of it (I thought it sounded cool because it was edgy without realizing how awful it was). My grandma rushed in the room so fast and made me change it and I'm so thankful she did to prevent me from doing something stupid.

When I was in middle school, I used to wear a set of cat ear clips every day, including to school. My best friends and I came up with "anime nicknames" for ourselves (aka calling ourselves by the names of favorite characters who we related to) and would insist on calling each other by those. At recess we'd talk about our anime crushes. In class we'd draw really bad anime-style art or read manga. It was basically the only thing we talked about. We tried to learn Japanese on our own/from anime, and would randomly use it in conversations with each other because we thought it was cool. There was also in 5th grade when I thought I was really cool for being completely and utterly OBSESSED with Tamagotchi. Yeah... my family says they didn't tell me how cringey I was being because I was enjoying myself and there's nothing wrong with that, but I wonder to this day if I would've had more friends and more social skills had somebody said something.

Back to middle school, I also used to write really terrible self-insert fanfiction pairing myself with my anime crushes. Made even more cringe-worthy when I look back on them by the fact that I refused to age myself up in them older than 16 (which I guess is basically an adult to a 12 year old?!), and some of my crushes were adult characters! But I never posted them anywhere. Now, I embrace even my worst writing as having been writing practice, though.

Bara_no_uta: Sounds like every girl who sat at my table in the cafeteria!

Self-insert RP. Without changing my name. I don't even LIKE my name.

Granted, I have a self-insert now, but it's less obvious.

I was a pretty dumb kid tbh.

I remember seeing a movie with this guy climbing down a rope, and my child-brain was like "ooh, I should do that off my porch! what could possibly go wrong?" (it's about 6 feet off the ground, for reference)

It ended about as you'd expect. didn't tie the rope tight enough, skinny little arms couldn't support my weight, slipped, fell. Boom. I'm lucky I didn't break my neck lol

Back in 5th grade, i had a crush on some kid a grade below me. We'd only really be able to interact during lunchtime, so one day i asked my two best friends to tag along with me for moral support (didn't tell them the plan though.)

He was sitting in the grass as we approached him, and the first thing out of my mouth was "my friends and i have been stalking you for the past few days, and now we're gonna kill you."

Didn't say anything back. Just stood up and proceeded to beat the absolute heck outta my friends (while i ran away.)

And unfortunately i'm just as awkward now

I'm not sure if this counts, but one time getting off the school bus me and my friends were being bad seeds for some reason and took all the papers out of this box in front of a house for sale, some lady in the window saw us from upstairs and was like HEY! so we panicked and threw the papers in the air on a windy day, blew all over, then she came down and tried to chase after us in her car but she was too slow after we ran and we turned down our street to go home lol She never caught us.

I remember one time this kid showed up to our 7th grade history class with one of those family size buckets of vanilla ice cream and was eating it out of his backpack. It was melting all inside his backpack as well, and we had a sub teacher so of course they weren't gonna notice or do anything about it. Which I always think is funny but entirely cringe worthy. Eating a bucket of ice cream out of your backpack on a hot day after everyone comes back inside all hot and sweaty from lunch break while it's practically already melted but you keep spooning it in as everyone watches you. He was eating ice cream soup....

When I was younger I'd run around the house pretending to be a dog.
My diary was extremely cringe when I was in grade school also.. I've read it as an adult and was so embarrassed I couldn't continue lol.

I can look back and laugh at this but at the time I was so embarrassed.

I went on a date in February and when the food was served I asked him what he had ordered and then proceeded to ask if there was any meat in his dish. He said no, but there's fish. I thought fish fell under meat as they both come from animals so I asked isn't fish meat and he laughed at me.

I was a month shy of turning 21 and didn't know fish and meat are two different things

When I was in high school, I used to get bullied so often I thought it was normal. After one specific confrontation turned one-way physical (the bully started hitting me and I didn't fight back) I actually APOLOGIZED to the bully. After a few years, I began to realize that was very cringe-worthy of me.

Side note: My bullies now come to me for financial advice, so I guess I win

Oh gosh, I'd say the most cringe things I've seen were on my old account here on ACC I logged on here a while back just to take a trip down memory lane and the stuff I had in my profile just made me cringe so baaad...

I mean It was just basic things about your art original character profiles that really didn't even need to be there hahahaha. It just brought back so many memories from my old art and many many more cringe moments flodding in my brain LOL.

There was this one time I was in a gas station buying some things and I was so awkward. I was dropping change, I babbled so much omg. I had no idea what happened. everything was going so fast for my slow brain.

There's like a list that just goes on.

In elementary school I'd walk around the perimeter of the field humming a song to myself and imagining I had a Valentine's-themed bear named Heart as my best friend. Back then she probably was my best friend, honestly. Haha.

I was obsessed with Invader Zim and thought that random humor was *shudders*... funny.

I didn't quite grasp the concept of physics when I was younger. Specifically, I didn't get that certain things can't handle certain forces. So when I leapt from the couch onto my giant plastic tub that I was using as a platform... yeah more bandages on my legs that day than I've had in my life combined since then.

Too many to name, but I think one of the big ones was being that type of rabid kid that just thought older = better, which is by NO MEANS true, and I was obsessed with things that are honestly stupid such as old operating systems. I think that stopped when I was 9 thankfully, and after that point my main cringy thing was I was just generally super annoying, and I clung onto old memes too hard