Things you used to do that now make you cringe!

[lifestooshorttodickaboutwithaubergines]

So I’ve been seeing the odd Facebook memory, throwing up past status updates I posted that now give me extreme second-hand embarrassment. We’re talking maybe ten or so years ago.

It got me thinking about how when I first learnt to drive, at about 19, I had a car but didn’t use it to get to work. My part-time job whilst at uni was in the town centre and it didn’t make financial sense to drive due to parking costs and that, so I would get the bus instead. For some unknown reason I felt a bit embarrassed about this, so when on the bus I used to keep my car keys in my hand so they’d be visible to the other passengers. Just so they’d know I could actually drive, y’know 🙄

I cringe when I think back to this! I’m sure nobody even noticed, because why would they, but I get that hot feeling of embarrassment whenever I recall it 😳

Anyone else look back at things you used to do and think wtf was I thinking?!

I knew Dumbledore would be on here somewhere…

Making a blood pact with someone you’ve known 5 minutes? Pretty cringe even if they don’t go all wizard Hitler.

A/S/L

Cringey "cryptic" lyrics on my MySpace page.

Writing with a capital letter with every word on MSN. No idea why that was a trend.

Oh and lighting up a fag when the cool older kids walked past because I thought I looked hard.

Prank calling my ex by breathing the down the phone. I stupidly rung his house phone and his Mum picked up and said "I know its you Mumteacherofmany"

I wanted the ground to swallow me up.

Oh and I had on my MySpace

“will suck you off for crack”

what the fuck!!

100% this! Teentrauma is wondering if it is going to rain and if she should put the washing out. Cringe!!!!

I also have Facebook cringe, those posts where I try to sound witty and cool and knowing…

is this why FB is dying do you think?

At school my friend and I went through a phase of writing the most morbid poetry, all about being sentenced to various horrible deaths, dwelling at great length on the anguish and gory details.

I can (unfortunately) remember the opening verse of one of them:
As I stood up there, in the prisoners' dock
I knew it would come, but it still was a shock
The judge looked very grim and said
”Hanged by the neck until you are dead!”

I don't know where all that came from but thankfully we grew out of it, probably about the time that boys happened.

I bet if you tell him, he'll love you even more.

Loving how many more gems have been posted on here since I last checked! Had a look at my FB memories to see if anything from this day was worth posting but nothing much. My friends keep laughing at me because my posts are getting increasingly middle aged but tbf, I am 37…I care about things like bin night now.

I actually thought of a cringe thing I do now - there’s a very minor celeb level comedian I follow on insta, minor enough that he will often reply back to insta messages because he doesn’t get so many that he can’t keep up with them. He also knows me by sight and I’ve met him once. Logically I know that doesn’t make us friends but sometimes I talk about him like he is my friend. I can hear myself doing it. But I keep on.

@Mitsky I too wanted one of those chains and parents would t get me one. My solution was I took our dogs chain lead and used that

I started my first proper job when I was about 18. We had to be trained in a group and it was also mostly people around my age so we all started hanging around at night too, going to the pub and what not. A mixture of girls and guys.

One of the guys eventually got a girlfriend and introduced her to the group. One night in the pub I was a bit pissed and my female friend and I thought it would be nice to welcome her properly to the group by reassuring her that she didn’t have to worry about us fancying her bloke and hanging around together all the time. I must have banged on about it for a while. A few days later he took me aside and laid it out in no uncertain terms that he had absolutely no interest in me romantically and never would. It was so embarrassing and I had absolutely no interest in him like that. I was rendered mute and eventually just squeaked ‘ok’. I still go hot and clammy thinking about it.

Dressed like i was about 50 or 60 when i was 16 - designer power suits with massive shoulder pads, etc

Sounds like we might be a similar age, I remember me and my friends dressing like that too on nights out. 😄

@bringincrazyback I’m 46.
i didn’t even wear this stuff on nights out. This was my going to 6th form gear - bright red riding jacket with a massive black velvet bow on the back, etc 😄

I remember when Sarah Ferguson was briefly considered a style icon.

When I was a teenager in the 80s, my family moved to a non-descript suburban town in the South East from an equally non-descript town in the Midlands. I was a very straight-laced, studious teen and saw this as an opportunity to recreate my image as edgy and cool, thus ensuring that everyone wanted to hang around with me and all the cool boys would fancy me. Key to my cunning plan was to be 'Northern' (I decided this was not a lie, as I was born north of the town I moved to) and left wing. I put on a generic slightly northern accent and complained about having moved to a soul-less, suburban, characterless place. My school had a strict uniform which limited how much I could reflect my cool northern character with my clothing, but I did wear a flat cap and a 'coal not dole' badge. I made constant political comments and at one point remember asking the school librarian why there was no copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto available (she did offer to get hold of one on loan and asked if I'd like the original German version or had a preferred translation- at the time I thought she was indicating that she supported my views!). If you imagine a female unfunny version of Rik from the Young Ones, that was pretty much me.

Unsurprisingly, my plan to become edgy, cool and popular did not work. I did make a couple friends, who were equally...interesting. One of them (despite having lived all her life in the SE town) was convinced she was Irish (I think her gran might have been). We convinced ourselves for a good few years that we were just too cool and intellectual for everyone else to understand us. I am so thankful that social media/camera phones etc did not exist back then!!!

This thread is absolutely hysterical 😂

My friend and I did that. We told everyone that we were going to the Playboy Mansion via private jet, we lived in a small village in Cornwall so it’s not even likely to be true. My friend had tiny boobs and we were just average looking.
We thought it would impress men but it didn’t.

Ohhhh I have a camera phone one - at a family wedding in my twenties, one of the only single people there. The groom (my stepbrother) had implied he'd sat me next to a single friend of his to see if we'd get on... And we did, chatting away. I had text a friend to say that the wedding was looking up, and she asked me to send a pic, so I tried to subtly take one AND THE FLASH WENT OFF. He asked if I had taken a pic of him and I tried to pretend it was a new phone and it was all accidental... Cringe cringe CRINGE. Needless to say we barely spoke a word to each other after that.

We all did that in the 80s though. I've a packet of photos from various 18ths and we all look we're on some sort of office convention. It's also quite evident that most people could only afford one or two 'going-out' outfits aka giant shoulder pad office jackets because the same clothes pop up again and again, which I think is quite sweet actually.

There also wasn't fast fashion in the sense there is now, so people would have had fewer clothes and worn them more.

I didnt go on fb until around 2012 so quite late compared the rest of my friends and I got hooked pretty quickly.
The low point was posting a montage of photos of just me.
Why?! God knows but I cringe hard at how vain I must have looked.
I was 32!

Hahahaha YES! Now when I read about parents monitoring their teen’s internet usage etc I’m like - they can’t possibly be doing anything worse than what I was doing on the family computer on dial up internet, and I survived 😂

The low point was posting a montage of photos of just me.

@PrincessHoneysuckle You were ahead of your time as that's the vibe of a lot of people's Instas now.

My one from early early 20s is that I used to wear fake eyelashes on nights out and would sometimes stay over at my boyfriend’s house. The next day instead of removing the lashes and being clean faced (surely the ideal option with my lovely youthful face?!) I would try to keep the lashes on, but frequently the glue would be becoming unstuck.

I distinctly remember us joining his parents for lunch one of these weekends and going to the bathroom, looking in the mirror and realising one of my lashes was halfway up my eyelid. They were extremely well off and must have thought I was so unbearably trashy but were always so nice. Shudder.

😆