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?!

Drugs

Orange shoes.

This is outing to only one person should they be reading...

I cringed for people at the time they were doing it. 😂
The self-absorption and attention-seeking whilst pretending it was all about charity! 😂

In the early days of the internet and chat rooms I innocently got speaking to some guys - didn’t think anything of it all my friends were male. One guy I was friendly with asked me to send him photos (at the time it was still snail mail) so I did. Very innocent ones of me fully clothed with my dogs. I was over 18 but looked about 12 My boyfriend at the time even took them for me, so I wasn’t the only naive one.

It was many many years later (we’re talking decades!) that I realised he had no interest in seeing me as a person fully clothed with my dogs 😂😂

I cringe at how innocent I was. I also cringe that some random bloke had photos of 19/20 year old me

my early 20s Facebook statuses are truly awful - things like ‘is a marshmallow’ and shit like that.

I die of embarrassment about this crush I had once on a guy that didn’t know who I was. Used to cry in the toilets and he was horrible, long dirty fingernails to “play guitar with” 🤮

When I was 16 I met a guy who had a motor scooter (Quadrophenia days) and next time I saw him he had emblazoned my name in white letters across his windshield. I was proud as punch. The only times he took me out was to his parents where we would all sit and watch TV while he smoked a pipe (yes an actual tobacco pipe - out of the side of his mouth - in the living room -he was 17) and drop me home later. Next night he turns up proudly showing me a new female name on his scooter to which I duly broke down and (faux) cried in front of him…. Cringing now.

Oh I loved my orange shoes. These were mine from 1986.

I also wore Grolsch bottle tops on my shoes in 1988 cos of Bros. Not sorry though as it's all part of growing up.

<misses point of thread>

When I was 16, I fancied a boy down at the youth club. I got my hair cut really short in imitation of a girl on a magazine cover. Only I didn't just leave it at that: I wanted her dimples, too, and looking in the mirror found that if I forced all the muscles in my cheeks into a kind of rictus, I could just about obtain dimples. I had no idea how mad this looked because I was so short-sighted (but too vain to wear contact lenses).

He never spoke to me again. We'd been getting on quite nicely up to that point. I might have got away with cutting off all my hair, but the Wallace & Gromit grinning must have made him think I'd completely lost my mind.

When I was in my early 20s, for some batshit reason I used to think it was fine to touch up my foundation wherever I happened to be at the time, and was once caught out doing it while waiting for a job interview that began a little early. I mean, WTF was I thinking?!

(No, I didn't get the job.)

My first snog… he stopped midway and said “why are you trying to bite me?” 😭🙈

It all sounds very innocent! 😍

I just remembered another thing, reading the beauty tips in girls' magazines, there was a lot of talk about colour correction in the days before you could buy creams that promised to fix it all. I used to lightly (I thought) powder a very pale green eyeshadow on my nose to "tone it down". One day, a teacher at school asked me "Why have you painted your nose green?"

I had a gap year in the US and met a 30 year old called Kevin through a friend. He lived a two hour drive away. We had literally had zero physical contact or romance and for some unknown reason I accepted his offer to spend the weekend at his house. I think the 19 year old me thought I was being very cool and liberated. In reality Kevin looked a bit like a younger and uglier version of the man from Breaking Bad and was about as charismatic as John Major (that may be harsh on John).

He drove all the way over, picked me up and drove me back to his. I announced I was going to sleep on his lounge floor, got in my sleeping bag and left him to his evening. First thing the morning I asked him to drive me home (which he did very gracefully) so all in all about 8 hours of driving for nothing.

I look back and think wtf was I thinking (ignoring the 11 year age gap). The poor man probably wondered whether the whole shenanigans was a quirky British way of dating.

I also cringe at my witty not witty FB memory posts although mercifully I swerved the X is feeling blessed ones at least.

🤣🤣🤣

This was me too, clutching a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 on the train making sure as many people as possible saw the cover. No one cared of course…cringe!

Staying married to a total dickhead for far too long … even when I knew he was a dickhead.

This is very outing, but as a diehard Manic Street Preachers "glitter kid" when I was 14... faking a Welsh accent when I had a distinctly Nordic one 😂😂 Fuck knows what I sounded like!

Grew up in the early 2000s skate / new metal era of big jeans and big hoodies.

I wanted a chain to go on my jeans but parents understandably didn’t think it was worth buying one for £20 so I got a section of chain link fencing from Homebase and popped it on a key ring. Arguably more punk but I absolutely could not pull it off.

fancied the boy who lived opposite. Our schools were in the same direction, used to watch his house from my parents bedroom window and when I saw his front door open would literally throw myself down the stairs to also leave so that I could coincidentally bump into him on the way 😳

Men

When I was 12 I had to go with my family to look around the area my step dad may be posted to (MOD) so there we were on a coach travelling around Chipping Sodbury…stopping off at various locations for a quick look around. We stayed in a hotel overnight then back home the next day.

The following day I returned to my secondary school (year 7) and dazzled everyone with my new accent I now had from my 3 hours in Chipping Sodbury. I think my friends were pretty amazed with how well travelled I was….my teachers on the other hand must have thought I was a right twat 😬

This, so SO much. Everyday I go on Facebook and look at memories always cringing in anticipation of what I did/said 15 years ago 🙈

I once pretended to be asleep and have a sex dream on a school coach(with the kind of noises I assumed you made when you had sex) so I seemed like a cool, sexual young woman instead of an awkward teenage virgin. Wtf was I thinking?!

Found out the number of the boy everyone at school fancied and kept calling him with my mate. I think we somehow thought he might fall in love with us after ignoring us at school forever. He didn't. He told his mates we were stalking him. So embarrassing.

I also kept a kind of fact file about another lad I fancied. This had been a long term crush. One day, he stuck a piece of chewing gum under a table, so I went and retrieved it and put it in a bit of paper. I kept it under my pillow so I could have his saliva near me 😂

I think pretty much everything I did for at least a decade was pure cringe.

My favourite outfit was cycling shorts with one black leg and one white, with a black and white tshirt the opposite way round, and black and white Nike Huraches...and I wore one white sock, one black sock and 2 watches, yes, one white and one black 😳😂 in my defense it would've been the early 90s, but thankfully no SM evidence!

Having sex with emotionally unavailable men.