Shame-baking

Just did something stupid — maybe unintentionally or maybe not — , apologized for it, now “it’s okay”. I put some music on, look up a nice cake recipe on the internet and start gathering the ingredients. Follow the instructions thoroughly, wait for the timer to ring, then take the cake out of the oven and eat a slice while it’s still hot.

This has happened quite a few times already and I hadn’t noticed until recently, but it seems I use baking as a way to escape temporarily from the guilt of making an awful mistake. It always comes back though, that unpleasant, consuming feeling of shame, forcing me to rewind the scene again and again in my head and wonder about what I could’ve done better or what the other people in the room thought of me in that moment.

It’s funny how the memories I most easily remember are the ones describing situations in which I felt sad, frustrated, misunderstood or embarrassed. I’ve heard a few times that “bad situations make the greatest stories”, although unfortunately I don’t believe that applies to me: those events yielded nothing but mild traumas. This leads me to wonder what I’m doing wrong that prevents me from seeing the silver lining in these cases and transforming them into compelling narratives.

Maybe I’m just overthinking about things that are not worth the concern, maybe I’m comparing myself to others too much — it’s weird to notice that some people seem to have one different funny story about every subject. Anyway, frustating as it might be, at least I still have the cake.