Picture this: You’re scrolling through Instagram on a Friday night, getting ready for a 10-hour snooze and a restful weekend. Suddenly, you shudder — flashbacks from when you stuttered in your English presentation invade your peaceful mind. 

Night ruined.

We’ve all had these thoughts before. It’s like our brain is constantly searching for embarrassing events to resurface, and this seems to peak whenever we’re finally feeling confident. 

I’ll take the role of your pesky brain to describe, in detail, your unluckiest moments.

Let’s start with social media, where everything seems to go wrong. Snapchat is like spyware: Every move you make is broadcast to the entire world. Didn’t mean to send that to someone? Too bad — you just did. Accidentally started typing? Tough luck, your crush knows.

Remember online school last year? The unmute button was a one-click disaster, and there were too many incidents where someone said something they probably weren’t supposed to. Plus, your Zoom box lights up after you speak, basically saying, “Look at this fool.”

But, that’s a distant memory. 

Now, when you’re called out in front of everyone, you get the same experience — in real life. When you freeze up, you know that every single eye is on you. 

Awkward.

And even if you scramble together a marginally cohesive sentence, a single stutter is all it takes to send you packing your bags. No more social interaction for the next week.

Speaking of which, have you seen someone waving at you in the hallways? You smile and wave back, only to realize the wave wasn’t actually for you. Mission failed.

Let’s get to the juicy bit: asking out that special person in your life and getting shut down. Look, it won’t always work out, but shooters gon’ shoot. 

“You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” Michael Jordan once said. You’ve got to view failure as a part of the experience: It’s damaging to endure rejection, but it can only go up from there, right?. 

You thought wrong. 

You’ll hear about it for ages after, and you’ve lost a piece of your ego that you’ll never get back. But keep your head up — there’s plenty of fish in the sea.

You always have the homies to back you up, too. Yes, they’ll ridicule you until your demise, but they’ll be there for you when you need them. You’ll bounce back. 

Unfortunately, it’s hard to recover from these experiences. Slowly but surely, however, the memory drifts away, and you’ll have to cope with the fact that it happened: Dwelling on such trifling matters isn’t getting you anywhere.  

I guarantee we’ve all had our fair share of embarrassing moments throughout the years, and they always seem to come back and haunt us in some way shape or form, whether we like it or not. Still, you’re not alone — a bit of ego deflation here and there doesn’t hurt.