This story is embarrassing, mostly because I did it entirely to myself and can’t blame a single other soul for my mortification.

I’ll accept this medal with pride and in honor of all those fallen victims—the flutes dropped, snared drums busted, and those shredded reeds.

(also, this just made me laugh out loud at work, so thank you)

In 8th grade I had this HUGE, world-shaking crush on a junior - he was my friend’s boyfriend’s older brother, and he was SO cute and SO nice, played guitar in a band (my small town was a cultural desert so this was a big deal) and he liked the same music as I did (early 2000s emo... V cool). Basically I transformed…

I was dancing in a crowd when a fast-paced song started playing. I start dancing faster, having a good time, notice more people watching me. I close my eyes and do a weird hair-whippy thing.

I still can’t decide if this was really mortifying or awesome BUT in 11th grade I went to my first ever dance. I was at a Catholic school that kept pulling us away and telling us to ‘make room for the holy spirit’, which was bad enough, but on top of it my paranoid father had drilled into my head that all boys were…

Almost nothing that happens in life is worse than middle school. :-(

I was homeless for the second half of 7th grade, and during that time I went to some weird, small school near where we stayed. I fit in okay there, I guess, better than at the school I went to before that, and I was excited about the graduation dance. I liked a boy with an Australian accent, and he was nice enough to…

Let me start this by saying this happened twelve years ago and I still get anxiety thinking about it.

It was my first dance ever at my middle school. I was dancing and having a great time. I went to sit down for a bit, and sat in pizza. Like those long rectangle slabs of pizza from the cafeteria. I felt the sauce leak in from my butt down to my knees. I was mortified and like who the fuck needed so much pizza?! For…

Here in the UK, high school dances and proms are really only becoming a thing now; when I was a kid, it was more the under 18’s nights (“kiddie’s disco”) at the local nightclubs that we had, which were kinda shit-showy as they would take place in the center of town in a nightclub surrounded by all of the other…

It wasn’t a dance. It was the Highly Discussed Black & White 6th Grade Roller Skate Party. (At my Middle School, the 6th Graders got a roller skate party and the 8th Graders got a dance and the 7th Graders didn’t get anything because they were constantly in trouble for bullying). ANYWAY. My family had just moved and…

Like most people, I was an gangly teen- all pimples and limbs and braces. I had a huge, super nerd-girl crush on someone I’ll call Joe. Joe was a year older than me even though he was in the same grade, and had bit puberty sooner as a consequence, so was more man-than-boy shaped. Ravelston likied.

One look at time on…

Ugh, it sounds very walk-of-shamey.

I do not understand the logic behind him making you wear your dress. Was it specifically for humiliation purposes, or was that somehow “proof” that your clothes never came off that night?

I wrote a scathing open letter that called out, by name, all the popular girls in my accelerated educated class and posted in the bathroom during the big 8th grade dance. It made all of them cry. I never got caught.

Oh boy, here goes. First you have to know that in middle school I was a social pariah. You know how there’s always that one really clueless kid that has zero friends everybody makes fun of mercilessly? Yep, me. Anyway, as part of this one school dance/party in seventh grade there was karaoke, and I somehow got tacked…

This was so long ago... It was my sophomore year, maybe my second high school dance and, being on the periphery of the popular crowd, I was determined to look natural doing those highly suggestive bump-n-grind dance moves that were all the rage with the kids. I felt like I had it down and I actually got a dance with…

On the DAY OF prom, I got a call from a friend asking if I knew her cousin, a senior who also went to our school. He was nice enough but, quite frankly, a pretty weird kid. She says he wasn’t going to prom since he didn’t have a date. I said I wasn’t so sure about the “date” part, but that he should come join all of…

Oh I’ve got a good one for this. Senior year of high school back in 2010. My best friend, Aja (cool name; not a cool chick) and I had planned for at least a year to go to homecoming together as besties. Trouble was, freshman year of high school she had moved from a neighboring town in MD to middle of nowhere VA and…

OK mine’s not too mortifying, but I’ll share. My first dance was in 6th grade...