Have you heard the phrase “I am cringe, but I am free?” Perhaps it’s just another iteration of Tumblr prose and Internet lingo with no real meat or substance to it, but we can’t help but to think otherwise.
We live in an era where everything can be content, and what is more entertaining to the wider audience than people embarrassing themselves online? The idea of cringe, or a feeling of second-hand embarrassment derived from the otherness of others is nothing new, however cringe is more than that. When the mainstream labels something cringe, its connotations are rarely positive. In lieu of minding our own business, some would prefer to watch hour long compilations of people being cringe. “Cringe has become a neoliberal aesthetic tool of power assertion.1"
Ask yourself what is cringe and who is usually being labelled so?
Is it cringe to watch subbed anime? To listen to emo music? To play children’s games? To make an original character?
Or is it cringe to be a woman? To be queer? To be a person of color? To be trans?
We believe it is all of the above, in which cringe has become a weapon we have aimed towards ourselves in the modern, uniform world. “We become inhibited, we self-censor, we begin to view ourselves as though looking from the outside.2" How have we come to limit ourselves through the digital landscape that was supposed to unlock all sorts of new possibilities?
This is a time where we need to empathize with each other more than ever; it starts with the youth and all those who have yet to lose that spirit. You were put on this Earth to live, so live sincerely.
Liberate us.
Cringe can be more than a shame you’re supposed to feel for being the odd one out. It is beyond being uncool in the real world. It is a culmination of the possibilities of another reality that has been stunted by the pressure to be part of a “Flat Design,” capitalizing on a space that was originally made by us for us. Our definition of cringe is an ode to the expedition of humanity into cyberspace as a place for those who lacked spaces in the physical world.
We ask ourselves to be cringe, to not fear being cringe. Cringe is the new authentic, it is as real as we can be in a virtual world. Cringe to us does not mean the same thing as it means to them.
It is our dreams, our obsessions that follow us when we go to bed and wake up in the morning to take on our 9 to 5. These hopes will not and cannot die.
We do not care. These are not childish aspirations, this is the future we do not let go of.
This term is ours, so be cringe and be free!