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Prologue
BEFORE WE BEGIN
When I finished writing Putas Historias, Putos Escritos, I swore I would never expose myself like that again.
I swore it with the same conviction I use for many other promises:
which means there was absolutely no chance I was going to keep it.
A few months later, at a party, I tripped over my own heels in front of fifteen people, crashed into a table full of food and, instead of dying from embarrassment, laughed so hard the entire party ended up laughing with me.
That night, I realized I had another book inside me.
I didn’t fall onto a table full of food.
I fell onto the perfect argument for my next book.
I’m writing this prologue myself because nobody knows my ridiculous moments with as much detail, memory, or shamelessness as I do.
Besides, it would be pretty damn cheeky to make someone else tell the story of my own stupidity.
And I’m not just talking about falling down.
If only human embarrassment were limited to tripping in heels and standing back up while pretending you were inspecting the floor.
No.
There’s also the embarrassment of swearing you would never do something and then doing it enthusiastically.
Giving brilliant advice that you wouldn’t follow yourself even by accident.
Feeling incredibly intelligent five minutes before making an absolutely idiotic decision.
Judging somebody else’s life with breathtaking confidence and later discovering that yours didn’t exactly come with an instruction manual either.
Because life has a pretty nasty habit:
it waits patiently for you to say,
“That would never happen to me.”
Then it immediately starts organizing the show.
And we all fall for it.
The person in love who swore they would never go back.
The spiritual person who lost their inner peace over an unanswered message.
The businesswoman who gave away her time because she felt awkward charging for it.
The friend who promised to keep a secret and somehow launched the national gossip network.
The mature adult who answered a passive-aggressive post with an even worse one.
All of us.
No exceptions.
Because making a fool of yourself doesn’t always mean falling in front of fifteen people.
Sometimes it means falling in love with more imagination than evidence.
Believing a lie because it was beautifully packaged.
Defending someone who wasn’t even defending themselves.
Trying to prove you’re completely over it while checking for the fifth time who watched your story.
Or spending half your life trying to look sensible when, deep down, every one of us is running a small unlicensed circus.
That’s where this book came from.
From that wonderful, absurd contradiction built into human beings.
We think we’re smart, but we repeat mistakes.
We think we’re strong, but we answer the message.
We think we’re evolved, but we’re still checking somebody else’s profile at two in the morning.
We think we’re incredibly dignified until life forces us to improvise with our pride in one hand and our phone in the other.
And that’s okay.
Well.
Things happen.
Some spectacularly humiliating shit happens.
But eventually, those moments become stories.
And once you stop hiding those stories, they lose their power to embarrass you and start doing something much more useful:
they make you laugh, recognize yourself, and stop believing you’re uniquely cursed.
That’s why you will not find one hundred ways to avoid embarrassment in this book.
I have neither the moral authority nor the proven experience to teach such a thing.
What you will find are one hundred pieces of evidence that nobody has life figured out as much as they pretend.
Not the person giving advice.
Not the person judging everyone else.
Not the person posting quotes about inner peace.
Not the woman writing this book.
Especially not the woman writing this book.
So here I am, introducing myself again:
the woman who already told you her fucked-up stories and is now going to tell you, with the same sarcasm as always, about one hundred of her finest acts of stupidity.
Not so you can laugh at me.
Well.
You can laugh.
I did too.
But read carefully.
Because everyone starts by laughing at somebody else’s embarrassment…
until they reach the page where they find their own.
Welcome back inside my head.
Come on in.
Make yourself comfortable.
Just watch the steps.
