That Awkward Moment
Sometime between 2009, when Dork Diaries was published, and 2011, when Borders went defunct and shut down their stores, I read my first Dork Diaries on the floor of a Borders bookstore. Borders was special because it had newer books than the local library and sold chocolate-chip cookies and hot cocoa from a local cafe. In the summer my dad would drop my siblings and I in the children’s book aisle and go to the cafe to work on his laptop. I prowled the aisles aimlessly, looking for a book that would make me into a perfect person, or at least give me guidelines to live a better life with its quick-fix hacks and habits that I could quickly adopt as my own. After a fruitless search, I decided I expected too much from children’s books and plopped on the carpet beside my sister.
She was already nose deep in a thick hardcover book. The cover displayed, in artsy yellow letters, the words ‘Dork Diaries: Tales From A Not-So-Fabulous Life’, along with a line drawing of a plain-Jane girl. It was the art that had me hooked. Cutesy but not childish drawings of characters and scenes populated every other page. In the Dork Diaries universe, the main character, Nikki Maxwell, supposedly drew the art herself to accompany the tales of her crummy day-to-day existence. In reality, the writing is done by Rachel Renée Russell and her daughter Erin, the art by her other daughter, Nikki. My sister let me read over her shoulder, and later our parents gifted us the book for Christmas.
* * *
Nikki’s first diary chronicles her time as a new eighth-grade student at cliquey Westchester Country Day, a private school she can only afford via an academic scholarship awarded because her dad is the school exterminator. In the first pages of the book, she details how humiliated she was when the other kids at WCD found out her phone was old and crappy. Other embarrassments Nikki suffers include falling and spilling lunch on herself in the cafeteria, wearing clothes from Target instead of Chanel, spilling body spray everywhere in the middle of a class, having a scholarship, her father’s bug mobile, accepting an invitation that wasn’t meant for her, and her parents and little sister existing in general.
* * *
I read two more Dork Diaries books before I’d even entered seventh grade. The books taught me the meaning of the word faux and what happens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the most memorable, relatable aspect by far was Nikki being embarrassed, or worrying about ways she could be embarrassed.
At school, at home, at the gym, at the grocery store, I lived in fear of embarrassment. I was insecure, tall, and gangly, with a horrifying glasses-braces combo and a random phase as a misguided attempt to emulate Cat Valentine from Victorious. I felt like I would die if I were embarrassed badly enough, or in front of a large enough group of people. In fact, I would rather have died than have a cringy picture or secret shared with the whole world, the way Nikki feels when her teacher gets mad at her for spilling her body spray. And I wasn’t alone. Everyone was going through the confusion of puberty. We smelled, we were awkward, our brains weren’t fully developed. We knew how to hurt each other, but not why we shouldn’t.
* * *
By the end of the first book, Nikki has made two best friends, beat her bully to win her school’s art competition, and is going to be lab partners with her crush for a unit on mitochondria. She has also embraced being a dork, having realized that being herself is what got her her best friends and her crush. Literally—if she’d never fled the cafeteria post-food-spill and hid in the janitor’s closet, the main trio in the series might never have come to be.
Under the layers of fakery we use to protect ourselves in middle school, from new clothes to lies about our interests to joining teams we don’t want to be on, eating lunch with people who hate us so we don’t have to eat alone, there’s something real, something we’re scared to reveal. What if people laugh at it? What if we end up alone? In Dork Diaries, this is what makes Nikki endearing, what draws people to her. Embarrassment makes her vulnerable. Being vulnerable makes her real.
* * *
By the end of book two, Nikki has enjoyed a dance with her crush. By the end of book three, her band is having a single released by a famous music producer. Things get crazier from there—later books deal with Nikki going on tour and becoming a reality tv star—but the embarrassing incidents remain a consistent thread. The only difference is that Nikki has people in her life to support her and handles these incidents with maturity, if not grace.
I can’t say I share the wild success story of Nikki. Though I am far removed from my middle school years, I have yet to release a charting single. My art abilities are far from the work I admired on the floor of the bookstore. But, like Nikki, I’ve moved past that crippling fear of embarrassment. I no longer worry about the time I ran out with the wrong team at a cheerleading competition, or ruined the hula-hoop battle at my first dance by knocking into a bunch of people, or said ‘Oh My Gosh’ before every sentence, or wrote a center-spaced poem about relating to sliced pineapples. I don’t believe it’s entirely true that no one remembers these moments—sometimes I recall the boy who came out of the locker room after basketball practice hoping to shortcut through the gym, only to find eight-hundred eyes on him as he crashed a fundraising assembly—but if they do remember them, who cares? None of these incidents had any lasting impact on my life beyond the initial feeling of shame. I can’t look back on them and laugh, but I can look back and not cringe, and that’s a step. I’ve become the person Nikki becomes by the end of book three—not an international popstar, but someone who’s no longer afraid of being embarrassed, because she understands that a few awkward moments won’t define the rest of her life if she doesn’t let them.