“You got egg on your face”.
“That was wack”.
“Cringe!”.
“So lame”.
“That’s an L moment.”
Regardless of how you say it*, the experience of doing something so embarrassing it lives rent free in your head for years is, well, timeless. For example:
... that time all your friends, family, and the rest of NZ primary school-aged kids saw you trying to slink into the background on a popular kids’ TV show when you loudly said ‘pavement’ when everyone else said ‘footpath’, and they wouldn’t re-shoot it before it aired...
... the time you wore your sports uniform for the yearbook school sports photographs instead of the formal school uniform everyone else was wearing, and it’s now recorded there for eternity...
Or the one which, as a librarian specialising in children’s and young adult books, hurts just as much 35 years later as it did in the moment:
... the time you were excited to show off your knowledge about famous NZ author, Joy Cowley, but you called her the wrong name and accidentally said the name of a classmate with the same initials...
Decades later as an adult I’m 95 percent certain no-one else has any memory of these things happening and am 100 percent certain that they’ve had zero impact on those people’s lives since.
Back then in the moment, however, those actions were mortifying. They were absolutely soul-destroying, and the end of life as I knew it. Because that is what life is, isn’t it? We go through it trying our best, but in the end we’re all just human, and sometimes we end up in situations we’d rather forget about.
And as someone once said:
‘Sometimes the most valuable lessons come wrapped in the most embarrassing packages, and sometimes the best way to learn what to do is to first learn, in excruciating detail, what not to do.’
That someone was Pax Assadi, award-winning comedian and TV writer, and now published author and WORD Christchurch Festival guest. And boy, has he had some great ‘learning opportunities’!
He’s written about some of them in Mortified, his highly enjoyable memoir that had me alternating between laughing out loud and wincing in second-hand embarrassment. From juggling Iranian, Pakistani, and Kiwi cultural expectations growing up in New Zealand, making questionable teenage choices in the face of peer pressure, and the trials and tribulations involved in joining the stand up comedy circuit, Mortified reminds us that embarrassing moments are universal. It’s up to us whether we turn them into lifelong trauma, or an incentive to grow into a stronger person.
Pax Assadi is in Ōtautahi Christchurch for the WORD Christchurch Festival 2026 to share his book, stories, and learning with pip adam and WORD audiences, and I am really looking forward to this conversation. Mortified is so casually written that it’s just like you’re in a kōrero with the author, so I am excited to continue this experience and hear more from Pax about these stories, and how he chose which ones to include.
Mortified: Pax Assadi is at Tūranga, 4.30pm to 5.30pm, Friday 4 September. Find out more, or buy your tickets ($26 full, $20 concession).
WORD Christchurch Festival 2026
- Get a copy of the WORD programme at libraries or check it out online.
- Visit our WORD Christchurch 2026 page
- WORD Christchurch's website
* And yes, I did look up a ‘generational slang decoder’ while writing this - I have enough difficulty using my native Millennial slang, so if I tried to throw in Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang as well without checking it who knows what I’d have said!
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