Control…What Have You Done For Me Lately?
The hardest part of finding my voice and being comfortable telling stories in front of audiences was confronting my anxiety. The actual storytelling part is great. I enjoy connecting with people and I absolutely love feeling the energy created when my voice fills a room. It was the worrying beforehand, the anxiety that I felt all the way up to the day of my performance that almost made the event not worth it to me. I would work myself up so much with visions of failure and humiliation that I felt sick. I would play on a loop all the different ways that my story would bomb and this made the entire process unhealthy because no matter how great my story actually went, I had already experienced the feeling of utter defeat.
Just thinking about what it would be like to publicly fall on my face made me experience the feelings as if it had really happened. It took me a long time to realize that I was harming myself with my own thoughts. Trying to ignore what I was feeling didn’t work, it actually made me feel worse. I tried breathing techniques and although they helped some with my physical responses I was still having serious anxiety. I decided to explore more in depth exactly what was happening to me when these negative thoughts started to fill my brain.
My heart beat faster, my muscles tensed up, my emotions navigated towards sadness, frustration, fear and anger…I was a mess. Why? Was it because I was unprepared? Nope. I knew my story front to back so where was my uncertainty coming from? Why was my confidence in my own abilities so fractured? What I soon figured out about myself is that I like to have control and storytelling is a vulnerable endeavor in which you absolutely can’t control how people will respond. You can only work on your craft and then release it into the universe, after that, it’s out of your hands.
For someone like me who tries to control so much of their life, the act of telling stories to a room full of people that I can’t control is very disruptive to my psyche. The cruel joke of it all is that control is an illusion. I have very little control in my life because life is, for the most part, uncontrollable. Humans have been trying to control it since we started walking upright but life-keeps-winning.
Oddly enough, this realization took all of the negative self-talk wind out of my sails. “It’s gonna be what it’s gonna be” became my new mantra. The destructive voice inside of my head went away and I was just left with my story to tell. If there were 500 people in the audience then there would be 500 responses that I couldn’t control and that’s okay. I reflect, I practice, I tweak things here, I change things there, I prepare and then I perform. To add self flagellation to that list doesn’t do anyone any good so I stopped. Now, I can devote all of my energy to preparing the best possible story, the best possible product, the best possible me to put forward and that is all I can really control.
