Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
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Dear James,
I have stage fright. I’ve had it since I was a little kid trying to perform at elementary-school talent shows. But the problem has persisted into adulthood, what with its occasional PowerPoint presentations and wedding speeches.
I would generally say I’m a confident guy, and I’m comfortable in one-on-one settings—even high-stakes ones, like job interviews. But put me in front of an audience, or on the spot to answer a question in a meeting, and that’s when my biology betrays me: heart bumping, fluttering in my gut, dryness in my mouth, dampness in my palms. In an instant, I become hyperaware of my body, and I can’t think straight.
How can I seize control of my mind when it’s been hijacked by my more reptilian nerves? I fear that you’ll suggest joining an improv group—but if you think it’ll help, I’m open to it.
Dear Reader,
Hijacked by the reptilian: I spend half my life in that state. Really a fascinating aspect of the human condition—and one that preoccupies us now more than ever, I think, because we’re so up in our heads, our screens, our sealed-off, smoothed-out little 21st-century subjectivities. The body won’t have it; the body won’t translate itself to the cloud; the body rebels and throws up wild and withering panics to recall us to our animal nature.
Stage fright is not something that’s ever bothered me. I’m like Lady Gaga—I live for the applause—although I did (I’ve mentioned this before in this column) endure a childhood stammer: If you want a primal image of my psyche, kindly picture me at the age of 10, a short-trousered boarding-school boy, standing at the lectern in chapel in front of all the other short-trousered boarding-school boys, comprehensively unable to utter the words A reading from the prophet Jeremiah. Gaping, blocked, with the pressure rising.
I got there in the end. I always do. (Put that on my gravestone: He got there in the end.)
I don’t know anything about improv, so for you I’m going to recommend meditation, and I’ll tell you why. Non-meditator that I currently am, I can trace one significant and quite helpful development in my being-in-the-worldness to the years I spent meditating very badly (like everyone) for 20 minutes a day. Those 20 minutes were pure mental chaos, but gradually I was made aware of a tiny part of me, a silvery scintilla of awareness, that wasn’t actually touched by the chaos. Rather, it watched the chaos, observed it, with a kind of benign fascination: Holy hell, this guy’s all OVER the place.
So now when the reptilian hijacks me, when anxiety sweats through me, when my stomach jumps and my head whirls and the dancing horses of panic make their entrance, I reach for that bright splinter of untouchability. I watch myself, experience myself, going through it. And pretty soon, I’m not in it anymore—and then it’s over.
Wishing you operatic PowerPoint presentations,
James
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