Anxiety

   About a month ago, I was asked to give a short speech at a work gathering. I was fine with this when asked and agreed to take on the responsibility.
   I was still fine with this right up until the day before the work gathering when all of the sudden it hit me--holy crap, I have to give a speech at a work gathering!
   At this point my anxiety simply took off. I began to visualize standing up there in front of the crowd and everything going wrong. Originally, I had envisioned doing a very informal, off-the-cuff type of speech, using perhaps only point form reminders on a piece of paper. I then envisioned looking down and not having any idea what the point forms meant. I envisioned my papers flying away. I envisioned the worse case of dry mouth, totally incapacitating me. More than anything, I envisioned the dreaded pause. The dreaded pause as over a hundred people are staring at me, waiting for me to say...anything. At this point, I actually envisioned having to leave the microphone, make up some half-baked excuse for why I was unable to continue and then never face those people again. Ever.
   At times, I was able to convince myself that I was going to be talking in front of a group of people I'd known for almost my entire adult life and that they would understand and not be judgemental, if anything did go wrong. Momentarily, thinking this way set me more at ease. Of course, then I remembered that if anything did go wrong, I would somehow be reminded of it daily, because these were people I saw every day.
   The end result of all this was that I spent much of the day with my stomach tied in knots. I wasn't hungry (unusual for me) and I couldn't force myself to actually do anything around the house. To escape this feeling, I actually went back to bed, in the middle of the day and pulled the covers up over my head. All this over a little, informal speech, in front of friends!
   My boss, Ken, asked me to do this speech, mainly because he didn't want to do it mainly because he feels the same as I do and neither one of us can really figure this one out. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, this suffocating sense of anxiety around public speaking. I've had it ever since I can remember, way back in public school. Once a year, we all were forced to do a 5-minute speech, topic of our choice. I never had much of a problem writing the speech, of course. It was the five minutes I had to spend at the front of the class that terrified me. I knew we were all in the same boat together but that didn't really make it feel any better. We would draw numbers to determine the speaking order and I was never quite sure whether I wanted to put it off to the end or get it over and done with near the beginning. One thing was for sure--I never even heard the people who spoke ahead of me. Once I was done, though, I was able to sit back and actually listen to what was going on.

   A little later on in my life, I occasionally found myself reading poems I'd written at poetry recitals. This, again, was agony. The agony was in the waiting, more than anything, once I got started I would quickly relax and actually begin to enjoy myself. This is pretty common with me, once I am in the middle of whatever kind of presentation I am doing I'm okay. Unfortunately, it's almost like I need drugs to get there.
   At some point, the day before my work speech, I decided to abandon the "off the cuff" approach and simply write out exactly what I was planning on saying and then read it out loud, to the assembled masses. Once I changed my plan of attack, the anxiety (the debilitating part of it) seemed to more or less melt away, much to my relief.
   I don't do a lot of public speaking so I have never really spent a lot of time working on strategies to avoid this kind of anxiety. I greatly admire people who are able to get up there and just talk comfortably, without having to read right off a page and perhaps that is the ideal I was aspiring to when I got so off track. Perhaps I will never be a professional emcee. If not, no big deal.
   My brief little anxiety attack now has me truly wondering how people with real anxiety cope, on a regular basis. What must it be like to wake up every day and be so totally paralyzed that all you can do is crawl back under the covers. It's also not hard to understand why some people don't cope, at all. My biggest fear about my speech was that I would not perform to an acceptable standard. I wonder what life would be like if not performing to an acceptable standard meant you got the crap beaten out of you on a daily basis. Or that you were constantly on the edge of losing your job. Or that someone might die. And no covers to hide under. Contemplating such things certainly put my little work speech in its rightful place.
   My life has returned to normal thank goodness. Actually, it was back to normal about five seconds after the speech ended. My boss, bless him, has promised me many more of these speaking assignments. For my part, I have promised only to ghost-write!