When I got to Albany Entertainment Centre and saw the two hundred chairs and bumped into all sorts of people I knew professionally, I started to question my choice of story to tell on stage. And I started to feel really nervous.
My friends were all… ‘You’ll be fine, you’re a lecturer, you do this all the time!’
‘But this is different’ I protested.
I’d been at the Barefaced Stories workshop the previous weekend, and the excellent facilitator Andrea Gibbs, had a canny process of gleaning stories. Mine was an incident I hadn’t thought about in at least a decade – all about being fifteen years old, my first real boyfriend, him sneaking into my room, leaving porn videotapes behind – it’s a long story, and my mum finding them the next day.
As I sat in the audience, heart beating fast and mouth drying out no matter how much water I drank, I thought of the self-deprecating disclaimer I could make before starting. But in the end I just told the story as I’d planned, and felt totally comfortable while doing it.
It is an amazing thing about performing or public speaking. That you can be so nervous, fluttery and anxious, even as you’re walking on to the stage, but then a calmness descends, your voice steadies, and you don’t feel another nervous moment.
The kind and supportive crowd in Albany who laughed in all the right places. Photo: Barefaced Stories
But there is a little part of me that freaks out before any speaking occasion, especially when it is not my comfort zone of talking to students, wondering if I might have a repeat of the most humiliating moment of my life.
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It was around fifteen years ago, when I was the Coordinator of the WA Collaboration, a partnership of NGOs working alongside the State Government who were in the process of developing a State Sustainability Strategy.
I was in Adelaide, where there was a conference based around the idea of developing a South Australian Collaboration, and I was scheduled to facilitate a workshop on the first day and be on the final panel on the second day.
Then a speaker dropped out of the very first session and I was asked to give a brief overview of the WA Collaboration.
I said ‘Sure, easy.’
I sat there with the other speakers, one of whom said, ‘You don’t seem nervous at all.’
I said ‘I’m not, I’ve spoken about this loads of times.’
I’ve wondered since whether being nervous in these situations is essential, and that if you don’t have nerves before speaking, they will hit you while you are speaking. And they hit me that day like a tsunami. I had the only panic attack of my life, while on stage in front of hundreds of people.
I have no idea where it came from, but I partly blame jetlag. In the only remotely jet-setting era of my working life, I’d just flown back from a conference in Cardiff, was at home one night and then flew to Adelaide. I was really tired and severely jetlagged.
My heart is beating ferociously just thinking about it. At the time my heart was beating so wildly I was sure that everyone would be able to see it through my top. Those poor people in the audience that I was making deeply uncomfortable with my public unravelling.
My voice wavered and shook, I was sweating and pale. I tried to slow down and gather myself, and reached for a glass of water, mumbling ‘I’m sorry, I’m really jetlagged’. But the glass shook so violently in my hands that the water was going to slosh out everywhere. So I put the glass down again.
I could see the doors and the green exit sign at the back of the enormous conference room, and it took every scrap of willpower I had to keep myself on that stage and not run, run, run, like the man on the exit sign, run down the street, perhaps I could have just run across the Nullarbor and back home. And I’m a swimmer not a runner. I’ve never experienced such an unbelievably strong flight response. It was a primal urge.
Somehow I made it through the mercifully short presentation, and I just wanted to melt away, into the seat and become entirely invisible. I got my wish. At the morning tea break nobody spoke to me. Normally after doing a presentation, people come up to you with questions and comments, but it was though I had an infectious disease. Nobody wanted to catch my public-speaking-panic-attack-affliction. I was probably also repelling people with my strong aura of shame and humiliation.
But I had to pick myself up and had to facilitate a workshop that afternoon, and I managed to do a good job. The final panel session went OK as well. I had redeemed myself, at least partly.
I’m sure that is what saved me from being scarred forever. Having to immediately do more public speaking and do a reasonable job of it, to prove to myself that it was a one-off thing and not a new normal. I’ve since met people who had similarly awful humiliating experiences and they’ve had a phobia about public speaking since.
Working as a lecturer for ten years has been one way of working through a potential phobia, but still it lurks there, as a little reminder. It does help me with managing the jitters beforehand, as I rationalise to myself that if I’m feeling the nerves now, I won’t feel them while talking.
Which was precisely the situation at Barefaced Stories. I was totally comfortable once I got up on stage, despite the nerves beforehand. I loved the experience, even though I’m still not so sure about telling that particular story to that audience.