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When I recall my younger days, I am filled with admiration for my fearlessness. Here are a few examples:
- I uprooted myself every few years, roaming from my childhood home in Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. for college; then to Buffalo; Brooklyn; Manhattan; suburban New Jersey; and back to Washington before getting married and moving to Honolulu. I got divorced just two years later, but I stayed in Honolulu—thousands of miles from home—for 12 more years.
- Moving from Buffalo to Brooklyn meant leaving the safe haven of a Ph.D. program in English literature. Two years later, with no experience in the field, I applied to and was accepted by a journalism school in Manhattan, where I plunged headlong into the gritty, thrilling world of New York City shoe-leather journalism and discovered my vocation.
- While in Honolulu, I fulfilled a childhood dream to visit Paris, and I booked a solo trip there, flying nearly 7,500 miles to a city where I knew no one and planned to rely on my high school and college French to make my way around. Luckily for me, my French turned out to be much better than I expected, but I didn’t discover that until I was in Paris—far too late to back out of my adventure.
I remembered these past acts of courage last week, after I provided background piano music for a luncheon of about 200 people and developed a severe, almost crippling case of the jitters.
I have written before about my return to piano as an adult and my previous experiences with performance anxiety. This time, I thought I would be anxiety-free because I had diligently practiced for weeks and prepared a list of seemingly mistake-proof selections. Furthermore, because it was background music, I knew no one would be listening carefully. That has always been the key to my limited success as a pianist.
Unfortunately, I had not anticipated that two of the guests would be classical pianists—one of them a college music professor. I had met both of these men before, and I was delighted to see them again. But my delight turned to dismay when I discovered they would be sitting at a table just ten feet from the piano.
As I started to play, I was hyper-aware of their presence. Even though I knew they weren’t listening closely, I quickly became a nervous wreck. My hands shook, and it took everything in me to calm my fingers enough to hit the proper keys. To make matters worse, my brain went into overdrive; a torrent of negative, destructive thoughts began racing through my head.
I soldiered on for 40 minutes, my perceptions surreally split between playing the music and observing myself in a state of quiet but extreme panic. Incredibly, I managed to play many of my pieces perfectly. When I hit the occasional wrong note, I made myself gracefully recover and play on so my mistake would not be noticeable. But still, it was a grim, clenched-teeth experience, and when I finished, just before the luncheon program began, I felt sick with a painful sense of failure.
After the luncheon, several attendees said they enjoyed my playing—including the two pianists. But their kind words could not erase my despairing realization that I would have played much better had I been able to banish the demons of anxiety that took control of me.
In the days that followed, I wondered whether the fearlessness I once possessed was now a thing of the past. Would I be increasingly subject to anxiety, with no way to subdue it? Would I ever play piano in public again—or take another trip to Paris or Honolulu?
And then two things happened. First, I remembered that I had a bout of anxiety on my Paris trip—in the airport ladies room, of all places, after I had landed in France and was preparing to find a taxi to the city.
I can’t say what brought it on: Perhaps it was the jet-lagged realization that I was alone in a strange city and had to make my way, in French, to the safety of my hotel. But I knew I had to calm down because there was no one else I could rely on.
I did this by acknowledging that, while I was terrified, I didn’t want to spend my dream vacation in a cramped lavatory—even one marked “Femmes” instead of “Ladies.” After about 10 minutes, I convinced myself to grab my suitcase, open the door, square my shoulders and head for the taxi stand. I can’t say I was anxiety-free after that, but I was not derailed by fear—and I had a wonderful time in Paris.
The second revelation came earlier this week, when I heard the actress Glenda Jackson interviewed on NPR’s “Fresh Air." In 1977 Jackson played the poet Stevie Smith in the play “Stevie;” she shared the stage with veteran British actress Mona Washbourne as Stevie’s aunt.
The play opens with the two characters sitting in the living room of their suburban London home. Washbourne was in her 70s; she had been acting professionally for more than 50 years. And yet Jackson said that each night, just before the curtain went up, Washbourne would whisper desperately, “Please God, let me die. Please God, let me die.” And then the curtain would rise, the play would begin, and, Jackson said of Washbourne, “There she was, firing on all fronts.”
I listened to this anecdote in astonishment mixed with relief. It was so reassuring to learn that even veteran actors suffer from stage fright, just as it was comforting to remember that my younger self did not really sail through all of her adventures without a care.
I still don’t have a foolproof remedy for vanquishing my anxiety demons. Maybe, as a therapist suggested, I should simply talk back to them and tell them to pipe down. But I am going to keep exploring options, because I realize that, for many of us in today’s perilous world, just getting out of bed and getting showered and dressed for the day takes as much courage as playing the piano in public or performing on the London stage.
Copyright © 2019 by Susan Hooper
