Editor’s Word: Is something ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Each Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Inform him about your lifelong or in-the-moment issues at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Pricey James,
I’ve stage fright. I’ve had it since I used to be a little bit child attempting to carry out at elementary-school expertise exhibits. However the issue has persevered into maturity, what with its occasional PowerPoint shows and marriage ceremony speeches.
I’d typically say I’m a assured man, and I’m snug in one-on-one settings—even high-stakes ones, like job interviews. However put me in entrance of an viewers, or on the spot to reply a query in a gathering, and that’s when my biology betrays me: coronary heart bumping, fluttering in my intestine, dryness in my mouth, dampness in my palms. Straight away, I change into hyperaware of my physique, and I can’t assume straight.
How can I seize management of my thoughts when it’s been hijacked by my extra reptilian nerves? I worry that you just’ll recommend becoming a member of an improv group—however if you happen to assume it’ll assist, I’m open to it.
Pricey Reader,
Hijacked by the reptilian: I spend half my life in that state. Actually an enchanting facet of the human situation—and one which preoccupies us now greater than ever, I believe, as a result of we’re so up in our heads, our screens, our sealed-off, smoothed-out little Twenty first-century subjectivities. The physique gained’t have it; the physique gained’t translate itself to the cloud; the physique rebels and throws up wild and withering panics to recall us to our animal nature.
Stage fright will not be one thing that’s ever bothered me. I’m like Girl Gaga—I stay for the applause—though I did (I’ve talked about this earlier than on this column) endure a childhood stammer: If you would like a primal picture of my psyche, kindly image me on the age of 10, a short-trousered boarding-school boy, standing on the lectern in chapel in entrance of all the opposite short-trousered boarding-school boys, comprehensively unable to utter the phrases A studying from the prophet Jeremiah. Gaping, blocked, with the stress rising.
I obtained there ultimately. I at all times do. (Put that on my headstone: He obtained there ultimately.)
I don’t know something about improv, so for you I’m going to advocate meditation, and I’ll let you know why. Non-meditator that I at the moment am, I can hint one important and fairly useful improvement in my being-in-the-worldness to the years I spent meditating very badly (like everybody) for 20 minutes a day. These 20 minutes have been pure psychological chaos, however progressively I used to be made conscious of a tiny a part of me, a silvery scintilla of consciousness, that wasn’t truly touched by the chaos. Slightly, it watched the chaos, noticed it, with a form of benign fascination: Holy hell, this man’s all OVER the place.
So now when the reptilian hijacks me, when nervousness sweats via me, when my abdomen jumps and my head whirls and the dancing horses of panic make their entrance, I attain for that shiny splinter of untouchability. I watch myself, expertise myself, going via it. And fairly quickly, I’m not in it anymore—after which it’s over.
Wishing you operatic PowerPoint shows,
James
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