um chronic shyness…
Most of my life was run by shame and guilt. I suffered from the shame of existing, from my own thoughts, my incapacity to be like everyone else, my inability to easily open my mouth, joke, say something witty or smart.
My mind took 400 years to process things and ultimately by the time I was ready to respond or throw in a comment, the discussion had moved miles down the road. So I was silent.
I questioned everything. There wasn’t an impulse that wouldn’t’ be flipped around on it’s head, analyzed and weighed out all the potential outcomes before it was put into action.
So, by the time the impulse was allowed to move, it was awkward, a bit unnatural, my words came out wrong, my actions didn’t give me the joy I thought they might.
I began forcing myself to listen to my impulse by the time I was in my 20’s and 30’s, I’d have these urges to run or to feel the drive to let the energy exploding in me to reveal itself.
It might be the desire to walk on a handrail, do a cartwheel, run up and down the beach, scream out loud. I would still calculate the potential outcomes, the people who may watch me, and the whole time doing it I would have their eyes glued onto the back of my head like curlers, but I’d do it.
I wouldn’t necessarily get the feeling I was striving for or that I needed to express, but at least I let myself push past the freeze response in my body that couldn’t move or speak.
With performing it was easier, I had a circle of permission. The audience was there to see me be impulsive, spontaneous, weird and quirky. I could delight in this, and my audience would give me that permission.
I could make faces, scream, fall all over the place, run and do cartwheels, take people’s shirts off, pull men’s ears, crawl on the ground, steal peoples’s hats, pretend like I’m drunk, tell everyone to be quiet, so that I, I, I, could speak.
Yes, performing gave me a public permission slip to be heard, no shame in my impulses or words, they paid for this.
It was different around a dinner table though, if I was to share an honest opinion, a tuning fork accessing my emotional and mental state and mold that into a word baby. Wow, that was a feat.
I attempted to converse. How do you have conversations? Foreign to me. Firstly, eye contact was excruciatingly challenging. I would have to hide and push down the nervous quiver to the lower floors. How far down could I hide it?
Words. What do you say to someone new? What kind of decent responses, wit and light intelligent responses would have to be invented on the spot just to keep them interested?
How to keep them interested? Maybe, I should share about myself. Yes, I can attempt to create a conversation by sharing about my life. I would talk about myself, the things I did, opinions, hoping not to have that awful silence. I wasn’t really interested in what I shared, I had heard it a million times, but how do I remain interesting to them?
I was always thrown into a state of disbelief if a few people at the table would stop to listen to anything I might share. Their eyes, all looking at me, the pressure, the pressure!
I had an audience, I have to maintain their interest, how do I get out of this as quickly as possible? Their eyes permeated me like microscopes. They could see everything. I cannot let them see how nervous I am. Hide it. Hide it.
I recall a shift. One day, sitting on a chair opposite a man facing me on another chair in a large empty theater hall. I recall he was important in my mind. It may have been regarding my show, perhaps a theater agent. My heart was beating so loud I could barely hear him speak. The heat was rising in my face as I attempted to smile, laugh and appear amusing and smart.
My mind was spinning, his words were a blur. I’m supposed to listen and respond intelligently.
“Carly, listen. Think of a response.” My inner dialogue is talking louder than he is. I readjust my posture to seem even more at ease on the outside.
Then I realize. “Carly, slow down. Just notice what’s happening in your body. Can you feel your heart palpitating? Can you feel the heat? Where are your feet, ah they’re there. Ok, can you feel the ground underneath them? Good.”
I manage to anchor my body to the seat. The seat becomes my stable point, my grounding.
“Carly, can you just be present? Focus on his words. Feel your body. Feel your body. Don’t let the mind go crazy.”
“Listen deeper.”
I managed to make it through that conversation.
Over time, I realized that pretending to be anything I wasn’t in conversation would create such an intense amount of stress that the discomfort exhausted me by the end of the evening.
I needed alone time to relax, to not have to be someone I thought they wanted to see. To release the pressure valve.
I had to spend a lot of recuperation time.
Finally, I decided to just name it.
I would teach yoga retreats, and as I would hold the opening circle, feeling the terror of not meeting up to the expectations of the people who signed up.
I start out “I’m feeling super nervous, my heart is pounding, I’m worried about your expectations, but I’m attempting anyway.”
They would all listen, and something about that blatant truth freed me.
Phew, I could start, my body relaxed and I’d take my power back. And for them, well, they could also stop with whatever narrative they had in their head to be the perfect yoga student. They had MY PERMISSION because I gave myself the PERMISSION to not be more than who I was in that moment.
I used that a lot. I still felt terribly nervous before speaking, even when I would want to respond to a group question. I would raise my hand and when it was my turn to speak, consistently, my heart would pound, my face would flush, my body would shake.
I’d say it. “I’m feeling nervous right now, but here I go.” And I’d make it through.
I haven’t been able to make that feeling completely go away every time I have the attention of a group audience ready to listen to my words.
I have to remember feeling my body. It anchors me in what’s present. I don’t always have to admit it to them, but I admit it to myself. And I give myself permission to feel nervous and still let my voice come out.
I was always a good writer. I could really let it rip, let my emotions, words, imaginations pour onto a page. Letting those come up and hit my vocal cords demanded another pathway, the pathway to concretization, manifesting of a thought into palpable audible form. Concretizing it into existence, not to be taken back or hidden in a notebook.
The stakes are much higher. Now, I feel, I formulate, as if it is a focused meditation. What wants to converge inside of myself and shape itself into the weight of a word? Yes, and when that word can be uttered and it hits the same feeling and image of that which is within me, the channel is open.
…as if the divine within is allowed to come pouring fourth like liquid.
Writing for me is god’s permission slip. You can write your soul onto the page. And when I share it, woah, there is the hot feeling in my body, the tremble before clicking the button “publish”. The after publishing rise of potential shame and vulnerability. And then something inside that releases, one more piece of me, I don’t have to keep hidden in my recesses.
One more validation to myself that every part of me is allowed to exist and express itself.
Then, once it is released. Said, read, heard. I can move on.
I can read it aloud if needed, I have released my heart, emotion, mind into the world to let them do as they wish with it. I have offered up the gift of me, my inner worlds, it is no longer mine to hoard over, to self masturbate over. It is for all to use, be inspired, ridicule or cry over. It is a permission slip.