From The Archives: 8.24.2019

An article salvaged from the archives of my previous blog. Originally posted August 24, 2019.

By the time you all read this, I will have spent an evening performing with my flamenco teacher and a few of my classmates, with a live symphony orchestra, in front of I don't know a few hundred people. I am asked on a regular basis if this makes me nervous.

Short answer: No.

Longer, more accurate answer: People freak out over being on stage mainly because it represents something that makes them significantly more nervous than other things they do, on account of the perceived consequences for screwing up. Performing in front of a crowd does not make me any more anxious than anything else in my life. The actual consequences for screwing up on stage are that you will have made a mistake in front of a crowd. The actual consequences for screwing up other things I deal with all the time are dying of starvation, homeless and alone, under an overpass somewhere on the outskirts of Boston. In comparison, "a bunch of strangers think I look silly" is not anything of note. I get up there and I do whatever I practiced, and then I get down again and go home. I generally get praised for it, although in all honesty, that doesn't have much more effect than the threat of failure, apart from the intellectual acknowledgement that if I'm smart and lucky I might get someone to give me money for it at some point.

The truth is that my life is incredibly unstable. I literally do not have enough money to buy my right to survive. This is why I have a Patreon and a PayPal tip jar. I get a lot of advice to the effect of that if I would "just do [X] everything would be fine." The problem is that [X] is a thing that I cannot do, a conclusion that I have almost always come to experimentally.

The [X] most often cited is "get a real (read: full time) job". I am not capable of holding one of those down. When I was in school a million years ago, I managed 12-15 credits a semester, plus a part-time job that totalled 15-20 hours a week. In theory this would have taken me up to 35 hours a week at time, and I have asked myself over and over again why I can't do this now if I coped with it then?

The answer is, in retrospect, I did not cope with it. I just prioritized the things other people wanted from me highly enough that nobody asked what was happening when I wasn't at work on their thing. There are two habits I picked up in college that I feel illustrate this well: Wearing pajamas to bed, and not eating breakfast for several hours after I wake up.

The pajamas came about because when I am overstressed I get what are called hypnopompic (or hypnogogic) hallucinations. It's a complex phenomenon, as weird brain things usually are, but the gist is that it's a thing that happens when you get jolted awake so fast the normal order of boot operations get scrambled -- the part of the brain that handles real-world input comes online and gets the eyes open before the part that handles generating dream imagery shuts down and cedes control. You see "dreams" overlaid on reality. In my case, the go-to hallucination is a fuck-off huge spider the size of a dinner plate either lurking on the wall next to my head, or descending from the ceiling towards my face.

Why this is what my brain jumps to, I have no idea. I'm not even particularly freaked out by spiders when awake. But when I open my eyes to a giant arachnid about to invade my personal space, my first instinct is to vault out of bed so fast I don't really wake up until I'm over by the door banging on the switch to get the room lights on. I had a single room for much of my college career and the doors auto-locked when you closed them. I didn't fancy getting stuck out in the hallway in nothing but panties. It never occurred to me to tell anyone about the spiders; I just went to Target and bought some sleepwear.

The lack of breakfast I can trace directly to the era when I routinely threw up from sheer anxiety before going to class. I hate alarm clocks. I am given to understand that most people dislike them, but these days I'm aware it's more because they like sleep and hate having it interrupted than anything to do with the alarm clock per se.

I hate them because, prior to smartphones, most of them were dedicated devices that either used oscillating bells or a shrill piezoelectric buzzer. Both of these noises make me hit the ceiling. But, prior to smartphones, there wasn't much of a choice, so I bought one and used it anyway. It woke me up in a dead panic every goddamn day.

Again, it never crossed my mind to tell anyone about this. Media had made it clear that dislike of alarm clocks was pretty normal, and at this point my parents had yelled at me countless times that everyone was miserable and I just had to suck it up, so it became part of my schedule. Wake up, freak out, check email, dry heave into sink, get dressed, go to class. Breakfast was pretty useless; if I managed to get any down, it would just come back up. I didn't really have the money to waste food like that, so my solution was to skip it.

I graduated, eventually. In the meantime I went to all my scheduled work shifts even when I was visibly ill, so nobody asked any questions. I eventually discovered the utility of dissociatives, which don't actually stop any of these things, but at least let me function without having to pay attention to the symptoms, when I could reasonably trade the ability to walk straight for not wanting to claw my way out of my own skin whenever anyone unexpectedly knocked on my door. Effectively, I was a total checked-out mess most of the day, and then a productive tuned-out mess in the evenings when I had to get brain things (like homework) done. I just learned how to cover it well.

I'm a bang-up actress these days. Humans can get good at anything if it's a necessary survival skill.

That's not even getting into being tired and uncomfortable 100% of my waking life. I had no idea that was abnormal until I escaped my family, either. Every blood relative I've ever met on my mother's side has been exactly the same. Every blood relative I've ever met in that line has also been female, and solved the problem by marrying someone who was desperate enough to put up with the madness and made enough money to support both of them. (I have long contended that the reason we are all drop-dead gorgeous is evolution in action. Those of you who have heard Tales of My Mother, just imagine how hot someone would have to be to make you consider dealing with that for your entire life. Any branch of the family tree that wasn't attractive enough to make that viable was pruned long ago.) I can't deal with other people long enough to marry for money, so I'm just completely screwed.