I am a dancer. I am a writer. I do not do well when I am unprepared.
There is safety and assurance in choreography. There is comfort in the written word; I can see and edit from the time the words emerge from where I first glimpse them nestled in the sulci of my mind, to the time they are spilled into the shapes and sounds I can then dust off, erase, reform, and polish until they’re ready to face the light of day.
I am not a speaker. My voice is at home in pixels and ink and graphite, and out in the air it flounders.
Bolstered by rehearsal, I can struggle through a talk. Given the right mindset, I can even improvise.
I’ve learned how to fake it until I made it, because I internalized the concept of looking like everything was okay on the surface when beneath the thin veneer of nonchalance I was shaking apart.
And somehow, I’d made it this far before it all came crashing down.
So, to anyone who has anxiety: there will be times you are pushed to your limit and there will be nowhere for the anxiety to go but out. And not “out” in a necessarily liberating sense of the word, but out as tears and shaking hands and a cracking voice when your only wish is to please, dear God, hold it together enough to make it back to your damn seat without making a fool of yourself. There will be times you don’t think you will be picking yourself up from the undignified heap of broken parts you find yourself in, but here’s the twist: you’re gonna be okay.
Some people make it look easy. Those people fall into two categories: the ones who would find it much more difficult to be small, and the ones whose veneers just haven’t broken in your presence. Don’t worry about whether they’re the former or the latter, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it makes your cloak of normalcy seem even more transparent and you feel that much more inadequate standing next to them.
In medicine, we are expected to perform. We are expected to excel in many ways that we have not been prepared for, and we are never allowed to fall apart.
Well, today I spent probably five minutes in front of the entirety of my residency program and completely lost it.
I can’t tell you it felt good, because it didn’t. Honestly, it felt pretty shitty. But I can tell you what I learned from it, and what our speaker today was trying to teach me:
1) Things like this can happen, and it’s okay. No hiccup is ever going to make anyone fail you. 2) The anxiety isn’t something that will just go away, but it doesn’t own you and it won’t win if you don’t let it. 3) Most of the people you think are judging you are actually rooting for you.
So today didn’t feel like I triumphed over anxiety. If anything, it felt like anxiety sucker-punched me in the mouth and shoved my voice back down my throat so hard I choked on it. But there was a little win today, in that somehow I cried in front of my whole program (and my program director, too), yet I walked away with their support and a goal to make it through public speaking without sweating my entire fluid volume out of my palms (and to not cry next time would be great).
The bottom line is that everything is trial by fire. Residency is the biggest trial by the biggest, scariest fire that could possibly burn, and it will reduce you to ashes. But no matter what your trials may be–whether it’s performance anxiety when you have to give a presentation to 500 experts in the field, or trying (again) to figure out how exactly ventilation is supposed to work–you will eventually emerge from the fire forged stronger. And maybe you’ll go in dull, only to bloom in full colour inside the kiln of your trials.
Your decision to share this experience, and turn it into an inspirational lesson for all of us (including yourself), is the bravest act I’ve seen in a long time.
the1timetraveller 