Love and Stage Fright
What do they have to do with each other?
In my last post, I talked about love and relationships.
What does that have to do with stage fright?
It turns out that love has a lot to do with stage fright. I tend to think stage fright at some level is an inability to love oneself, at least when one is in a state of fear. Love means compassion and acceptance, and stage fright offers us none of that.
Stage fright tells you that you’re unacceptable. It tells you to run away before you’re mocked or rejected. It tells you that you’re not ready, not worthy, not good enough.
Learning to overcome stage fright is the process of learning to ignore that voice, to accept its presence and go forward, to make it irrelevant.
How do you do that, exactly?
Well, the simple answer is that you succeed in your performing, again and again, until you know that the stage fright voice is wrong. It may still say the messages, but you don’t have to attend to them anymore. You’re too busy attending to the task at hand: making your performance work.
Simple, not easy. How do you get there?
It’s not as if every performance is going to go well, especially with that horrible voice in your ear calling your attention to every mistake, every rustle in the crowd, every intrusive thought. Sometimes the bear will get you. Sometimes you’ll make a big mistake and feel like a complete fool, maybe bad enough that you won’t want to get up on stage again.
That’s where love comes in.
My first real breakthrough with stage fright came when I played my second church job. I used to accompany the choir, a kindly group of elderly singers who honestly didn’t need me to be perfect, even if I needed to be. The music wasn’t easy, and I flubbed it a lot.
The point was, they loved me. My ability to play for them was the important part, not my ability to be perfect. Yes, they preferred a better performance, but as long as I kept the music moving forward, we could always go back and start again the next time.
Over the years I’ve discovered many situations where my inability to be perfect proved only a hindrance to my enjoyment, not to my opportunities to play in the future. I found a nurturing jazz jam, so different from the ones I’d experienced in my 20s. I accompanied my daughter, who told me again and again she’d prefer to have me play for her than an accompanist much better than me who didn’t care about her.
It was the love that gradually transformed me, a love I couldn’t find in myself. Over time, if you are loved enough, and well, you begin to believe that you are worth being loved. That process is not fast, and given the amount of damage you’ve suffered, it’s not painless either.
We can be suspicious of love, especially if our previous experience of it was that someone pretended to love us in order to get something, or used love as a way to manipulate us. Any number of things can get in the way of us understanding that we are worthy, flawed though we are.
But without that love it’s difficult to move forward. Maybe you can do it with sheer will, or by becoming so relentlessly good that no one can ever knock you off your horse again. I’d say that’s a long-shot, and even if you succeed you may pay an unexpected price.
If you want, I can write about that another time.
Love is the best way. Get in a community that loves you, that supports you, that reminds you that there are other voices besides the one in your head, and those voices are also true.
Or work with a coach. I can help. Get in touch with me and we can work on that self-love together.