Sharing is Caring is Performance Anxiety
March has been a creative whirlwind for two reasons: my Women’s History Month recording project and the five incredible days I spent at the virtual CineStory TV writing retreat.
First, the recording project. I’ve been performing and posting music by different women composers every day of March. I didn’t have the idea to do this until the end of February, so most of the videos are recordings of pieces I learned the night—or, in some cases, an hour—before. It’s been a fun exercise throughout the month, seeing how “good” I can make a performance with very little time.
I used to be a confident performer who loved the adrenaline rush of performance. As time went on, the adrenaline rush became anxiety. This anxiety grew until the point that I got so nervous—shaking, sweating, heart pounding, stomach churning—before performances that, a couple of years ago, I decided to stop for a while.
My performance anxiety wasn’t something I cared to full-on deal with because I wanted to write more anyway. Writing is not performing. You can write in your pajamas and nobody sees you, and once a section of writing feels done-ish, you can leave it and it’ll still be there whenever you come back to it. Performing asks you to do everything well, all at once, publicly.
But I’ve had an itch to play more piano lately, and sharing thirty-one underperformed pieces with others sounded, well, fun. Also, nerve-racking. Was it Eleanor Roosevelt who said to do something every day that scares you? I believe she was instructing everyone to become artists.
It’s scary to share a piece you started learning an hour ago. It’s frustrating to start recording a piece and psych yourself out in the middle of it and then repeat the process twenty times. It’s an icky feeling to share a performance in which you play wrong notes and have memory slips.
Part of why I wanted to do this project was to get over all that, because being an artist means, in large part, putting yourself out there. In order to do that, you need to get yourself out of your own head.
Earlier this year, my pilot script for my limited series about Amy Beach was a semifinalist in the CineStory TV screenwriting competition, which earned me a spot in CineStory’s TV writing retreat. The retreat ended a few days ago, so I’m fresh off 11-hour Zoom days and still processing the 45 pages of notes I took. Many of the lessons I learned during the retreat resonated with my recording project. TV writing is all about throwing ideas out there quickly. TV writers’ rooms are about pitching every idea—even the bad ones. Everything happens fast.
At the retreat, I pitched my series to a Zoom room full of people, got script notes from mentors, and participated in mock TV writers’ rooms. Before each of those experiences, I felt the same pounding heart and churning stomach I used to feel before a piano performance. As it turns out, my performance anxiety is not tied to piano. It’s tied to me.
David Bayles and Ted Orland write in Art & Fear: “Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others.” My performance anxiety is fear that I’m not good enough and fear of what people will think of me.
But maybe it’s not about me!
One of my favorite takeaways from the retreat is that you are not your art. TV writing is collaborative and the script exists as its own entity, separate from any one writer or creator. After you’ve got something onto the page, it’s not about you anymore. It’s about the story.
Similarly, sharing pieces of music by amazing women is not about me. It’s about the pieces of music by amazing women.
To tackle performance anxiety on a daily basis, I’m trying to keep some practical ideas in mind:
I am not my art.
I am imperfect.
What I share will always be imperfect.
I create to connect.
To connect with anyone, I have to share imperfect things.
Bayles and Orland write: “Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. Inevitably, your work… will be flawed. Why? Because you’re a human being, and only human beings, warts and all, make art.”
If* you can accept the imperfection of it all, there’s nothing left to be afraid of. (As one of my piano teachers used to remind students, if you forget the notes in the middle of a performance, the world remains wholly unaffected.)
*A very big “if,” I know, but acceptance is a journey. Baby steps.
Here’s my women composers playlist. Six more to go!
Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland is essential reading for any type of creator. And for creators who are screenwriters, I can’t recommend CineStory enough.
Speaking of television, we lost a legend yesterday. Rest in peace, Jessica Walter.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.