Anxiety is Weird Sometimes

It’s very strange to me that I have suffered from anxiety my whole life in my interactions with people one-on-one, and yet in my work I’m in front of various crowd sizes at any given time and I’m incredibly comfortable.

Does that happen to anyone else? Like if I’m speaking to a room completely filled with people, I almost feel like a different person. I have confidence and calm like I almost never have in my other interactions. Even if something embarrassing happens.

Take this one presentation I was giving: it was to a room of strangers and they’re all much older than me so I’m trying to act as professional as possible to command respect. I’m also pretty young so I’m supposed to be technologically savvy. Not that day.

I tend to go to different, and most of the time unfamiliar, places to give presentations so this place was brand new to me. I arrive early, set up my materials, pull out my laptop and go to plug it into the tv. Except there’s a million cords in front of the tv and none of them are for what I’m doing. Then one of my audience members arrives.

So now I’m doing all of this in front of this person. At this point I realize I’m not going to be able to figure this out on my own so I excuse myself to this man to go look for help. At the front desk, the man says he’ll come help me. He can’t find the cord either. And it turns out he’s the only person working that day. Then that audience member kindly approaches and tries to find the cord too. Nothing. I had to give up and then improvise.

I’m not going to go into what I did because that’s not the point here. My point here is, the entire time this was going on, I wasn’t anxious or embarrassed at all. I solved the problem like I would have if I was alone in that room. Even with what ended up then being my entire audience watching.

Maybe it’s the fact that all of these people are strangers to me and that gives me some sense of anonymity. That when this is all over, I can go home and forget about it being pretty sure they’re going to forget about it too. Or maybe it’s something else, who knows.

It’s just really something isn’t it? To not understand things about yourself. Like all of your life is just one discovery after another of yourself and maybe you never truly uncover everything.

Wild stuff, huh?