Stage fright

Despite people's first impressions on meeting me (so I've heard), I'm actually fairly shy by nature. Once I get to know people, I'm fine, but being put into a new situation and/or with new people is not one of my fortes. However, I'm still functional in the social sense, so it doesn't bother me as much as it did when I was younger (and trying to go out and pick up gurlz in dark smoky clubs - thank god for those women who didn't assume that butch = extrovert).

Related to that is a more pathological tendency to stage fright. I started playing a number of wind instruments in my teens... up until the point that I'd either have to perform in public, or do exams with external assessors. No thank you. Again, it's dealable-with, but the greatest number of people I've had to present to at once is less than a dozen (and that was about work, an area in which I'm not terribly lacking in confidence). I do still tend to avoid situations where I feel put under the spotlight. I have a fairly strong distaste for being observed and possibly judged wanting. The worst thing you can do to me is embarrass me; I actually cope much better with outright abuse.

So, tonight was the first night of tai chi lessons after a brief hiatus. We have a new instructor, which is hunky-dory. Being in the front-left corner is the equivalent of wearing the gimp suit in some of the sequences, and guess where I ended up this evening? I actually aimed for the middle of the room, but everyone hid behind me, the buggers! That was fine, until we got to the part where we had to go through the form and basically get checked out for our progress. No worries, until someone to the front of me (we were turned to the right) got in a knot and put me off. Normally that's ok (actually, normally I don't get put off), but I couldn't pick up the sequence again. Three more times I tried to continue with it, and each time I got flustered and lost it again, until I gave up altogether. Buggery. I slunk to the back of the room and hid for the rest of the lesson.

Now, the sequence was the last few moves that we had learned most recently. It wasn't super-familiar, but I'm fine with it, and I'm actually better than half the class... as long as I'm not screwing it up for myself. It wasn't a question of my feeling especially inadequate in the circumstances, but I've not felt that degree of flusterment in years, actually, especially not over something so trivial. So I've been kicking myself for the hour about why the fuck I got myself in such a knot on that occasion.

It seems to be - and this is why I'm bothering to write about it -  an accumulation of tricky situations that makes me more prone to getting excessively self-conscious about stuff. Today at work was reasonably rotten, to be frank. It wasn't a disaster, but there was an extremely complicated situation which could not be anticipated, and which involved a group of users being without email for a few hours. The fact that they deal with external customers directly added extra fun to the mix. The fun was enhanced when it turned out that the issue made obvious an area in which some of our network settings weren't correctly configured. Then I managed to individually screw up the settings of the group's director... and I didn't catch that error for another couple of hours (a typo - funnily enough, mail can't be delivered if the address is wrong, even by only one letter). Only that last was something I mucked up myself, but all the other stuff had to be implemented or co-ordinated by me anyway. Other than my one screw-up, everything was fixed in reasonably short order (at least I knew how to go about it), the punters are all happy, and I got to go home at the usual time.

Following on from that, I think it was feeling very put on the spot work-wise today (I'm not even going to start about the tricky report I've been avoiding writing all week) that made me much more prone to feeling self-conscious in an area in which I'm not so confident. It doesn't really seem like all that much of a stimulus, but I suppose in the areas in which we are weak, that's where we get pinged. And, well, better to get all in a tangle in tai chi than do it at work.

I'm glad I figured it out, rather than continuing to beat myself up. OMG, perhaps this is maturity coming on me at last!

PSA for you head-bangers out there

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