Quick question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Young people across the world have answered that time-honored question as long as they’ve had an option. I make a point to keep asking it in my 300-level writing class for college juniors.
“Alright…now what about after that?”
The answers which following that second question tend to be a little more sparse and undefined.`
I’m now just months away from my 35th birthday — a milestone that currently feels very “old” in my current context, but is admittedly still “young” compared to a modern life expectancy — and I feel like sharing some insights that have fallen into my lap during a (simultaneously lengthy yet rapid) 15-year span, particularly in regards to careers, passions, and our life’s “purpose” (almost always framed as a singular when any experienced human would tell you it’s plural, and in the dozens if not hundreds).
I am, explicitly, full-heartedly, without reservation, giving you permission to experience multiple different lives during your journey here on Earth. They may have one (rapidly decaying, graying) body in common, but you can make them as distinct and different or similar and symmetrical as you’d like. Continue reading →
I went back to therapy today, for the first time in 6 years.
I didn’t realize how vulnerable and lost I would feel all over again.
When I made my initial appointment a few weeks ago, having noticed my new insurance plan offers $5 co-pays for in-person visits with a mental health professional, I imagined the appointment itself would be guaranteed to resemble a moment of glory. It sure felt like it when I got the fortunate and well-timed phone call informing me I had graduated off the waiting list back in February, merely a month after my initial inquiry.
Considering that I hadn’t seen a professional therapist since 2018 — the summer my mother unexpectedly died of pneumonia and my long-term romantic relationship ended just before our five-year anniversary — I immediately painted a mental image of March 18 as my de-facto day of redemption.
March would bring the sun, and the sun would bring my smile.
But on this Sunday night, I had fallen asleep without using my CPAP airway device that manages my sleep apnea. I had spilled the previous night’s hastily made dinner — microwave popcorn — all over my bed. I was sleeping, quite poorly, and noisily, with Orville Redenbacher’s crumbs all over my flannel sheets. While hazily plucking individual popped kernels from the plastic bowl using my tongue as a sort of proboscis (admit it, you’ve done it), I overturned the glossy pink dish and dumped a bunch of crunchy popcorn debris into my sleeping quarters. Which I never was awake enough to really move.
In reprehensible yet comic form, I was getting sloppy, but I had been rounding the final bend of a busy weekend of bartending that saw me make great money at an exhausting physical cost. On Friday, I rapidly assembled cocktails at a downtown video arcade late into the night, slinging and cashing up to 50 drinks an hour. On Saturday, the brewery I serve at had our busiest day yet, thanks in part to the appearance of a regional food truck specializing in fresh, sea-caught lobster — an incredible feat given the region is Indiana.
[Brief aside: The lobsters are flown from states away. People lined up an hour early, around 4 p.m., in anticipation of the food truck’s arrival. “Is it still coming?” many folks asked, still 20 minutes before the truck was scheduled to appear. It was the sort of honest spectacle a small-town newspaper would have written about with great fervor in 1915.]
In sum, come Sunday night, I was spent, and I spent the evening partying. I video-called a friend to catch up on life, and to share some marijuana together. I traded relaxation for pleasure and indulged quite hard.
At one point, I had fallen asleep listening to the R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 soundtrack while painting my fingernails (poorly) a soft powder blue. The polish was smudged and chunky, as I kept forgetting to let them dry while drinking beers at my keyboard. I didn’t do as well as I should have, even if I was merely having fun painting them again.
And consequently, I did forget to take the trash out before their Monday morning pickup, as is my house responsibility to do on Sunday nights. I had also let the dishes stack up to the point the sink could not be used, though I will cite having three (3) separate jobs where I clean dishes all night as a particularly reasonable excuse for not wanting to do them after a long day at work.
I am not a perfect person. I do not take care of myself like I should. I do not eat like I should. I do not work a normal job (or four), and I have a skewed perception of what “real life” looks like with each passing month.
Now that I’m moonlighting as a part-time party vampire, I go to bed when the sun comes up, and I go to work when the sun goes down. Mildly uncomfortable and relatively inexperienced in a surreal work schedule, I typically spend my next moments of free time seeking a fleeting joy instead of working proactively to improve my surroundings. I frequently feel alone in my struggles, as I feel like nobody sees what I’m going through, no matter how many times my friends tell me they love me or insist that I am not alone.
Hello. My name is Jeff. And I’m going to therapy.
On Monday morning, I woefully and groggily picked up my hungover pieces and washed about half of the myriad dishes stacked across my kitchen. I also took the trash out — too little, too late — but the cans are still less than half-full, so we should be okay for now.
Regardless, I am mentally massacring myself.
you’re such a bad housemate and you are an embarrassment and you’re 33 now and you’re still acting like a college kid grow up jesus christ why are you sleeping in popcorn you dumb fuck
I am very bad about negative self-talk. I call myself an idiot for just about everything I do, intentional or accidental. I give myself very little grace compared to how I treat both peers and guests at my bar. In a sense, I’m a walking hypocrite, and a nag to myself.
And yet, what I’m saying ain’t entirely wrong all the time.
I was already beating myself up on the drive over to my therapist’s office, of which I was running late on because I was low on gas, but bargained the night before to purchase fuel on the morning drive over. (Everybody hates that move.)
I had skipped breakfast, as I have made a terrible habit of skipping meals when I’m stressed. I was anxious that our first meeting was going to be met with me feeling sick and unable to “do the work,” as I have cheerfully pledged to friends in the weeks leading up to March 18.
By the time I parked the car, the responsibility of what meaningful therapy entails was becoming apparent. Here I was, at parties and social settings, acting with braggadocio that I am going to be a better person once I start getting my $5 therapy hours in, but I couldn’t seem to do anything right on the day where I was to actually start evaluating myself.
To go to therapy is to realize how far you’ve fallen.
And felt like I was dangling from a cliff on Monday morning.
I got out of my truck and immediately noticed how quiet the industrial park was. I opened the door to the nondescript strip mall office and got hit with the usual aromas of vague terror that healthcare distinctly provides: Hand sanitizer. Burnt coffee. Fabric seating. And the vague sense that somebody nearby just smoked a stale cigarette not too long ago. These scents established the very horrible recurring theme that such offices, such as dentists or doctors, provide me: traumatic vulnerability.
I took a seat opposite a woman wearing a face mask, which made me feel guilty, because I’ve generally stopped wearing them. I pulled out my outdated Google Pixel 3a to check Twitter, and felt guilty that I was already spending so much time online that day, fighting with Barstool fanboys of all things.
I felt a lump in my throat. I sighed and I gulped.
this is gonna hurt
“Jeff!?”
My new therapist is a sweet woman named Daisy. Mentally, I have been calling her “Wendy,” which makes no sense at all, and I have no reason or mnemonic to be making this mistake consistently, but the whole point here is that my brain doesn’t work as well as it should.
I make a graduated point to stand up and say her actual name. I enunciated like a language arts teacher.
“… Dai-sy?”
“Hey, nice to meet you, come on back.”
It’s hard to anticipate what your therapist’s office is going to look like, especially when the waiting room has all the energy of a dying fern. Or a fern that you can’t even tell is real.
Wendy led me through the main entry and through a narrow labyrinth of gray hallways. Somehow, it looked even more drab and claustrophobic than the Motel 6-chic lobby. We crossed other therapists leading other clients back out, turning sideways as to allow extra room and not shoulder-check each other. At one point, six of us were strafing past each other like a macabre dance.
Certainly, if I’m in a space where everyone is trying to accommodate each other, I thought in that moment, then this must certainly be a good place for me to be. I took a breath, and Wendy swung
I did it again. Her name is Daisy.
DAISY swung open her office door, revealing a warm and golden suite, plush furniture in every corner. My eyes met a soft lampshade light on the side table and my face immediately relaxed, as if I was a baby being soothed by its mother.
She told me to take a seat anywhere, and I chose the loveseat over the recliner. I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m certain it’s a litmus test for something.
She complimented my blue fingernails, and my gut instinct was to say “thank you” instead of pointing out how poorly I thought I did.
“I work with my hands professionally, so I do like to take care of them.”
I smiled, widely and sincerely, though with a tired countenance.
I laid back, in my matching blue pit-stained “Surfing Anteaters” T-shirt — my favorite shirt, which I wear to casual job interviews and parties alike — that had accompanied me to therapy like a NCAA-licensed security blanket.
Already, instantly, I had felt seen. Like someone worthy of a compliment. Because Daisy absolutely did not know me towards this point, and had no *reason* to compliment me. And yet, she saw some beauty in me on what had otherwise been a humiliating day for yours truly.
Daisy smiled back, took out her laptop, and we formally began a provider-client therapy relationship.
Now, just from me to you, as writer to reader: If I want to Do The Work as I’ve alleged I need to do, that means most of the specific conversations and details of my therapy sessions will and must remain unknown to you. I already share a great deal of raw content and damning personal implications with my writing (too much, some have said), and the idea of trying to manage my big life reset with an audience of several thousand online followers is not going to be a very smart idea in the long run.
But — I am quite compelled to compliment my therapy progress with the most reliable communication medium I’ve ever known: the written word. To be honest and raw with one’s writing is to be raw and honest with one’s thinking.
I am committed to telling myself the truth, no matter how ugly it seems going forward.
Wen- no, DAISY, yes, Daisy sat with me for close to an hour, asking me and my tired brain the most serious questions with incredible tact. Consequently, I said some things in therapy today that I’ve never said before, to anyone. And that means a lot from a guy who started his first blog post in months immediately confessing to waking up covered in popcorn, pantsless and ashamed.
I am intimidated by the weight of the boulder I have pledged to move, but I am more motivated than ever before to engage in the Sisyphean task of self-improvement. I spoke with the weakest, most wavering voice it took at some times today, but I did not tell a single lie in therapy.
And that’s what “Doing the Work” — the one recurring maxim I know every therapist to say — looks like.
I already know that I have a tremendous ally in Daisy, who has given me gentle homework.
Her first assignment, simply, is for me to eat more — “I’m not asking for three square meals every day,” she said with a loving, joking tone. “But I would love to know that you ate something before we meet again next week.”
The way she phrased it, I felt genuine interest in my well-being from someone. It sounded like something my late mother or father would have texted me. They’ve been gone for 21 combined years. And yet, someone just wanting to see me eat? That made my day.
It made me…hungry.
I told my therapist — a fan of the women’s IU basketball program — about an online phenomenon that recently tickled me deeply. I cited how the thing that’s made me laugh more than anything in the past few weeks, even going far as to saying it kept me holding on, is gentle mockery of a local Hoosiers beat reporter claiming he could accurately read the pulse of the IU fanbase at the woebegone westside Buffalo Wild Wings while a men’s basketball road game was on.
This was, of course, met with immediate online derison from folks inside and outside the IU basketball fandom. To eat corporate wings in a college town is already a tragic decision, whether you boast it up in the Big Ten or put ’em away in the Pac-10. But this restaurant is located miles from the furthestmost point of IU’s campus, and it has a notorious reputation for serving unhealthy food. It’s the only place I know of in town that has definitely had Hepatitis A outbreaks.
Over the past few weeks, as I’ve dealt with grueling work hours and the suicide of a bar colleague, I’ve found myself giggling at the audacity of the tweet. It would be like declaring Diet Shasta as the world’s finest beverage.
Considering that Daisy’s office is adjacent to this ill-fated B-Dubs, I told Daisy about the joke, and she thought it would be funny to go check it out for myself.
But, she told me: if I went, I had to eat something.
After an hour of fighting back tears and confessing some pretty stark truths to myself, I ambled over to the yellow-and-black establishment with three days worth of food debt in my stomach. I politely stood at the “seat yourself” sign and waited two minutes for a server to appear so I could ask if it was OK if I took a bar seat.
That’s my anxiety factory on full display right there. All terror, no brakes.
I took a seat in front of a wall of TVs and draft handles, next to a balding man who was picking at french fries. I scoured the menu and found nothing that interested me greatly. There were no sports on of value, unless you care greatly about Minnesota Twins spring training. I had thought this in-real-life riff of an online joke out much better in my head, that’s for sure.
But I did order an ice water. And six buffalo boneless wings. And six honey barbecue wings. With ranch and fries.
What arrived was the single least-appetizing tray of food I may have ever seen served from a licensed restaurant.
The boneless buffalo bits ended up being served with a “rub” instead of the sauce I requested, but mistakes happen, and I was committed to eating them anyway. The honey barbecue wings arrived dry, and stringy, and barely touched by sauce.
What I had imagined for weeks as a day of accomplishment and happiness had arrived as a complete flop: Hungover. Hungry. Tired. Sad. Bullshit snow after Spring Break.
And now, a hillock of food that actively disgusted me.
But I promised Daisy I would eat. I already got the sense she cared for my well-being, and I didn’t want to let her down.
I started with the dry-rub wings and took a few bites. I almost quit after the second wing. Mentally, I considered asking for a box and trying again later, but I knew that I would probably quit on them altogether if I placed them in a styrofoam to-go casket.
So I forced myself to sit at the bar and eat every single dry, fleshy, over-boiled and underwhelming wing. I carefully reconsidered all the things I copped to in my first day of Doing the Work, and The Fray’s “Cable Car (Over My Head)” — a song I loathed in high school for its sappiness — overtook the B-Dubs stereo system.
Life has an incredible ability to sort itself out into little cinematic moments. Some of them, you anticipate. Others, you get blindsided by. You didn’t buy the ticket. But you’re definitely along for the ride, whether you’re prepared to cry or not.
So I sat in the far corner of a bar I made fun of, eating food that tasted like absolute shit, listening to music I absolutely hated. It was the perfect metaphor for the struggle of going to therapy and confessing the many shortcomings about myself that await me going forward.
The restaurant was out of ketchup. A shitshow.
I fought back tears as I choked down fries.
“And eeeeeeveryone knows I’m in Over my head, Over my head~”
A song I constantly teased others for liking as a teenager now had me weeping in the corner as a grown-ass adult. Admittedly, my younger self probably would have called me a pussy. (I don’t use that word like that now, and that probably makes my 15-year-old self feel justified.)
But that’s what growth looks like. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes years. But it definitely requires work, and acknowledging some uncomfortable truths — whether you are wrong about a popular song, needing to cut back on the vices, obsessed with teasing somebody on the internet you’ve never met, or that you feel asleep in a pile of fucking popcorn.
That’s what therapy is all about. Telling the truth.
And I greatly appreciate you listening.
-moose
###
PS: i will never spend $28 at Buffalo Wild Wings ever fucking again
Suppose 100 people walk through your front door tonight.
Hold on, this doesn’t need to be scary. Play along like this brings you joy.
You’ve never met this centurion army of strangers before, but they’re friendly and eager to exchange pleasantries. You share a few drinks and a couple laughs, and you see them out the door with a smile and a wave.
How many of these strangers do you think you could recognize in public again, on your own volition, at any point down the line?
Alas, I’ve hit you with a trick question — each one of them has been inside your living room before, and they’re starting to take it quite personally that you can’t remember them.
This failure, as surprising as it may seem, is the truth behind many (or most) of the interactions I have had as a professional bartender.
I’ve written so many “Dead Parent” posts at this point, between Mom and my father who died in January 2009, that the magic and poetry (perhaps novelty) of the healing process has burned out altogher.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t learn from Sherry LaFave.
I learn from her every single day of my life — even five years after her final breath.
With such a limited family background to lean on at this point, all of the specific details about my mother are kind of hazy. I don’t know where she was born, what she wanted to do for a living, how many people she dated before my father, and — perhaps more meaningfully — four-fifths of all the things she told me as a young person.
Truth be told, I assumed she would always be around for me to check in and ask about later.
Obviously, that’s not the case.
It hasn’t been for some time, and it was iffy for years before that. For each year she rooted for me in college from 75 miles away in our podunk farm town, we grew a little more distant. Even the bonding factor of losing my father a few months before my departure to college-land became old hat, and something that felt less worthy of celebration every year I spent as a student in Bloomington.
The sands in the hourglass tick by, and yet, the shape of the timepiece remains the same.
There’s just less to assign hope to as each minute passes by.
To speak candidly, my mother was a Saint among snails. As far as I know, she grew up in rural-ass nowheresville to a family with little money, and extoled the virtues of sharing and caring to anyone who wound up on the Chapman family porch that evening. Anyone who found their way into the abode was welcome for dinner; anyone who stayed for dessert was welcome to stay the night.
A few years later, Mom and the rest moved to downtown Indianapolis, and she kept the same altruistic attitude on Temple Street near Arsenal Technical High School — do unto others, love all — even until her graduation day, when a race riot saw a classmate rip Sherry’s earrings out through her earlobes minutes after getting her diploma.
You can’t pick the road you have to walk in this life. But laying down in defeat is absolutely not an option.
The story goes that my mother met my father at work late one night in 1989. Dad was the president of an east Indianapolis welding business — dropped in his own lap after his father died relatively young — and my mother was working as a for-hire maid cleaning the joint after-hours.
Somehow, whether it was at the copier or over a parking-lot cigarette, the two fatefully met. The rest is history: When I was a teenager, Dad told me he ultimately proposed to Mom shortly after meeting her for the first time. He knew, in his heart, that she was the one. In his initial confession to my young self, he said he called her and talked and hung up and redialed her and smiled and hung up and called again and talked some more and finally got around to the point.
Just two weeks after their paths crossed, Sherry LaFave (neé Chapman) had a ring on her finger.
Nearly exactly nine months after their wedding day, I was born.
While my older sister is a living testimony of their meeting, and my younger brother a living record of their later years, I am perhaps best-equipped to have experienced their time together as the living metaphor of their commitment and copulation.
Alas, despite all of our best wishes, the time goes quickly.
I was Jeffrey. Then Jeffy. Then “Jeffrey-Doo-Dah-Day.” I was the boy who laughed in public and cried in private. I was the boy who learned long division before he could tie his own shoes. I was the honor student who felt like a total impostor every step of the way. And I was the young man who found a dead father in the basement and made sure Mom was the person who knew first.
She saw me off to college, minus the figure she would need to lean on the most, and did so with the most grace one could ever hope for from a widowed family matriarch.
Move-in weeks come and diploma bestowments go, and gray finds its way into everyone’s hair.
The last I saw Mom’s hair was at her showing: she has been dead for 5 years, as of today.
Her passing came and went in a flurry — Mom texted me on a Friday night that she was having lung issues, and had checked into a hospital. She was certain, like every time before, that it would be a minor stay. By Saturday, she was on a ventilator. By Monday, she was choking. And by Wednesday, she was dead.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust — we all do what we must.
An uncanny phenomenon about relatives that have been dead for so long is that, despite your best efforts, you begin to lose the finer details about the cadences and diction in which they spoke. But they never leave you fully, especially when juxtaposed against the eternally memorable and symbolic actions in which the memories themselves were carved.
I remember my mother, Sherry LaFave, as a mother who was frequently doing her best with a limited battery. Despite battling sleep apnea, Lupus, a cigarette addiction, an eating disorder replaced by Coca-Cola classic, and a broken heart from the loss of her soulmate Mike, she was always front-and-center to accommodate me and any friends I had over in our home from a young age — just like she was raised on Temple Street.
I kept a lot of young-person truths hidden from my Mom, especially while I was away at Bloomington (“a practical Sodom and Gomorrah,” I was told by a random Bible-thumper in high school). She never knew about the cigarettes or the weed or the booze-flooded parties or anything like that. I did my best to keep it from breaking her heart, and truthfully, I can tell she did her best to keep her judgment from fracturing my spirit.
I get the sense she’d understand — after all, youth wasn’t easy for her either.
Mom always told me that it was toughest to be young: You have all of the responsibilities, and none of the experience. All of the rent due, and none of the finances in the bank. All of the acquaintances, and very few proven friends. All of the drive and little of the wisdom. A walking oxymoron, young people are.
I’m especially grateful that she saw it in me, her first son and the eponymous “Big Guy.”
I held her hand for the final time on July 26, 2018. I told her it was okay to let go and she squeezed my palm with her frail wrist one last time. I knew that neither of us wanted it to be so sudden, nor so horrifyingly sterile as to come in the intensive care unit.
But I saw her giving all of her weak 90-pound frame, and I knew I had to carry that energy, that electricity, so long as I lived, so her vivacious torch would never burn out.
And so, 1,826 days later, I unfortunately feel as I am writing about a person who is lost to time more and more with each day.
But I am confident that my eyes are seeing for her spirit, my bones are aching for her passion, and my heart is living for her soul with each and every action I take as a 33-year-old man.
She called me Scarecrow — a metaphor of our relationship embodied by her love for “The Wizard of Oz” — as I was with her, Dorothy, from the very beginning.
The yellow brick road will guide us to our fateful destination, and we continue despite (and dedicated to) those who marched with us along the way.
Back when I worked normal human daytime hours, I published a brief-but-promising series here called “Morning Coffee.” The premise is that I would blog about personal day-to-day affairs, vis-a-vis my usual efforts of metaphorical storytelling, while consuming my daily brew.
The deal was, I had to do it every day.
Obviously, that’s not how it shook out.
Life is, at its core, a non-stop series of questions asking whether or not you will cede your time to answer it. Somewhere along the way, I lost focus and stopped writing on a daily basis. You know, the thing I went to college for. The thing that made a name for myself in my hometown. The thing that kept me alive as a teenager.
I’m serious about that last part — during the MySpace Era, I maintained a blog not unlike this one that was meant for general consumption and contemplation. I’d rush home after high school, some times, to etch out my thoughts and share them to all my angst-ridden peers in rural New Palestine. Each post averaged a few hundred to several thousand views, which meant everything for a picked-on teenager in 2007. It meant the world to hear a classmate (or a stranger) tell me they liked what I read, or even just that they saw that it was getting some traction online.
More than 15 years later, the online landscape of places to barf out one’s thoughts has clearly evolved, but writing (I hate to say “blogging”) is still the game I know best.
I just have to do it for myself.
And such as with previous writing projects I stand behind, I would like to announce a return to form, of sorts. I am committing to writing more regularly for my sake as a living, feeling, thinking human. You, of course, are welcome to read anything and everything here. I’m a proud soldier in the army of emotional vulnerability.
A few simple promises will guide our path:
I will write much more often than I have been doing — daily, if possible
Some personal information will be off-limits (work matters, names)
Each entry will draw upon something worth sharing. No “what I had for breakfast” posts.
What’s most likely here is that I use this writing series to spend the aftermath of my nighttime bar shifts proactively thinking about my life. You know, what normal people do with their evening.
What bugs me the most is that there was a period of time where I took my writing so seriously, my parents would ask to watch me write in real-time. At the time, it just made me feel self-conscious that I was being made into a spectacle or a talent show. But now, as an adult who has buried them both, I think they’d be very surprised to hear that I just don’t write anymore. Disappointed, perhaps.
I’ve got a gift and I’m not afraid to admit it. I need to be better to myself, and use it more often.
And such, more writing will be coming soon.
That’s it and that’s all for now. I’m just excited. Wanted you to know.
Stay tuned.
-moose
###
PS: Please offer writing prompts you’d like to see here! I take those suggestions and other reader-added thoughts in Moose’s Mailbag.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, you may confront your darkest hours.
There are no more presents to open. The leftovers won’t keep much longer.
Uncle George keeps forgetting he left his government-issued walking cane at your house, and now you’re responsible for the existential fate of his aluminum hook.
There’s merely time to wait. And think. And worry – about everything.
The shadows grow darker. The winter grips colder than ever.
“2023?,” you ask yourself every few hours while pacing your bedroom. “How much more of this do I have? I didn’t really sign up for all that with the Big Man, did I?”
Your drawers become cluttered. The laundry pile has a sentient personality.
But what about us avid travelers who simply cannot stand to leave the dread of modern life at home?
Thankfully, our experts at TripAdvisor have compiled a (growing!) shortlist of places and spaces where the fugue state is all the rage.
We’re tackling this ennui trend with Indianapolis, the bleary community that made Kurt Vonnegut so singularly fucked up as to draw buttholes in his finest books.
Our resident south-central Hoosier and Indy-area native Moose recently spent some time in the “Circle City” to attend to personal matters.
While there, he crafted us some thoughtful reviews on the small businesses and liminal moments around Indianapolis that made all the difference while his brain screamed non-stop for a few days.
Today would have been my late father’s 60th birthday.
I’m not yet a champion when it comes to planning content ahead of time – the realization of today’s meaning struck me an hour ago – so I wanted to spit out a few words and memories about the (6-foot-9) Big Man while I have enough coffee in my system to think straight.
I knew my father when he was between the ages of 28 and 46. Now being 31 myself, I feel like I’m just starting to understand so much about him. Continue reading →
I don’t know how to say this — but then again, that’s usually the case.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I have terrible anxiety about the way I talk.
And when I say that, I mean that both in the “public speaking” sense as well as one-on-one conversation. I could be talking to a room of 40 strangers, or to a close friend over of coffee: either way, I’m usually a mental wreck.
I’m nervous. I stutter. My heart accelerates. I talk in circles. I speak in a low baritone, and I have a tendency to mutter. I pace the room to play it cool, but end up looking lost. I worry that other people are seeing me fail, and things immediately get worse. I get the shakes and sometimes my rows of teeth don’t even make contact when I try to spit out a thought.
I don’t enunciate as well as I’d like to, and please believe me when I say I’ve been trying to better this for 31 years. My experiences with braces as a kid didn’t finish as well as the orthodontist had hoped. I still have a bit of an overbite with my two front teeth, an open bite on either side, and a bottom row that’s starting to become more crowded than any floss pick would prefer.
Even when I get my enunciation right, sometimes my cadence spits the words out half-baked. The prepositions all start running together — to the for the by and how because — and whatever is truly going on in the conversation is subject to interpretive guesswork at best. I give up on a thought or jump to something else without really finishing up the previous idea. Continue reading →
B-TOWN Moose 