On Introversion and the Performer

Like a raw nerve, plopped across your dining table, glistening. I grin at you, look into your eyes for how you really feel, and all the while you are struggling not to grimace at the intimate grotesqueness I’m displaying toward you, in an effort to gain your approval. Moreover, I’m not aware of how it’s making you feel. I have shut off my natural empathy as a defense mechanism, and I rely on you, the poor audience member/friend’s hurried critique as you-rush-to-catch-the-bus-because-you-weren’t-expecting-I-would-be-there-outside-the-theater-quite-so-fast. And then you leave and then I drink another glass of wine because I have no idea what you actually thought, and if I can’t make an impression with the very mettle of my insides, then what is the use of being alive? Later, I head to my house. I have another glass of wine, and I get angry. Then I get sad, and I feel over-exposed. I say stupid things like “I’m ready to not be watched” or “Everyone is looking at me”. In surprise, my partner frowns. “Isn’t that exactly what you want? Need, even? To be watched?” “Not any more,” I swallow, and lie. And the curtain closes on the evening, only to wake up with a pounding head and a million regrets, nothing responsive to the salve of accomplishment, critique, affections of those that worked alongside me. It is not a fair thing. To be introverted, anxious, and also an artist. The life of an artist is by nature anxious, uncertain, and passionate. I was born with these characteristics, but I often think I was not meant to be an artist. The eyes of 60 people on something I wrote with blood sounds… both intoxicatingly lovely and screamingly torturous. My heart pounds even now as I write about it. I rub my own chest to calm down the heart palpitations that have plagued me for two weeks. Any one situation I could deal with: My soulbaby show going up, I could do. My mother in town, I could do. My husband and I being separated for three months and then picking up and moving to Dallas… I mean, I’m doing it, aren’t I?! I feel plowed under by anxiety; that feeling before a huge wave hits, or the cardiovascular leap of a rollercoaster headed downhill. Add to that, the static electricity of the terrible outright SHIT that is going on in our own country and beyond, and the stage may have been set perfectly for the episode of anxiety that hit me this weekend. There’s no… explanation, or anything. It’s just the facts. My head hurts. I think it’s sinus pressure and the glare of midsouth clouds.