Speaking

 Public speaking was always a more terrifying fear than death to me. At least if I died, I wouldn't have embarrassed myself, or said something stupid, something that people would remember. I could rest in that peace, I thought.

I was always afraid of people seeing me in a light that I wasn't actively controlling, afraid of when I wasn't puppeteering their idea of me from behind the scenes or in the shadows. Playing humble when you're just scared to speak, playing patient when you're just avoiding expression. Going dull, stuck in your head. But in control.

This kind of control has always been a great lens to distort someone's opinion of me, like an eye doctor with his Wonka-esque polyclops of a viewing contraption. 

But it's so much work. It's tiresome. And all you're really doing is designing a more intricate contraption for you to hide your true self within.

Public speaking rips you bare, tosses you on stage and turns up the amp. 

You versus the elements, right?

You don't brave the elements unprepared.

It's a lot like writing, in truth. Sure, it's live, but unless you're doing improv there's a high likelihood that you've gotten your words written up on some Word doc somewhere, you know how to phrase that joke on page 2, and when to pause for effect. It can be fun if you lean into it, if you buy into the act.

You've prepped. You've practiced. When it comes time to it, when it's you on that little Zoom box with the white Speaking border lit up, with everyone else on mute, you can lose yourself in your own words.

You're not really there for the audience - you are, but you aren't. You're there for you, to say what you want to say, and to bask in the responses and reactions you receive. It's more of a live poetry reading than it is any chaotic freefalling event.

You write to let your voice out, to have it intermingle in the wide open world and see what it finds. With public speaking, that wide open world is the great sea of audience emotions and questions for you to dance with. You can go along with a reaction, play into it or dart away. Go along with a question, entertain it and introduce it to other thoughts, or mark it off with a nicety and a Next question, please. 

I'm still in my beginnings of learning more about this form of expression - I hesitate to call it an art form, though it may be. At least a form of Letters. Its main drawback is that it's all too often overrun by arrogance and a too-large Name on the screen. But that's hardly its own fault, is it?

Besides, I think it's writing that can truly go off the rails - if it pours all that extra time into itself, waters the wrong roots and sheds its sunlight. Writing can fortify itself under that bastard heat, where speaking just fizzles and withers away.

Speaking is live but it rarely lives on.