Every Which Way but Loose

Well those of you who know me well (or read my stuff at all) will be quite shocked to learn that I drove on the freeway the last two days. I must be losing what's left of my mind.

My job is going well. I still find that I need to get out more (some immersion therapy, if you will, to combat social anxiety). The struggle is real, people. And it’s really with people. But I can no longer drink myself into a stupor in order to say the things I’ve been feeling. Time to be as brave in real life as I purport to be online. Watch out Boise, I may even start singing sober again.

Interestingly, all of those years I spent nearly crippled with stage fright, I never thought of having a drink to loosen up. I was too much a perfectionist and thought surely imbibing something before a performance would negatively influence my pitch, among other things. Little did I realize (though it was suggested by one professor) that what I needed for this anxiety was medication. I didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that I needed to be medicated at the time, because I was a young twenty-something and I knew everything. Yes, those of you who knew me in high school and college might readily recognize that my head was, and sometimes still is, stuck up my own ass.

Yet I wonder if they had struck upon this particular cocktail of medicines earlier in my life. What might I have accomplished? I love my daughter and I don’t regret one second of our time together. But I wonder about how my path might have differed if I had followed my preferred professions.

And then, naturally, I wonder if it is too late for me. I’m almost forty years old (though some would argue a tad preternaturally preserved). Can I still do this? Can I open my mouth and allow music to consume me once again? Can I perhaps get back the octave of range I’ve lost? Or was that simply something that was never meant to be?

And then there’s the other art I love, that of acting. I started out in plays because I found it was the only way to speak in public that didn’t involve my stage fright. I became rather good at pretending to be someone else. No wonder, since I wore the mask of normalcy over my illness for so long.

So it’s been fun being a coward and hiding in the shadows. I’m going to start getting out there somehow. Maybe I’ll even end up a geriatric actress in a laxative commercial.

Stranger shit has happened.