My brain—and probably yours—is at once a best friend and a worst enemy. Rarely, however, have its twin roles been played out quite so contiguously for me as in the past 24 hours and a handful to come. You see, as I write this, I’m two hours away from doing something that should be great fun, and may well turn out to be great fun, but that fills me with dread: speaking in public. As some of you know because I heralded it atop last week’s post, I recently won third prize in the Bethesda Urban Partnership/Bethesda Magazine essay contest, and for doing so I will receive $150, a year’s membership to the Writer’s Center, and the opportunity to pee my pants while reading 500 words of wonder to a bunch of yahoos at the Bethesda Hyatt Regency.
Before I get back to my brain’s epic portrayal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, allow me a digression—you can decide whether it makes me or Bethesda look worse. Bethesda is, for those of you who don’t know, a somewhat precious and snooty upscale suburb of Washington, DC, that those of us who live in Silver Spring—especially those of us who live in the only slightly less precious and snooty upscale part of Silver Spring—like to rag on whenever we can. It’s one of those rare but interesting cases where one tries to get shit to roll uphill. Some of my best friends live in Bethesda, but that’s never stopped me from lampooning it whenever possible, partially because it delights my adult children, who also are expert practitioners of this particular craft, and one needs to hang on to things the whole family can do and enjoy together, especially after the nest is emptied. Anyway, I entered this contest twice before, and each time after being skunked, I read the winning essays and, well, let’s just say I was not a fan. My Bethesda-embittered pill having been swallowed, I consoled myself with the belief that whatever judges were chosen by these Bethesda Barons—which is in fact the nickname of their high school’s teams, and I do so appreciate them proving my point for me—just didn’t get my eastern Montgomery County sensibility, an admittedly acquired taste. Now that they’ve handed me the bronze, you might think I’d swallow my pride and acknowledge that maybe I was being harsh, but no. It’d be a tougher call had I won gold, but bronze feels a bit like a condescension prize tinged with geographical bias, especially since I’ve read the essays they deemed better than mine and, just between you and me, they aren’t.
And now back to my brain. I really do love my brain in so many ways, and I hope you’re equally fond of yours. Mine keeps me company when no one else will, amuses and confuses and dazzles and disappoints me in nearly equal measures. It, unlike me, is almost never dull. Every great idea I’ve ever had, from introducing a second ball in the second half of scoreless soccer games, to the countless sparks of brilliance that didn’t get written down and are long since forgotten, emanated from the neighborhood inside my noggin. It’s ironic we call brains gray matter, as they are by far the most vividly colorful assets we possess. Every smart/stupid/silly limerick, poem, song, story and letter I’ve ever written is a wholly owned subsidiary of my brain, except for material I borrowed—always with permission and attribution—from other people’s brains. I’m so glad so many of the brilliant young adults I know are working in the field of neuroscience, as the more we know about the source of pretty much all human happiness and despair, the more we can help people engineer a better ratio of the former to the latter. The only serious book I’ve ever read on the subject was The Brain That Changes Itself, a collection of stories about the brain’s endless and relatively recently discovered adaptability. It quite appropriately blew my mind.
But in the run-up to my first public reading in 24 years—my last a piece from a collection published by Salon.com’s Mothers Who Think, at a Barnes and Noble in Rockville—my brain is being a pain. I don’t know why I expect my anxiety to be rational, since by definition it isn’t, but I find it truly annoying that one of my favorite things to do, namely talking, would produce such joy when practiced with handfuls of individuals—even, and sometimes especially, ones I don’t know—and such fear and loathing when practiced formally and in front of a sizable group. My two primary phobias—speaking in public and heights, or more specifically, precipices—are numbers one and two in the US. This makes me feel somewhat less alone, but also unoriginal—my third biggest fear.
It should be a simple math problem, as all I’m doing is multiplying my standard audience. But of course it’s anything but, as my brain points out by causing my heart to race just thinking about the reading a full two days ahead of the event. I try the old “What’s the worst that could happen?” approach, which my brain quickly and effectively counters by wondering if sudden-onset Tourette’s is a thing. Nope, not gonna google that. Instead I call my daughter, a veteran performer of slam poetry—a uniquely vulnerable art form—and one of the most emotionally intelligent people I know, for advice. She agrees with my therapist that leaning into the anxiety is the way to go, which means instead of trying to put a cork in the discomfort, allow it to flow over you, and hope that in doing so you defang the monster. This resonates for me intellectually, but emotionally seems like an advanced-level assignment, and I’m scrambling to reach intermediate. We talk about the importance of breathing, which I sometimes forget to do. She reminds me that when she was little, my pre-swim meet prep talk for her consisted of two words: Don’t drown. As I recall, my intent was to get her out of her own head as much as possible, as she was a world-class overthinker. But now the shoe was on the older foot. We settled on a three-part mantra: Deep breaths, physically capable, don’t drown, which I quickly forgot and had to text her for retrieval. And I decided to shitcan the physically capable part in the interest of maximum brevity and alliteration.
I wasn’t worried about the material. It was a quality piece, even if in shortening it to the required 500 words I had to cut out some good lines. I can get to 450 just clearing my throat. But it was reasonably funny, and had several references to Costco, a store Bethesdans undoubtedly adore, as long as they don’t actually put one in Bethesda. But I hadn’t done enough work on myself in the month since I received my bronze-medal news to feel confident my brain wouldn’t betray me when the crucible hit, so I took hold of technology in the form of a low dose of propranolol, a benign beta-blocker that would hopefully keep my heart rate low enough to foil any of my brain’s self-sabotage.
SPOILER ALERT: IT ALL WENT FINE
We were the first to arrive at the event, natch, and slowly the crowd filed in. Half of the 24 readers won in the high school division, and most of their readings were appropriately intense and endearingly awkward. The short story winners only got to read portions of their 2,500-word stories, so that left us hanging on a few, especially the tale of an arm wrestling contest featuring eighth-grade versions of David and Goliath. (We learned later, sadly, that Goliath won.) I was third to last to read, which ordinarily would have enabled the anticipatory dread to build slowly but inexorably to a sphincter-puckering state, but for some reason, likely pharmaceutical, I was pretty calm. It helped that few of the honorees chose humor as their genre or Costco as their setting; the overall seriousness of the readings would make the crowd easier to amuse.
Eventually they called my name, and with an almost unnervingly normal heart rate I stepped to the rostrum (such a great word!), and didn’t even entertain the possibility of tripping along the way. I only coughed once during the reading, and actually had to pause a couple of times to let the laughs subside. I didn’t look up as much as I’d hoped, but the rhythm of the reading was too important to risk losing my place. Immediately after, I posed for the requisite picture with the sequin-flecked, sideways cap-wearing financial benefactor of the event, who thanked me for the laughs, as again, the dominant themes of the evening fell on the dark side. A couple of the other writers came up to me after and said I should have won, which was nice, and off we went with a few friends to a celebratory dinner.
All in all, a terrific evening, and hopefully the start of a late-in-life spate of performing, as I have my eye on a musical open mike in Takoma Park, the nuclear-free antithesis of Bethesda, at which I’d have my guitar and two not terrible and recently-written original songs to hide behind. It’s an interesting time for me and my brain, as while it has never been worse at hanging onto information, it’s also in a hyper-creative phase, which I am enjoying greatly.
I was still riding high on my triumph 36 hours later, when my brain decided to bring me back down to earth by forgetting I’d set a plastic mousetrap in our rarely-used-except-by-mice oven before I turned it on to pre-heat, only to discover that this cooks up a dish no one wants: mousetrap flambé, which sent noxious fumes pouring through some of our favorite living and eating spaces. On the up side, we had N95 masks handy, so I can add that to Covid’s slim list of silver linings, and it wasn’t cold out, so we opened every window and door, turned on every fan and beat it the hell outside for a few hours. But it was a sobering reminder of my all-world ability to forget.
And so ends another rollercoaster weekend thanks to my best friend and worst enemy. It can shine light and spread joy like Mister Rogers on his best day, and a minute later produce thoughts you’d think could only come from the love child of Eeyore and George Costanza. The one thing it won’t do, seemingly, is be quiet. I learned this during my brief YMCA yoga period when, for the last few minutes of each session, one is supposed to quiet one’s mind, and all I could do was look around and wonder what other people were thinking. But I’m okay with all of it. Ultimately, like the often-problematic mop of curls that covers it, I’m just happy my mind is still almost all there.