Apr
7
Performance Anxiety
Filed Under Therapy
It has been a while since the last time I wrote a blog. When I first started writing this blog I had hopes of keeping up with it at least once a week. Now that months have passed I can safely say I broke that promise. This leads me to think of a common problem in therapy: anxiety. Anxiety tends to be future orientated, a fear (and even a fear of the fear) of the unknown future. This fear seems to manifest in different ways for different people, it could be fear of other people, or fear of public places, or even the fear of losing ourselves into the great unknown. This fear typically has to do with a postmodern “performance”; the wanting to live up to an ideal way of being. Maybe this is the idea of a public speaker who is polished and laid back and has no worries or the idea of entering a school and being “just like every other” student. This performance is a cultural trick because no one really knows what performance is always and in every situation the correct “way of being”.
We are all just pretending to know the “right way”. The question should be asked what is better, a performance or authenticity, and does it matter? And to whom? And why?
How does this help with beating back anxiety? It helps to shift our perspective on our fear. It helps us to question the object of our fear. It does not get rid of the anxiety but helps change the magnitude of the power that we have given it.
How does this relate back to not writing a blog for the past few months? I believe that I had envisioned myself as a person who was a prolific writer, a writer who was admired, perhaps even a future of having one of the best awarded blogs around. That would be quite the performance to live up to. So I have created this fear of being anything less than that, but by questioning this performance and assessing what it is that I could actually accomplish I have helped change my perspective and have thus lowered my performance anxiety.
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