by Jessica Pan
I stand on the unfamiliar street. It’s cold and windy. I start to shiver in my light T-shirt as it, naturally, begins to rain. I’m in a part of London I’ve never been to before, and I have 9 percent battery life left on my phone.
I close my eyes.
Julia, the woman from the online forum, had said that Alice changed her life. She didn’t mean that she just abandoned her old life and started a new one, right? Because that was looking like a pretty good idea to me right now.
I finally find my way to the station, coat-less, and while on the train, I relive the scene again and again. Me sitting across from Alice being interrogated. “TELL ME THE STORY,” she says, and me, blubbering, “I have these buttons, and I just can’t remember,” sounding like every disturbed witness ever to be harangued on Law & Order.
I wish I could explain to others why I started crying in that ordinary moment, just talking to a well-groomed woman in a very nice house. It’s hard to even comprehend it myself afterward. But in those kinds of moments, under scrutiny, with adrenaline and cortisol coursing through my body, I become sick with nerves, irrational, not myself. Maybe it was taking me back to those fraught months in Beijing when I felt too exposed and too seen.
Under the pressure of Alice’s gaze, imagining the magnitude of being onstage and carrying the anxiety from my past performance failures, my body released the fight-or-flight hormone, adrenaline. With so many things to worry about (Do I sound OK? Am I saying this right? Do I look weird? Did I get that detail wrong? Does she hate me?), I had become overstimulated, jittery, and easily distracted—the very opposite of focused and Zen, the state you want to be in when you are performing. Research shows that when we are stressed, our bodies also release cortisol, which interferes with our attention and short-term memory.
In short, my brain had briefly short-circuited. While I couldn’t control my reaction to this fear, I could rationalize it. Despite what my brain thinks, I’m not actually being chased by saber-toothed tigers onstage. I don’t have to view my failure as a TV reporter as indicative of how I would always be. I could try to let go of my entangled web of past anxieties around public speaking.
But it was very deep within me. It was going to take a lot to dig it out.
I go back to the swimming ponds, this time by myself. Before I can talk myself out of it, I dunk my head in the water and get my hair wet. Delete everything, I command the water as I dip under the silky brown surface. It’s still bracingly cold, but it shocks my body into a state of euphoria and then calm. Swimming in the water, hidden behind the trees, staring up at the sky, my worries feel far away.
After I dry off and change into my jeans and sweater, I wander through the Heath, walking under the trees, and get lost in thought. I resolve to at least try. I need to fight through the anxiety and see what happens. I can’t keep crying in bathrooms. I took a vow this year to be braver and not give in to my every natural inclination to run and hide. I can’t give up so quickly. But crucially, I want to be free of this. Free of this fear that has been haunting me for more than thirty years. Here is my chance to exorcise it. I do not want to waste it. Deep in thought, I get so lost in the Heath that I walk for over an hour before finding the right train station.
When I get home, subdued from the water and my walk, I force myself to practice my story aloud in the apartment, alone. I go through the entire thing twice. Unpleasant, but necessary medicine.
✽ ✽ ✽
I go back to Alice for a second session. I have no other options—I’m not cured, but I also haven’t found another cure. Besides, she still has my coat.
This time, she leads me to a different room with a piano and a beautiful original fireplace.
Alice sets up two chairs, and we once again sit across from each other, our feet flat on the ground and our knees about three inches apart.
She demonstrates a breathing exercise, where you close off one nostril with a finger to breathe in through the other nostril and then you switch. She has me do this twenty times. We do it together.
I don’t know where to look, and it lasts an eternity.
Then Alice leans forward, sitting with her legs splayed. “Try to be masculine: take up a lot of space, make your body loose,” she says. I imitate her movements; it feels good.
Then we stand facing each other.
“Sometimes we lose our voices because there’s no oxygen going through the vocal cords. When this happens, we need to do the ‘sniffy mother-in-law.’” Alice does a snotty “hmmph” through her nose.
“Now you do it,” Alice says.
“Hmmph!” I faux-sniff in the air, pushing air out of my nose as my voice vibrates in the back of my throat.
“Good!” she says. I’m starting to relax. “This will bring your voice back if you lose it.”
Then she has me stand and put my hand on my diaphragm. I’m supposed to feel it contracting or something. I don’t feel it but pretend to.
“OK, now I’m going to lead you through some vocal warm-ups. Just imitate me,” Alice says. I nod.
“Ba-ba-ba-baa,” she belts.
”Ba-ba-ba-baa,” I belt back.
“MmmyyyYYyyy!” Alice belts, her voice undulating on the vowel.
“MmmyyyYYyyy!” I echo.
“Good!” Alice says.
I like this praise for easy tasks. This I can do.
“MyyYYyy mummy is marrrrrvellous!” Alice shouts.
I pause.
“Just say it like I did,” Alice says. She repeats, “Myy mummmmmy’sss mmmmarrvellous!”
But Alice says this in a British accent. I have a hybrid accent that is best described as American-who-hasn’t-lived-in-America-for-ten-years-and-lives-in-London-but-also-I-married-a-man-from-Sunderland-who-used-to-live-in-Australia.
“Do you want me to say it . . . just like you?”
Alice nods, exasperatedly.
It hits me. I am George VI in The King’s Speech, and she is my wily, bulldogged Geoffrey Rush. I look into Alice’s eyes. She looks into mine. Yes. This is it. The go-ahead I’ve been waiting for since the day I moved to England.
“My mummy’s marvelous!” I bellow in a haughty British accent. I sound exactly like one of the children in Mary Poppins.
“MY mummy’s marvelous!” Alice shouts back at me, encouragingly.
“MY mummy’s marvelous!” I shout back at her, delighted, now sounding like Hermione Granger. What would someone think if they walked in on this scene? That we are psychotic. And that we are both enormously proud of our marvelous mummies.
The bellowing goes on for a while. Probably too long.
Alice says, “Great, now I’m going to sit down, and you’re going to tell me your story.”
Oh.
Alice takes a seat in the back of the room. I go into the hallway. She calls out my name, “Please welcome to the stage . . . Jessica Pan!”
I jump out from the hallway. She is sitting in a chair, her small, thin legs crossed. I don’t look at her. I look at the nice crown molding above her. (This house!)
But then I focus. I begin the story, standing about ten feet in front of her. And I finally, finally make it through the entire thing. I don’t stop. I don’t flounder. At the end, Alice claps.
Before I can bask in the glow, Alice says, “Now you’re going to say it again, and I’m going to heckle you. Because people might be drunk on the night. They might be loud. They might shout at you.”
I really don’t want to tell her the story again. It makes me feel so dumb to repeat myself. But she calls out my name again and again as a one-woman rowdy crowd, so finally I jump out of the hallway again and tell the story. This time Alice is on her phone and purposely laughing loudly at the wrong parts. She yells, “WHO CARES?” when I’m about thirty seconds in. I ignore her and keep going.
Alice. The tiny heckler who might just save me fr
om myself. I manage to finish the story again. When I leave her house, everything feels different. Better.
✽ ✽ ✽
I see Alice one more time. She has me go through the story twice more, and with each time, I become calmer. My voice grows steady. My mind is clear. I’m starting to believe I can do this. Me! Perform! In front of real people! Just as I’m wrapping the story up for the second time, I see something out of the corner of my eye. A spider mission-impossibles his way down from the ceiling, dangerously close to touching me, and I back away into a corner suppressing a scream.
Today’s lesson: always stay on your toes.
As I am gathering up my things to go, Alice tells me, “I want you to remember why you are telling this story. You have to want to tell your story. There needs to be that desire. When you are struggling with nerves, try to remember why you want to do this,” she says.
Straight from Alice’s house, I head to the Moth rehearsal. The performance is tomorrow, but tonight I’m going to meet the other four storytellers who will share the stage.
There’s Daz, an Australian documentary maker with blonde pixie hair; Ingrid, a former academic turned writer; David Litt, an American who has just flown in from Washington, DC; and me. There’s a fifth storyteller who couldn’t come because his daughter is sick, but I don’t catch his name. Probably because I’ve just found out that David was one of Barack Obama’s speechwriters at the White House.
I’m sorry, what? I’m going to be performing with the man who helped write Obama’s speeches? I’m going onstage after this guy? I can’t follow him!
But then I realize: Who else could give me better advice? Who else but a man who has helped the greatest orator alive? If anyone could give me advice about public speaking, it would be this guy. Well, it would be Obama, but this guy is a close second. I corner him.
“So do you think Obama gets stage fright, or do you think . . .”
“I think he had other things to worry about,” David says.
“Right,” I nod.
David tells me that he and Obama both rehearse a lot, which is reassuring. For some reason, I hadn’t imagined Obama rehearsing. I thought people like him were just born articulate, calm, and graceful.
“I also think it’s good to remember that Beyoncé gets stage fright,” David says.
I like David, but this means nothing to me. People always say things like this, but I am not Beyoncé. Not even a little bit. At the end of the day, she’s still Beyoncé, and I’m me, which is why she will almost definitely do well and for me, all bets are off.
Once, during a live Grammy performance, Adele stopped midway through, swore, rolled her head back, and said, “I’m sorry for swearing; can we start again?” I am much more Adele than Beyoncé.
“Do you think . . . David, do you think I’m going to be able to do this?” I ask.
“I do,” he says. My own personal Obama cheerleader. I try to trust him, the way Obama must have. (Obama and me? We are the same.)
Meg gathers all of us around a table, and the four speakers take turns telling our stories in front of the others. Ingrid, tentative at first, tells the most moving and animated story. She’s transformed as she talks about nursing her mother as she died of breast cancer and then dealing with her own son being bullied at school. You can tell she’s still grieving over her mother, but Ingrid somehow manages to be funny and poignant at the same time.
I love listening to everyone else’s stories, to see them moved with emotion as they revisit an important, defining moment in their lives. But what I really like about the storytellers is how they all seem terrified. It’s kind of the best thing ever. Their collective terror comforts me. I’m not insane. I’m not alone. I’m just like them. Meg is like our den mother, high energy and constantly assuring us that, despite our stage fright, it’s going to be OK. None of us believe her.
✽ ✽ ✽
I don’t sleep the night before.
It’s hot. So hot. I am unable to do anything all day because I have no attention span. As the evening draws nearer, finally, I take a shower. Sam irons my shirt. I am dressed exactly like Sharon Horgan (the actress from Catastrophe) was when I saw her at Union Chapel at a live event: button-down light blue men’s shirt, black jeans, gray boots, hair down, big jade earrings to ward off evil spirits.
When I arrive, I already see a short line of people at the door. The audience had always been “in theory” to me, but now they are real and lined up, and some of them are looking at me. I stand outside, frozen in fear, when the door slides open and one of the producers pokes her head out and motions me to come in. Then she reminds me of the rules of performance at The Moth: stories last twelve minutes. Once we hit the twelve-minute mark, a violinist will play a series of threatening violin notes to let us know we’re out of time. And we definitely cannot go over fifteen minutes.
I’m only half listening to her. I walk tentatively into the chapel, looking at all the empty seats, and find the other storytellers practicing using the mic. During my turn, I hop up onstage, sick with adrenaline. I say a few words into the mic and am thrown off by how strange I sound. Curveball. I do not need a curveball at this point.
“The thing no one tells you is that once people fill up the room and sit down, it’s much less echoey,” a man standing near the stage says. “It won’t sound so weird when you’re actually up there telling the story.” The other, final, rogue storyteller has just arrived straight from a literary festival. He introduces himself as Nikesh, but I don’t hear him properly. His full name is Nikesh Shukla, and what I don’t know at the time is that he is the guy who edited The Good Immigrant and I have read two of his books. I’m too distracted in the moment to enquire further, so to me, he is just another person out on the battlefield.
He is dressed in pineapple shorts and a pineapple shirt.
“You don’t seem nervous,” I say suspiciously.
“I am,” he says. “Why do you think I wore this? So that everyone is looking at the pineapples instead of at me.”
We’re waiting in the greenroom, milling around. Daz, the Australian, keeps running away and coming back. She is even more flighty than I am, the effect accentuated by the long, flowing coat she wears that acts as a cape as she strides across the room. I know without asking that this is her armor for the night.
She bursts back into the greenroom, sits down at the piano, and starts pounding the keys.
“This relaxes me!” Daz says, the piano melody drowning out the rest of the noise in the room. An elfin brunette woman, introduced as our timekeeper, takes out her violin, riffing off the piano. It’s discombobulating, all this loud, erratic music, as if I’ve stepped into an avant-garde film just as the protagonist loses their mind.
Meanwhile, Meg and another producer are talking loudly over the music. David is pacing back and forth in his black blazer. I stand in the corner, watching. The whole scene makes me feel like my brain has been turned onto its side and shaken.
I run out of the room and through a hallway to peer past the large black curtain. The lights are dimming, the sun is setting, and people have just started taking their seats.
There’s so much adrenaline in my body that I could lift off. Half an hour before showtime.
“Where is Jess?” I hear Meg call out in the room. The piano music abruptly stops. I have been flagged as a flight risk.
Rightly so because I am pulling my hair back into a ponytail and adjusting my socks. I’m wearing ankle boots with a heel, but I know how to run in them. In fact, I’m pretty fast in these boots: I could just run away and never return.
I hear a voice behind me and turn around to see David.
He is looking at me imploringly.
“Can you take me somewhere to—” he begins.
I look into his eyes, puzzled.
To start a new life? To head out to sea? To find Obama? H
onestly, where is he?
“. . . buy an iced coffee?” he asks.
I sigh.
“I’m low energy,” he says. “I need it before I go on.”
An excuse to escape. I lead him as we weave through the aisles of Union Chapel, past the producers and the stage crew and the people lining up outside.
There is now a huge line out the door.
“It’s the paparazzi!” I say, in a stupor of fear.
“That’s not what paparazzi is,” David says.
“I know!” I say, waving him away, staring at the crowd.
They are here. They are here. The people are here.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“It’s Sunday night in London, and you want an iced coffee, David,” I say. “We’re going to Starbucks.”
As we cross the street and walk, I can’t really feel my body. Or think. David is talking, but I can’t really respond. He’s saying something about how English people don’t like him because he’s too chatty and he once put his dirty toothpick back in the wrong pile at a food market or something.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
David continues talking all the way back to the chapel with his coffee. I take a seat in the front row to wait for when the lights dim and we are on.
David sits down next to me, sipping his iced coffee.
“I get very chatty when I’m nervous,” he says. He launches into the history of Icelandic democracy and Vikings.
I’m beginning to appreciate why the British hate David.
“David, I can’t talk right now,” I finally say.
“OK,” he nods, and he drinks his iced coffee, muttering about the Icelandic government system to himself.
Five minutes to go. I run off to go do my Alice breathing exercises.
It’s always like this. There is so much time, and then there is NO TIME. THERE. IS. NO. TIME.
I go into the bathroom quickly to do my calming nostril breathing. Why, oh why God do I have to do this in a bathroom? “Sharon Horgan has used this bathroom,” I tell myself. “And Damien Rice.” More calm breathing.