Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  In one way or another, these Eureka! moments figure in all our lives. They are the moments when we discover the falsehoods lurking in our most cherished beliefs. In life, as in literature, they are the catalyst for change. The change might be a decision just to walk away, as Durkin did, to the great relief of almost everyone who knew him. (All, that is, except his accountant.) Or they may signal a shift in one’s own definition of success and failure, as happened to Martha Gutierrez when she watched the video recording of her speech at the Stagefright Survival School. She wasn’t “that bad.” McMahon, the psychologist, had a similar revelation a few years ago when she was being interviewed on TV for a segment about how to maintain one’s mental health in bad financial times. She had never been on TV before, and as the cameras began rolling, the moderator casually mentioned that she hoped to get the footage in one take. “My heart was pounding, my throat was drawing in tight, and I wasn’t sure I could even talk,” McMahon recalled. “I said to myself, Get over yourself. This is not about you. This is an opportunity to give information that could be helpful to people who need it. Within seconds, my anxiety dropped.”

  Karolina Strassmayer never had a problem in performance as long as she was playing her saxophone. It was only when the music stopped and the audience waited for her to introduce the band, to announce the names of her tunes, and to make some welcome chitchat that she lost control. She wished she were like Dizzy Gillespie, the prankster who could charm and josh and set an audience at ease. Instead, she grew so nervous that she couldn’t shut up. She talked and talked and could make no sense of anything she said. It was that bad. She saw the audience cringing in front of her; she sensed the band members flinching behind her. She was the only woman onstage, and suddenly she felt very far from home.

  Strassmayer was born in Bad Mitterndorf, a postcard-perfect village in the Austrian Alps where her family has lived for generations. Her mother was a music teacher; her grandfather was the conductor of the town orchestra. It was assumed that Strassmayer, who grew up playing traditional Austrian music on the flute and recorder, would marry a local boy and take her place in the musical life of the town. But then something unforeseen happened. When she was sixteen, a friend’s sister was throwing away some old unlabeled cassette tapes. Strassmayer rescued one and gave it a listen. It turned out to be trumpeter Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and the sound of his band reached her ears like a fanfare from another world. She heard Cannonball Adderley blowing his heart out on the alto saxophone, and she knew she had to play what he was playing. Only none of her friends had ever heard an alto saxophone—certainly not the way he played it. She brought the tape to her grandfather, who guessed at the instrumentation, and within a few weeks Strassmayer had sold her mountain bike to buy a saxophone and take lessons with a teacher who had studied jazz in America.

  Her new passion drove a subtle wedge between her and her friends and family. They thought the music was ugly. They said the saxophone wasn’t a girl’s instrument. At twenty-five, she moved to New York, armed with a scholarship to the New School, a visa, and little else. New York is where she came into her own, as a woman and as a musician. In time, she played in Carnegie Hall and at the Village Vanguard, often as not the only woman in the band. Her confident musicianship began drawing attention and she was soon featured in jazz magazines, where she inevitably was asked what it was like to be a woman in a world dominated by men. She always rebuffed the question with the same answer: She played just like anyone else.

  But that came at a cost. At the New School, a teacher once told her that she would always “have to be better than the guys, or no one’s going to take you seriously.” She took the advice literally and played “like a man,” blowing aggressively, especially on the first song of a set, just to prove the bandleader’s faith in hiring her. It was an implicit response to the often explicit admonition that “I got a lot of flak for giving you the gig, so now you better deliver the goods.” She played the horn with such force that she sustained stress-related injuries in her neck, shoulder, and back.

  Strassmayer dressed “like a man,” too, favoring leather jackets and trousers. She kept her hair short and eschewed makeup, “so no one could accuse me of dating the drummer or sleeping with the bandleader or looking cute onstage.” She knew she was being scrutinized, and by now, she was scrutinizing herself. By the time she became a bandleader, her perfectionist qualities had reached new levels.

  “I had so many expectations of myself, including being a Dizzy Gillespie kind of leader who made jokes and could be charming and wonderful, a perfect leader … I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight and I couldn’t be all of those things. I’m not a natural entertainer. I was standing there petrified, talking myself into a tizzy and not getting a good reaction from the audience. They were cringing and so was I. Like, ‘I can’t believe I just said that.’ And the looks from people in the audience: Oh God, don’t say anything, just play.”

  Some jazz musicians never say a word onstage; her hero, Miles Davis, rarely did. But the advice of her mentor at the New School hung in the air, reminding her that as the only woman onstage, she had to prove herself. Whenever one of the other musicians took a solo, she found herself obsessing over what she would say when the tune ended. Would the audience like her? How could she get them to laugh? How should she introduce the bass player? “Now in hindsight,” she says, “I think that being a woman affected my performance anxiety.”

  Strassmayer spent years studying the Alexander technique, a system of movement that teaches coordination of gestures, muscle relaxation, and deep breathing. It focuses on physical alignment and poise. Musicians often turn to it when they are injured; it helps them unlearn maladaptive habits and deal with the stress of performance and repetitive motion. Though Strassmayer found it valuable, she benefited more from psychotherapy, which helped her come to a détente with her fear. “It helped me become myself and be happy with that,” she said. “The root of performance anxiety was always not being okay with myself—my skills, my looks, or whatever. Not living up to my own expectations, which were off the chart at that time.”

  In 2004, she was offered a place in the WDR Big Band in Cologne, Germany. The position brought instant credibility; the WDR Big Band is one of the best jazz ensembles in Europe. Strassmayer no longer felt she had to prove herself on a daily basis. Though still the only woman onstage, she could relax and feel confident in her musicianship. She created her own band, KLARO! (“No Sweat” in German, a wordplay on her nickname, Karo), with her husband, jazz drummer Drori Mondlak, and their music began garnering enthusiastic reviews.

  “I’m a product of a generation of women who saw that their mothers were very dissatisfied being stay-at-home moms. I remember promising myself very early on that I was not going to be that. I was going to go out in the world and do something. Not just be a hobby musician, but someone who makes the best of herself. That was a guiding principle. Today I can enjoy that drive.”

  Now, when a tune ends and it’s time to introduce the band, Strassmayer can speak with ease and even joy. A present-moment awareness—feeling the breath, the body, the sound of the instrument, the temperature in the room, physical sensations—is the key. “When performance anxiety happens today, I don’t engage in it. I can say, ‘Oh, here it is.’ It’s sort of like a recognition of a thought or a pattern that wants to reinstate itself. But there’s enough awareness not to buy into it. That gives me great freedom to enjoy myself onstage. I’ve also learned that it helps me to think of the audience not as an anonymous, potentially hostile crowd, but rather as individuals. And I speak to them as individuals, not with a hard focus on a single person, but [with] a soft focus that sweeps over individual faces, lingers for a moment on one face, and moves on.”

  Chapter 11

  CULTURAL ARTIFACTS OF FEAR

  “Benjamin” is a forty-eight-year-old Orthodox Jew who lives in northern Jerusalem with his wife and eight children. He is a scholar who has spent his life immersed in Jewish stu
dies and is admired by his community for his erudition and expertise in ancient manuscripts. But for as long as he can remember, Benjamin has had a fear of appearing and speaking in public. At wedding parties, he leaves before the final prayers, to avoid being asked to recite a blessing. He declines to read the haftarah (the weekly portion from the Books of the Prophets) in his synagogue, and though he is very religious, he stays home on Saturdays because he is afraid of being called to the Torah. He gets anxious before saying the blessing over wine on Friday nights with his family, and if a stranger is invited for the Sabbath dinner, his anxiety grows extreme.

  This portrait of Benjamin, as drawn by the Israeli psychiatrist David Greenberg, is the only published account of an unusual social phobia known as aymat zibur.1 The disorder takes its name from a Hebrew term that translates literally as “fear of the community.” As described by Greenberg, director of the Community Mental Health Center at Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, it is a form of performance anxiety that’s specific to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men—and only men, since the women of this community are not permitted to lead prayers.

  Aymat zibur is an expression that derives from a single passage in the Babylonian Talmud, which dates back to the sixth century. It refers to the sense of awe and respect de-manded of a priest who serves as intermediary between God and man. In the words of the text: “Rabbi Isaac said: Let respect for the congregation be always upon thee; for behold, the kohanim [priests] had their faces toward the people and their backs toward the Shechinah [a Hebrew name for God].”

  Scholars of Jewish law acknowledge the incongruity of this passage. One would expect a priest to show more respect for God’s presence by facing It, rather than turning his back. The text suggests that the fear of the community is strong enough even to overcome the fear of God. Or perhaps the priest’s responsibility to the community is so enormous, so onerous, that it merits a degree of fear. But in recent years, the meaning has shifted from a term of esteem to one of distress. When aymat zibur is mentioned in contemporary medical journals, it is cited as a culture-specific anxiety disorder, along the lines of the Cambodian pul meunuh, which literally means “poisoning by people”; the Japanese taijin kyofusho, which refers to a fear of interpersonal relations; or the Indian dhat, a folk term sometimes translated as “semen-worry.” In all these cases, societal norms play a critical role in determining when behavior turns pathological. They are culture-specific variants of performance anxiety writ large.

  Though Greenberg refrains from estimating the prevalence of aymat zibur, he quotes the rough calculations of a gabbai in a large Hasidic synagogue in Jerusalem. A gabbai is someone whose function resembles that of a churchwarden or sexton; he’s the person who helps organize activities and services and selects people to recite the weekly benedictions. According to this gabbai, 30 percent of his synagogue’s congregants decline to stand up and perform the prayers. “Those with difficulties seem to fear they will get stuck saying the prayers aloud or will stutter,” he is quoted. Not very scientific, but a surprisingly high number all the same.

  Greenberg draws his own seven examples from a caseload of five hundred ultra-Orthodox male referrals. One young man, identified as “Ezekiel,” came self-diagnosed to the psychiatrist’s clinic. “I was asked to be hazan [leader of prayers] on the Sabbath and practiced for a few weeks, but I have aymat zibur with a stutter, and did not want to shame myself in front of the Holy Ark, so my mother agreed it is unnecessary to shame myself,” Ezekiel told the psychiatrist. “As a child, I knew the tunes, but the pressure and fear ruined it all. My brother also doesn’t lead prayers—there are many with ‘fear of the congregation.’ ”

  Aymat zibur becomes a problem when it thwarts fulfillment of the very obligations that mark ultra-Orthodox Jewish men as members of their community. Fear of performance may prevent them from leading prayers (a religious duty expected of every adult male) and reciting the blessings over the Torah (which is considered an honor). “If, as a result of this problem, a sufferer does not attend public prayer, he is avoiding an integral part of religious life,” Greenberg writes. “If a mourner does not lead the prayers during the year of mourning, this will be immediately noted. He has first right to the honor, and will feel uncomfortable at not doing so.”

  For the man called Benjamin, the distress is simultaneously chronic and anticipatory. When his daughters become pregnant, he worries well in advance of the birth that if a boy is born, he—the grandfather—will have to assume a role in the bris, or ceremonial circumcision. He frets about the eventuality of his parents’ deaths (“May they live many years”), anticipating that he will have to lead the congregation in the daily Kaddish, or prayer of mourning, in the year that follows a loved one’s demise. His blushing signals the onset of a domino effect: His voice chokes, his legs tremble, he becomes convinced that everybody within eyesight sees and stares at him, which makes him blush all the more.

  Many men who suffer from aymat zibur appear to have been shy or anxious children. Their anxieties were overlooked, probably because a timid and taciturn personality blends smoothly into a culture that shuns secular society and values above all else the keeping of Jewish law. Teenage boys commonly study Torah to the near exclusion of all other activities. The ancient teachings are filled with exhortations discouraging social intercourse and easy conversation. “Whoever stops studying Torah in order to engage in conversation is fed the embers of a broom fire,” a passage in the Talmud warns. In the ultra-Orthodox world, a man’s worth is measured by the study of Torah, and any conversation that takes away from that study is discouraged. Greenberg quotes Maimonides thus: “A person should excel in silence and should not speak, unless to say matters of wisdom or matters to do with physical needs.”

  But while a natural reserve may be admired and even encouraged, a man’s ultimate standing in the community rests largely on his voice. The talmid haham, or wise student, is sought after for public speaking (on religious subjects, naturally) at social gatherings and ceremonies. And in the world of the ultra-Orthodox, teaching Torah confers the highest status of all; it’s the equivalent of being a cardiologist in the secular Jewish world. Effectively barred from so many activities integral to religious life, some of the younger men in the Jerusalem synagogue have tried group therapy to improve their public-speaking skills. In some cases, according to Greenberg, they have turned to a shidduch, or matchmaker, perhaps hoping that a wife would help ease their way into society. Benjamin turned to his rabbi. When that proved unhelpful, he sounded out Kabbalists—mystical sages—for counseling, blessings, and remedies. “Sorcerers,” he told the psychiatrist dismissively. “If not for this problem, I would have opened a school.”

  The term aymat zibur is barely known outside ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but its effects permeate well beyond those confines. Corinne Blackmer is a member of Beth El-Keser Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in New Haven, Connecticut. BEKI, as it is known, is an egalitarian congregation where women are allowed and encouraged to read from the Torah. Blackmer regards it as her second home and regularly attends Saturday services. But put her on the bimah, the podium from which the Torah is read, and she exhibits many of the same symptoms as the ultra-Orthodox Israeli men who suffer from aymat zibur. The last time she stood for the honor she opened her mouth, blurted out a few words, and fled the synagogue. The Hebrew language isn’t her problem. Blackmer speaks it fluently. She lived in Israel for several years and fought with the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Nor is she afraid of public speaking. A professor of English and Judaic Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, she routinely lectures before hundreds, loves to speak before large groups, and earns excellent ratings from her students.

  Her anxiety is specific to liturgical Hebrew. Though she knows the prayers by heart, she is afraid to get up and chant them. “I feel intimidated by the congregation since there are so many accomplished people there. Even though they are incredibly nice.” In a sense, chanting Torah
is not all that different from performing a classical music recital, with its zero tolerance for error. The instant a reader mispronounces a word in the Torah, or even stresses the wrong syllable, the members of the congregation are duty-bound to correct her—literally stopping the performance and forcing her to acknowledge and redress her mistake. For Blackmer, the delicacy of the parchment scroll itself creates an added anxiety. “I don’t want to hurt it,” she says. “I’m afraid that I might take the Torah pointer and jab it through. I’ve literally thought of that.” Though she can easily read the daily prayers, she is studying them intensely, hoping to one day stand up and recite them comfortably.

  The most examined of culture-specific anxieties is the Japanese taijin kyofusho, which translates as a fear of interpersonal relations. Taijin is almost the flip side of performance anxiety as we know it in the West. Instead of fearing that you are going to embarrass yourself with your behavior, you fear that you will embarrass or even offend others by your very presence. In the Japanese diagnostic system, there are four subtypes of the disorder: sekimen-kyofu (the fear of blushing), shubo-kyofu (the fear of a deformed body), jikoshisen-kyofu (the fear of eye-to-eye contact), and jikoshu-kyofu (the fear of one’s own foul body odor). Most sufferers experience only one of these fears.

  Taijin kyofusho is especially prevalent among adolescent boys and young men; studies report that 10 to 20 percent of Japanese males say they suffer from it. When a Japanese psychophysiologist, who examines the impact of fear and other emotions on the body, confided to me that she had taijin, I wondered if she was joking. It turned out that she had studied to be a concert pianist until perfectionism got in the way. “If there is a very small mistake, it ruins my performance,” she said, explaining that a serious case of focal dystonia—pianist’s cramp—forced her to quit the piano entirely. The physical problem was exacerbated by her taijin kyofusho. “I worried that if I played bad music, people would be embarrassed.” Now here she was, studying those very symptoms in other people, in her role as psychophysiologist.