An acquaintance of mine, a fabulous person - Poppy, from poppiesarepunk, posted a very interesting video Am I a "Fake Youtuber"?, about how she fakes confidence on YouTube, and how it is actually helping her become more confident in real life. I touched ever so slightly on the subject in a post on this blog a few weeks ago, called Behind the Camera. In this post, I identified as an "attention whore", and also as "incredibly shy." I think it was the least coherent and most contradictory post that I have ever written, but I don't take it down became it was also one of the most difficult to write.
This post, I hope will clarify some things, and possibly be interesting for you to read.
In real life, I am quite shy. Whilst among a group of people, I can come across as confident, self-centred or ballshy even, I spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about what I say and worrying about saying it. Afterwards, after pretty much every conversation I have, I begin to analyse everything, from what I said, to how much I said to how I said it. And invariably, I will determine that I messed up, that they are probably at home now thinking about how much of an asshole I was. A part of me tries to say that that isn't true, but I have never been able to quell these thoughts.
People also assume that I am confident, because I act on stage quite a lot. I get nervous beforehand, but once I am on I don't identify as me at all. I'm a bit of a method actor in that I completely forget who I am until I am safe and back in the wings (where the secret analysing of my acting begins). But that is a character, it isn't me. If I do not have a scripted part, so if it is improvisation, and especially if I have not had a lot of time to get under the skin of the person I am playing - so the parts that are "me" still poke through - I get incredibly nervous.
For instance, today in a three minute improvisation piece, halfway through the piece my character became a hyperventilating, quivering wreck. People thought it was very believable, and it probably was, because it wasn't the character at all. I couldn't convey any emotions except for the ones of fear that I was feeling. In "Behind the Camera", I mentioned a lesson in which I had been made to stand in front of the class, just why a song played and how I had begun to shake. A lot. There was no reason for this - I wasn't opening any thing up about myself, and there was no chance of me failing, unless Youtube crashed and the song had stopped playing, in which case it was hardly my fault. It was just a case of being me, in front of an audience.
This wasn't a one off though. My friends don't let me forget the time that during a geography presentation, in which I just had to read off a script for five minutes, I shook so badly that I dropped by pieces of paper all over the floor. It was completely scripted and not particularly about anything I cared about (I mean, much as I love the peninsulas in Antarctica) and so again, there was literally nothing personal about the speech at all.
I'm pretty sure by now we've established how shy I can be in person, and so moving swiftly on without further examples...
There is another girl, decidedly less self doubting than me, decidedly less annoying, dorky, chubby, spotty...
She is the girl who lives in my head, the ultimate version of me who I would like to begun. She has a lip ring to the right side of her lower lip, and somehow this matters a lot to me. It's become an instinct, almost a comfort blanket when I feel really terrible that sometime I'm going to get my lip pierced. I would have by now, but stupid school uniform rules exist. She is skinnier than I am, and she looks a lot more punk than I do. I mean, I may have the music taste, but I come across as far from the musicians I wish I could emulate. She's probably in a band, despite the fact that I am literally friends with no one who shares the music taste that is mine or who would want to form a band of any sort. She sings, but by now she can play the electric guitar. Her hair is probably dyed a brighter colour, maybe a Hayley Williams-esque red...She can dance. She rants about feminism coherently. She can public speak.
She is the version of me I want to become.
But I feel like, like Poppy, online I emulate her more. In real life, my thoughts about orcas and feminism stay largely inside my head, but on this blog, I talk about them, I share them and I hope that someone out there will notice.
Poppy says "fake it until you make it," but I'm not sure if it is so much faking it, or just speeding up the process of becoming the person who you want to be until you get there. Either way, I think it works. What say you?
I'm pretty sure by now we've established how shy I can be in person, and so moving swiftly on without further examples...
There is another girl, decidedly less self doubting than me, decidedly less annoying, dorky, chubby, spotty...
She is the girl who lives in my head, the ultimate version of me who I would like to begun. She has a lip ring to the right side of her lower lip, and somehow this matters a lot to me. It's become an instinct, almost a comfort blanket when I feel really terrible that sometime I'm going to get my lip pierced. I would have by now, but stupid school uniform rules exist. She is skinnier than I am, and she looks a lot more punk than I do. I mean, I may have the music taste, but I come across as far from the musicians I wish I could emulate. She's probably in a band, despite the fact that I am literally friends with no one who shares the music taste that is mine or who would want to form a band of any sort. She sings, but by now she can play the electric guitar. Her hair is probably dyed a brighter colour, maybe a Hayley Williams-esque red...She can dance. She rants about feminism coherently. She can public speak.
She is the version of me I want to become.
But I feel like, like Poppy, online I emulate her more. In real life, my thoughts about orcas and feminism stay largely inside my head, but on this blog, I talk about them, I share them and I hope that someone out there will notice.
Poppy says "fake it until you make it," but I'm not sure if it is so much faking it, or just speeding up the process of becoming the person who you want to be until you get there. Either way, I think it works. What say you?
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