Out of my way

It’s not even 5 am and I’ve been up over an hour, stressing about, working on, my presentation today. These things don’t come easy for me–I’ve been doing presentations to rooms full of hyper critical people for over 20 years and it’s never been easy for me.  I tell myself I don’t think well or speak well spontaneously. I’m not naturally cute or funny or interesting. I’m shy and quiet and thoughtful, not playful or clever or authoritative. I was told when I was a kid not too take up too much space, not to be too obvious or loud, not to call attention to myself, not to get too big for my britches. And those messages are hard wired. Not easy to get past that. It takes a lot of energy to get past that.

So I woke up before 3, stayed in bed as long as possible, got up before 4. Wrote some stuff out. Tried to prepare and envision myself doing well. I’ve prayed: Help me. Help me let go of the fear. Let go of my need to appear to have it all together and all under control to always have to say the absolute right thing. Help me to have fun. Help me to see the people around the table as friends rather than enemies, as people who want to hear from me, rather than people who want to kill me. Thinking about that Marianne Williamson quote which Nelson Mandela made famous in a speech in 94 I think: “Our playing small does not serve the world.” It doesn’t serve me, it doesn’t serve anyone. I want to take that into my gut where all the fear and holding back sit. I want to knock all that playing small shit inside me on its ass, I want to tell it to get the hell out of my way. Once and for all. Or at least for today.

And now I’m tired, of course. Now when’s it’s almost time to get going, go work out, get to work early, I’m ready to go back to sleep. Insomnia is a bitch.