The Metaphysical Meaning of Performance Anxiety
How Manhattan looked to me from Hoboken last week. I’m not sure how this drawing relates to performance anxiety and derealization, I just like it.
HOBOKEN, SEPTEMBER 26, 2024. I like pondering mental maladies. Are they mere brain glitches, best suppressed with stoicism and/or meds? Or might they yield insights into the nature of things?
Take performance anxiety, which has nagged me since I was a kid. It’s like stage fright, except you don’t have to be on a stage. It can strike whenever you are, well, performing. And when aren’t you performing?
My aversion to the spotlight has diminished since I started teaching two decades ago. Yammering to a pack of feral youths serves as exposure therapy, in which confronting a phobia over and over reduces its power over you. But the scrutiny of others can still make me wobbly.
Friends, reading this, might roll their eyes, because I’m not exactly shy. In fact, I’m a blabbermouth. That’s because I’ve learned to play, indeed relish, performing certain roles: friend, father, teacher, journalist, know-it-all. I get so engrossed in the role I’m playing, the lines I’m saying, that I forget I’m playing a role.
I chatter happily with my colleague Michael about dreams involving sexual shapeshifting. I persuade a friend to see the greatest film ever, The Matrix. I rant to my students about the blind piranha and Plato’s cave. But at any moment I might stammer and freeze as part of me stands back from my performance and thinks, Huh?
Performance anxiety can seize me even when I’m with loved ones, like my son and daughter, or all alone. One self lies on the bed at 3 am, staring at the darkness, while another self hovers nearby, watching, judging.
What’s going on here? From one perspective, performance anxiety makes biological sense. Natural selection designed us to care how others see us, because if you annoy, disgust or frighten your fellow hunter-gatherers, you might not survive, let alone reproduce. Hence our brains warn us, Don’t fuck up!
Sometimes you care too much. Your fear of fucking up becomes self-fulfilling, and you choke during a date or televised debate. That sucks. But caring is good. If you really don’t give a shit what others think, you’re probably depressed or sociopathic.
But this Darwinian explanation of performance anxiety does not preclude metaphysical interpretations. Performance anxiety, I’ve decided, is not just an evolutionary adaptation gone awry. It is a manifestation of another psychic syndrome that has nagged me since childhood: derealization.
Derealization is a psychiatric term for a sense of estrangement from the world, others, even your own self. Everything seems weird, unreal. You feel as though you’ve been thrust onto a stage in the middle of a play. The other actors look at you expectantly, but you’re not sure what the plot is, let alone what part and lines you’ve been assigned.
Derealization and performance anxiety, I propose, are two aspects of a single syndrome: derealization/performance anxiety. Yeah, psychiatrists should add this to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, their official compendium of ailments. But psychiatrists should acknowledge that derealization/performance anxiety might not be a disorder; it might be a rational reaction to “reality.”
Consider: Scientists cannot explain the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of consciousness. The more scientists ponder our existence, the more improbable it seems. There is no reason for me to exist, or you to exist, and yet here we are.
Every single moment of every single life is weird, that is, inexplicable and improbable, but some moments are weirder than others. Take the conference that I described in my past column, during which I moderated a discussion of theories of consciousness. I was on a spotlit stage in front of hundreds of people, so I felt a twinge of derealization/performance anxiety, but nothing unmanageable. I was even enjoying myself.
Then the spirituality and alternative-medicine mogul Deepak Chopra, who was sitting next to me, locked his eyes on mine and told me that the microphone he’s holding isn’t real, he’s not real, I’m not real, because reality consists of an infinite field of consciousness that transcends space and time.
Chopra was, in effect, giving me a rational explanation for my derealization/performance anxiety. His riff had a paradoxical effect on me. Part of me thought, If I don’t exist, and Deepak doesn’t exist, and none of those people out there in the Amesbury Ballroom exist, what’s there to fear? Chill out, man.
Another part thought, Oh shit, this is too weird, too meta--perhaps because confrontations with ultimate reality don’t always end well for me. During a drug trip long ago, I became the infinitely intelligent cosmic computer at the end of time.
At first, being this God-like entity was cool. Then I realized I was all alone, no one else existed, and I was terrified, I didn’t know what to do, I freaked out. A really good trip turned into a really bad trip.
I’d like to end on a (hopefully therapeutic) up-note: If you feel derealization/performance anxiety welling up in you, take heart: It’s not a disorder, it’s an insight into existence, and God feels it too.
Further Reading: