Even though my public speaking competition days are behind me, I still work my voice, albeit in a different fashion. I have developed a habit of mimicking other peoples speech, especially if their voice has heavy nasal or high shrill qualities, or extreme eastern or southern accents. I find I have to mimic these voices, otherwise they sting my ears like a wet towel slapped against my eardrum would. When I mimic agitating voices, I can play and replay them until I manage to edit them into a medley I can appreciate and value.
Most of my public speaking fell under a category called radio and television. Basically, I would sit behind a microphone and read news copy I had written, to a panel of judges. When I competed in this context, I usually won or finished in second place. There is no question that this was my favorite thing to do, but I also liked performances that challenged my nonverbal expressions and my body posture. It was great fun to think of myself as a doll I could bring to life. I enjoyed methodically planning how I could make a script or poem more meaningful with facial expressions and eye contact and the wave of a hand or the shift of my weight. It was like a puzzle I could piece together. Little did I realize it was also a wonderful way for me inadvertently to learn how to use my nonverbal communication skills when I was not presenting a piece of literature. I was coming to understand that words on paper sometimes had to scream to be heard, but that words spoken with a distinct voice and compelling expressions could whisper, for the combination was that powerful.
I never experienced apprehension or fear when I spoke in public. I do not understand why so many people do. I wonder if I am missing something, if I am overlooking some obvious problem with public speaking that falls beyond my grasp. Maybe I enjoy speaking in front of a group because it is a one-way communication experience and, as such, something that is not affected by the complications of other people’s body language and non-verbal styles. Given a chance, I would much rather speak to a large group than I would to an individual or two. Small group conversations make my nerves feel like they are wearing stilts on an icy pavement. When I talk to other people, I have trouble following conversation transitions. I step on other people’s words, stumbling ahead with my own thoughts, in almost every conversation I have. It was not like this when I performed monologues and oratories. It was easier. I never stumbled a bit. Standing on stage was a release for me, even though I was always a solo performer and so, on my own each and every time. It was as if all the thoughts I kept trapped throughout the day, all my weird observations on life and my strange obsessive wonderings, could leave my conscious and find a new home within someone else’s mind. Once my thoughts were spoken aloud, I could finally move on to another thought or concern.
Speech competitions taught me a great deal about myself, especially when I was off the stage. On stage, I could try on the entire range of human emotions, even the emotions I typically had nothing to do with, and then as easily as I slipped them on, I could take them off and re-shelf them until the next time. But offstage, I did not have the luxury of pretending. I remember the first time I knew there was a vast difference between what I was able to make myself do in front of an audience, and what I could coax from myself when I was left without the stage lights. When I had to be me around peers I had not known for a long time, especially peers I was meeting for the first time, I froze.
Hindsight tells me this was AS nagging my reality, bubbling up and over until it became a cold, wet hand that held my calm to an ice tray white with frost. Try as I might, I could not sneak back and forth between the world of the normal and the world of the irregular. I seemed to shout my arrival the moment I made it to one place or the other. When I visited normal, I was relatively sure of myself and largely able to maintain my sense of composure, despite the fact I worried all along that eventually someone would discover I was an outsider. But when I side-stepped my way to the irregular, the glue that held me together softened and I melted a bit. Suddenly, without any kind of warning, my nerves would jump to center stage and demand my attention, making it impossible for me to remember any of the interpersonal speaking techniques and body language expressions I could show on stage. Something odd would happen to me and I would retreat into the places I used to visit when I was a little girl. I would turn my mind from everything that was going on around me, even the laughter and the jokes, the friendly discussions about everyone’s upcoming events and the well wishes that were coming my way. I would concentrate instead on blanking out my thoughts, counting over and over and wishing I was in a still spot away from the noise. Maybe I was experiencing sensory overload. Maybe I was frazzled because I did not have any way of predicting what would come next. Or, maybe I simply felt uncomfortable sharing close space with people so foreign to me. All I know for certain is that these moments were terrible. Faces began to merge together, voices sounded out of sync and my perception fooled me. Things ran on slow speed then, letting an eternity slip by until I could find a quiet corner or an empty room to gather myself up again. It was hard to make me right at that point, but given time, I always did.
It is tempting for me to reexamine that period according to the knowledge I now have, and each time I do, I find myself wondering if I might not have learned more if I had not isolated myself from my peers. Would I have learned more useful information about personal interactions if I had been a part of a drama team instead of a solo act? Would I have come to realize that emotions and expressions and words are empty if they are not shared and received? Would I have been able to see, years before I finally did, that communication does not rest against a flat surface, but that it has a vivid, virtually three-dimensional element to it? I can only wonder…
The study of all things linguistic was clearly one of my favorite obsessions, but it paled in comparison to the fixation I kept on the wild western frontier and Hollywood’s romantic comedies. When I was not watching the movies on television, looking through my vast collection of movie magazines or one of the dozens of books I had on the history of film, I was usually turning the pages of every fiction and nonfiction book I could find on cowboys and train robbers and American Indians and pioneers and western settlers. I loved anything to do with the way America lived in the late 1800s. I rode my horse bareback because that was how native Americans rode. I bought a cowboy hat with my first babysitting money. I even inquired into my genealogy to see if I was related to the infamous gambler and gun fighter, Doc Holliday. Other girls in their teens did not seem to share my interest in the old west, but then, neither did the boys. Not that any of them seemed particularly put off when I went on and on about how fascinating those times were. They were politely tolerant, but not inclined to add much to the conversation. After a while, I stopped trying to talk to my friends about my favorite topics, but I never stopped thinking about them or enjoying them on my own. I went to see western movies and old films by myself, not giving one moment’s thought to the notion that this was an uncool thing to do. I made audiotapes of western television series and played them over and over instead of listening to the radio. I wandered the archives of the library all alone, never dreaming of asking someone else to join me in searching the stacks for books about Annie Oakley or Wild Bill Hickock or Sitting Bull. And I argued with my teachers when they tried to convince me to read something other than western lore, telling them it was my goal to read every book in the library on every western character I could find. I think I did.