Smoke and mirrors

On Tuesday morning I spent some time making sure that I framed myself in a camera shot just so.  I was about to speak with a bunch of students via Skype and I wanted to convey the idea that they’d caught me as my natural self, totally unprepared and that, yes, I always sat this far from the camera, at this angle and yes, the quirky stuff in the background just happens to be there etc.

The Skype session went fine and the teachers emailed later on to say they were grateful for my time and sorry the students were shy of speaking with me, and that the session had been good.

Throughout the entire time I was on camera there was a voice and a belief inside my head that I was going to screw up.  That I was going to come across too confidently and arrogant, or that I would take myself down a verbal cul-de-sac that would wind up both incomprehensible to both them and me.  Essentially, in my mind throughout the time running up to the session and as the session went on was the consistent thought of fraud and failure.

*

On Wednesday morning I took thirty minutes to walk to a meeting.  I was going to teach a class and speak with other teachers.

I had dallied about getting ready through the morning.  In fact, the evening previously, I had considered the fact that I would wake up and decide not to go.  In the event, I readied myself and walked out of the front door.

Every person I walked past on my way to the meeting could see straight through me.  They could see me, and they could recognise a charlatan.  The pace I walked at slowed and slowed.  It slowed the point where I was going to be late.  There was no way I was going to be late.  To be late would be to actually announce I was a failure, a deceiver, out of my depth.  To them, all it would signal was I was shit at keeping time and, hence, not worthy of theirs…correct but not for the right reasons.

To have been late would have been a physical manifestation of my weakness.  It would have meant an explanation, leading to a bumbling, Hugh Grant-esque umming and aaring sentence or so mask.  The real reason being that all this is smoke and mirrors.  That I am stood in front of you, or on your screen through the wonder of Skype, and I seemingly know what I am doing and look in control and make you laugh and know the words, but it is all a sham.

If they knew that if they could slice me down the middle and open me in two then they would find an empty shell, the computer would be switched off and the invites rescinded.  Who wants to invite a vacuum into the space where they exist?  That’s how it feels.  Appearance and reality: looks fine, has an absence of self.  And a hatred of looking at yourself in this way, at this perception of you that you hold so fiercely in your hand, so tightly that the fight to prise it from your fingers is one you don’t know if you have in you.

*

This move back has been a journey to try and get a hand on the tiller.  To try and get the head up and look about and see a path, some sort of path to follow.  Truth be told, I know there are lights up ahead.  I can see lights, that’s for sure and they are beckoning and I’m following.  I can’t yet see how to get to them, nor whether that when I reach them it will just be something on fire.

That’s why it sucks that they messed about with the Marmite.  Things change, of course they do; but you look for reassurance sometimes and to have "reassurance" changed can have an unintended, unimagined affect beyond all measure.  Twitter, bless it, has told me that I can still buy the Marmite I know and love, so perhaps nothing has changed after all.  But we know it has.