Zara sweater (similar) & jeans (similar) | Jimmy Choo ankle boots (similar)
This post was created in collaboration with Rogaine.
There are some things that live in your DNA – like, say, eye color, or a taste for Yodels – things that are guaranteed to be a part of your life practically from the moment of conception. (Kidding about the Yodels, but only a tiny bit: Yodel-loving is definitely part of my personal genetic makeup.) Some of these things can feel like an essential, even necessary part of who you are, but even so: that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to define your future – not if you don’t want them to.
I started out writing this post about hair loss, and how it’s part of everyone’s DNA: Even if you don’t suffer from hereditary hair loss, everyone’s hair follicles begin to shrink as they age. I was writing about how I made the decision to start using Rogaine to combat mine (with truly incredible results; right now I have a solid two inches of regrowth happening and yes, it looks a little finger-in-the-light-socket-y, but oh my goodness, a few months from now it’s going to be SO GOOD). And then I started thinking about other things that I’ve wanted to change, but figured I couldn’t; that they’d be there forever because that’s just “the way I was.”
Take, for example, my stage fright. The stories I can tell about the ways that my anxieties about speaking in front of people wreaked havoc on my life and my career are too many to count. It always started the same way: with a hot, tight knot in my chest. Then the fizzing sensation would begin, shooting up into my brain and making it impossible to think, move, breathe. My legs and hands would tremble visibly, and my chest would break out in huge red blotches that suggested that I might just possibly have a touch of scarlet fever. (It was very glamorous.)
My stage fright always disappeared once I booked a job and found myself on an actual set – so I guess it wasn’t “stage fright” as much as “standing-in-a-big-room-with-a-lot-of-people-looking-at-me-and-theoretically-judging me-fright”…but you know what’s hard to do when you have full-on panic attacks during auditions?
Get an acting job.
I had loved acting ever since I started my career at 13 years old, but as I grew older I grew more and more desperate to have the next audition turn out to be The Big One – the one that would change it all for me – and consequently became more and more anxious, to the point where just getting a phone call from my agent would make my heart race. I wanted so badly to be able to stand up in front of a room full of people and show them what I could really do, but my brain simply wouldn’t let me do it.
When I finally “quit” the industry (that’s a loose term) and started Ramshackle Glam, the one bright spot was that I wouldn’t have to audition anymore. I could stay where I felt safe: right there behind my computer screen.
Except that’s not exactly what happened.
I started this site in 2010, and after awhile I started being asked to speak at conferences or appear on panels. This was super flattering and super exciting and super, super good for my career. It was also something that I really, really did not want to do.
More big rooms; more people looking at me. More judging.
One day, I got an email from a colleague asking me to speak on a panel at a big event helmed by a major fashion magazine. I was completely freaked out at the idea of standing up in a room and speaking – and even more so by the fact that I’d be standing up and speaking in a room full of my peers. I was close to declining the offer. “I can’t,” I told my husband. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s worth all the anxiety.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kendrick said. And then, because he is wise: “The fact that you’re scared clearly means that you’re going to have to do it.”
So?
I did it. I said yes.
After that, I started saying yes to everything I could. Yes to the speech at a small local charity; yes to the live national news segment; yes to it all. If someone wanted me to speak in front of people – whether just a handful or thousands – I did it. Every time. No matter what.
The first few times I spoke in public, of course, it didn’t go especially well. I shook; I blushed; I felt that familiar fizzing in my brain. But eventually I came to realize that even when the anxiety found me, I made it through, and came out the other side more or less intact. I found ways to manage my stage fright – standing so my weight was distributed on both feet; taking deep breaths – and after awhile these forced behaviors became habit. I also learned how to forgive myself when I did less than my best.
A couple of months ago, a representative from a mental health organization asked me to be a keynote speaker at a conference in San Francisco. Hundreds of fancy Silicon Valley startup-founder-types would be in attendance, and she wanted me to give a speech.
What about, you ask? She wanted me to give a speech about…
Hold for the irony…
My experiences with anxiety.
I said yes, of course, I’d be honored. And it was only much, much later that I remembered that I was supposed to be terrified…Except I wasn’t.
I couldn’t wait to get up there and talk about where I’d started, and just how far I’d come.
Photos by Kim Ebbets.
