You screwed up that important thing! (Or did you??)

I just did a fancy radio interview, for one of Australia’s most listened to shows. And I completely screwed it up.

Or did I?

This week: what happens when you genuinely can’t tell if you screwed up or not?

A great opportunity (goddammit)

It was a great opportunity. A chance to talk about the Big Feels Club to a national audience. To share our inspirational message (life sucks! you don’t!) with hundreds of thousands of people.

I’d spent hours preparing for the interview, practicing what I would say. I was ready.

But I was also tired. We’ve been pushing this little feelings boat hard lately. Making the podcast. Promoting the podcast.

Struggling to sleep the night before, I looked over my notes for the tenth time. That delicious catch 22. The more I prepare, the more tired I’ll be. But if I stop I’ll feel anxious and won’t sleep.

It went just fine. Until it didn’t.

The interviewer was lovely, curious, understood where I was coming from. Honor had heard the whole thing from outside the booth and said I did great.

But within half an hour I had this nagging feeling. I couldn’t put my finger on it right away. Was I hungry? Tired?

No wait on. You just completely fucked up that whole interview.

Ah. Alright then.

(Cue shame spiral.)

To her endless credit, Honor helped me go over the play by play, multiple times. But I couldn’t remember what things I’d actually said and what I’d just practiced so many times.

A horrible thought wove its way around my guts.

You didn’t say *anything* good. You just sounded like an idiot with a lot of feelings.

Me after the interview. That magic 'I've ruined everything' feeling.

An even more horrible thought. What if you just can’t tell what really happened?

Why am I sharing this story with you?

Because I have this theory. My theory is, the interview didn’t actually go all that badly at all. In fact, it might even have been quite good.

But the point is, I have no way of knowing that.

After a few hours of spiralling thoughts and self-recriminations, I am genuinely the least reliable witness of whatever happened in that recording booth.

Living in the gap

And here’s the thing. That gap, that discrepancy between your inside experience (you’re the worst) and the reality others see, that is kind of the essence of being a sensitive cat.

If you spend much of your everyday lived experience thinking your feelings don’t quite line up with everyone else’s reality, it’s easy to start feeling ashamed of that gap.

Soon enough it’s not just the feeling that you’ve screwed up something important. It’s the shame of feeling so crap about it, even if you didn’t really screw it up.

Lovely.

We don’t hear about other people’s fancy-interview-meltdowns

I know I’m not the only person who experiences the world in this way. I’m not the only one wrestling regularly with that gap between my messy inside experience and the world as it really is.

I could offer theories about how my perfectionism comes in useful, or how my post-interview freak-out is really just part of any creative process - but my point here is simpler.

I think it helps to know you’re not the only one having these moments.

So I am writing this to capture the feeling of having completely screwed up, so that I can then compare that against the finished interview. (Assuming I can bring myself to listen to it.)

If it does turn out to be a good interview, the point is not look at how wrong I was to freak out, everything turned out fine. The point is closer to this:

Look at this fancy-seeming thing I did. Here’s what that experience was actually like.

And if it turns out to be a bad interview… Well it was nice knowing you all, I’m going to go live in a tiny house in the country somewhere with no wifi.

So what’s the verdict? How bad did I do???

Decide for yourselves! The ep is out now.

It’s a special episode of ABC’s long-running (and most excellent) show about mental health, All In The Mind.

If not for me, check it out for the fabulous Gareth Edwards (he of Big Feels and No Feeling Is Final episode 6 fame).

And also check it out for the fabulous Caroline Mazel-Carlton. Honor and I met Caroline earlier this year when she trained us in something called Alternatives To Suicide - a revolutionary, deeply human way of responding to hopelessness (which she talks about in this very episode).

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