You’re Not Afraid of Speaking

“Fear nothing, except public speaking.”

That would be an honest tattoo.
You could get it in cursive, slightly obscuring the last part.
I once had a debilitating fear of heights. Through conditioning and obstinacy I lowered the original rating for that fear.
These days I am aware of my environment when I get onto the roof to clean the solar panels. I watch my footing. Blind fear, which I once described as standard operating procedure, has made space for deliberate and practiced caution.

Some of the bravest people I ever met will scale bare rock faces, allow spiders to crawl over them, and still experience the worst stomach churn when asked to address a crowd.
So where’s the difference? What differentiates the fear you recently had tattooed on your arm from a thousand phobias?
Could the simple answer be, “No people to watch me, judge me, reject me?”

Our ancient counterparts stood up to speak in smoke-filled caves and halls, addressing the others in the tribe.
Screwing up the speech of your life could have meant getting kicked out of the tribe and being ridiculed.
Our nervous systems can’t always distinguish between a few dozen bombastic elders in a circle and an auditorium filled with many more observers.
Something else — irreversible judgment — also creeps in. We can’t control things in real time. When a panic attack hits on the roof, you can sit down, gather your thoughts, and push back. But on the stage, that only increases the imagined ridicule from the audience.

When I prepared pupils for debate competitions I told them they were not scared of speaking in public.
They were scared of being heard and looked at in an exposed and vulnerable setting.
They were not afraid of making noise.
For the rookies, I often concocted weird but fun experiments to prove that making noise or being loud in public was never the problem.
I have never researched whether an actual phobia associated with a mic or stage exists, but the veil lifted when the competitors realized where the root of the fear originated.

“I am afraid of speaking.” Nobody will get that tattoo.
But the following reframed language is worth observing once it lands: “My nervous system is imagining, even simulating, the cost of losing status or belonging in front of witnesses.”
Yeah — witnesses. Unfortunately, thousands of recording devices in an audience do not help here.
This is one of many conversations I want to have about the fears we wear — literally or otherwise — without ever naming them correctly.
We have the same circuitry and wiring the ancients had, even if the world evolved around us.

Which is why ‘Fear nothing, except public speaking’ remains the most honest tattoo you’ll never get.