Around 10 years ago I suffered from anxiety due to a long term situation I was in. It would start with a pain in my chest which felt like indigestion, but wasn't. My heart would race and occasionally skip a beat, my hands would shake and adrenalin would surge through my body. I'm long since removed from the situation and therapy has helped me deal with the anxiety. I rarely suffer from it now, although if I feel I'm in situation similar to the one that used to trigger it, the symptoms will come on again. However I'm now equipped with techniques to calm myself down, and have used them successfully.
I had a very different experience on Sunday with something I can only assume was blind panic. I was auditioning for a role in a local amateur theatre production of My Fair Lady. It's not my first audition, and I had worked with everyone on the audition panel in previous productions - so there were no unfriendly faces. Now, I normally get nervous before an audition, but as someone who's been a performer since the age of 5 I know how to harness those nerves and always in the past, once the music starts muscle memory kicks in and a performance happens. Also, I have this weird ability in job interview to harness nerves and normally interview really well. So what happened next came as a surprise.
The pianist starts playing my audition song and I start to sing and I'm not in the right key. I ask for another start and the same thing happens again. The Musical Director, who knows I can sight read, offers me the libretto so I can quickly re-acquaint myself (with the song I had been practising for over three weeks on a daily basis) and try again. I look down at the sheet of music and the words and they are suddenly a bunch of meaningless symbols that I can't translate. It's like she's given me a book written in another language. It was the most bizarre and frightening experience of my life. I slammed the book shut and said I'll just try again. I hit the key I was supposed to be in, but was so rattled by the experience that I lost the words of the second verse. Bless her heart, the MD sang the third verse along with me to keep me going.
I went on to finish the dancing and reading section of the audition without any problems. But for 10 seconds of my life I had the worst moment of blind panic a person can experience. It was like something out of a nightmare, except I wasn't dreaming.
Panic and anxiety should never be underestimated. It's a scary, scary thing.
Oh and one more thing: "C'mon Dover! Move ya bloomin' arse".
