In Conclusion, Don't Worry About It by Lauren Graham

Author:Lauren Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

Then, some nights everything would mysteriously click. And I’d try to repeat whatever I thought that winning combination was, but I’d fail to find it the next night. I was wracked with anxiety. Within a single week of performances, I cycled through the same waves I’d experienced in high school, only more concentrated. Certain nights were Hello, Dolly!, others felt like a senior slump. I couldn’t figure out what the difference between them was. It felt like my performance was controlling me, rather than the other way around.

But as the weeks passed, I began to hit my stride. It was too late in one way—the reviews had already come out, which meant all the “important” people had already made their judgments. But the timing was perfect in another way. Finally, I had stopped caring who exactly was in the audience. No matter who they were, I realized they were just hoping for a good time and a few laughs, and they deserved to get it. What they hadn’t paid for was to see me worried that I wasn’t living up to my own idea of who I was supposed to be. So I decided to stop worrying altogether. I decided to bring joy with me onstage every night, even the ones when it felt like the audience was comprised entirely of coughers and candy unwrappers and theater critics. And a funny thing happened: Once I stopped worrying so much about pleasing others, once I decided to let myself off the hook, I realized I could fly.

“What happened to you?” the same friend who’d seen the early preview asked, and I struggled to articulate the change.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “But it sort of feels like…sailing.”

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