Being me
Tuesday 12th March 2013
Recently, I have been following a very interesting discussion kicked off by
Karina Westermann about identity and specifically about the on-line persona and ‘branding’ of artists, makers, crafters. Karina being a knit-wear designer, the focus was on knitters, but it would also be true of other artists.
This is one of the posts, read this and then go ahead and maybe read the rest.
Well, you read this blog, I assume and so through this blog, you kind of know me. If you know me in ‘real life’ I guess you will see other facets of my character, because so far, I have not shared all of me here. I say ‘share’ as if that’s a good thing, like slicing a pie and handing pieces round, whereas really, sharing isn’t always good. For example, I am not going to share my obsession with candlewick fabric – doh! too late.
In part, the discussion has looked at projecting ourselves, ourselves being people who knit, for example, and also blog or ‘broadcast’ themselves via websites and other media.
‘We knit, therefore we are happy. Discuss’. Or,
‘I am a knitter and I am my own brand’. Yes, I knit, in fact knitting forms part of my portfolio of paid activities. (Diversion: get me! Portfolio). I am also happy, sometimes. More often than not in fact. But I’m not a smile-freak, in fact I can veer to the acidic side of the humour spectrum, even when I’m not actively annoyed. I do filter my blog, as I have told you before, but this is because even I don’t want to write about toothache, the damp in the back hall or the urgent need to paint the fence. Let alone inflict it on you. That is what diaries – or maybe just a ‘to do’ list – are for.
I can’t be a brand though, partly because I have too many other, widely divergent ‘jobs’. I also can’t be a brand because I don’t really know what that would entail.
One little piece of information about who we really are, that I
am going to share, so assume the brace position, concerns teaching. I love teaching. I started teaching knitting when I worked for Rowan Yarns and I gradually taught more and more. Once I left the comfort zone of my own store (by my own store, I do not mean to imply that I owned or thought in a deluded sort of way that I owned John Lewis’s Cribbs Causeway branch, I just worked there two days a week), I grew slowly more and more anxious about teaching.
When I was asked to teach in Holmfirth at Rowan’s UK HQ, ‘The Mill’, which is an amazing place to teach and was a real honour, this anxiety reached new levels. Even now, just thinking about doing it makes me feel a bit odd. Try as I might, I could not hit upon a strategy to overcome it. ‘It’. I’m still not sure what it was, or is. It was just a semi-paralysing fear I suppose.
Let’s be rational, Alison, fear of what? I am not afraid of catered buffets, yarn, or even of Yorkshire. It must therefore be fear of letting people down, knowing how much store knitters set on coming to The Mill, how much they may have anticipated the weekend, created the time and space for this weekend.
I countered this by obsessive preparation and to an extent, this did soothe the panic. However, it wasn’t enough. In the end, I couldn’t keep doing it.
You would think – at least,
I did – that the more you do a thing and that thing doesn’t go horribly wrong, that this would in itself be enough to solve the problem. The trouble was, each time I taught a big gig like that, and it was fine, my mind just ferreted about in the back room of my psyche and pulled out another dusty packing case full of potential fear. What if the food doesn’t come? Oy, for God’s sake, you’re not in charge of the food. What if the yarn isn’t right? What if it snows and I am snowed into the hotel? What if my car breaks down…? All just excuses really, to worry, when what I was
really worried about was, I think, this: when they come, and they meet
me – what if that’s not good enough?
I
know the food will come, I know the yarn will be OK (I know this because I obsessively wound it all – on a winder, so it was perfect). I know I have prepped the designs, refined the teaching plan…what I don’t know is if I can see it through – and be good enough.
One thing that got me through the doors and made me face the fear was a simple and possibly trite tactic of pretending to be someone else. Much as I would have liked to be Audrey Hepburn or Doris Day, I used to pretend to be Amelia. Amelia is the ex-colleague with whom I worked for many years. Amelia and I were made redundant together, one day about two and a half years ago,
in my linen cupboard. But prior to being made redundant by an alien, who I believe has scales instead of skin, under his clothes (I have no proof; also I
am over it, just in case you were wondering), Amelia and I shared many funny, stressful, painful, often very successful but mainly really happy work experiences. As teams of two go, we were pretty good. I am a ‘starter’ but not a finisher. Amelia is a do-er, and a completer. I generate a lot of ideas, some with no home or purpose. Amelia is good at distilling the good parts out of this mess. I am anxious to the point of stopping still in my tracks – literally, at times. Amelia is brim full of confidence. And when she’s not – she hides it.
So, I would pretend to be her. Our work together had nothing to do with knitting, or craft or art – quite the reverse, it had to do with accountancy, actually. But we sometimes did have to manage large numbers of people in a technical training environment. While I would obsess and check and run about, Amelia would say: it’ll be fine! Sit down, stop moving. It was, I did.
If I taught you at The Mill, the first person you met was Amelia. After that, after the first few moments – it was me. It really
was me, I only needed Amelia to inhabit for a moment, then she’d slip away – and I’d be fine. Until the next time.
I am aware that I am way off-topic concerning the discussion on Karina’s blog that sparked this stream of consciousness in me. Her posts on it and the subsequent responses, are much more coherent, and I think form part of a key debate, about how we project ourselves via media such as blogs, websites, Twitter and so on. They are not about my identity theft, that’s just where it led me, today. But it does touch on the points raised. When I taught at The Mill – and more widely generally than I do now – I didn’t have a website or a blog. Now that I do, I feel
more confident in a way because,
if you read the blog, you do know me quite well, so you also probably know what you might get, if we meet. I am just a person who also knits, just as this blog is by a person who knits but often, it’s not about knitting. I feel less likely to let you down.
I think that it wouldn’t happen to me now because, in a weird way that perhaps doesn’t apply to everyone, having a blog has made me feel more confident. It hasn’t made me a better knitter or teacher, but it may have conveyed something of me so that the reality – of which the blog and site is a part – will be OK. Probably.
Slightly more on-topic to the debate that I referred to, several contributors describe themselves as quite or very shy. I know that if you have been taught by me, you might not believe me when I say that I too am shy, with a shyness that at times has almost closed me down, socially. The kind of shy that makes me think up lists of conversation-generating questions if I am going to have to meet a stranger or strangers or people I have not seen for a while; or that keeps me in my chair at parties when everyone else is moving about. I think the combination of shyness and having to move about, say, in a room full of people who are socialising – this is known as ‘circulating ‘ I believe – is just terrible. It’s bad, I wish I wasn’t like this. I am usually fine in my knitting comfort zone though, I mean, I’m far less shy with and around knitters, or at least I am more able to crush it down. Also, if I am knitting, I can talk more easily, more freely. It’s not that knitting gives you courage, but it does deliver comfort. Seriously, if you have had the misfortune to sit next to me at a ‘work’ dinner or even worse, a ‘do’ at the golf club (work, Mark’s not mine but still…) I am sorry. I am sorry for being so dull, and so quiet and for only bursting briefly into greedy animation when the cheese arrived.
Amelia is aware that I borrowed her confidence and poise from time to time, by the way. She is cool with that, having been blessed with both mine and hers at birth.
This is just stage fright, isn’t it? – I say ‘just’, but it isn’t a small thing. Also called performance anxiety. A violinist may be physically trembling before they go on stage, even throwing up – but as soon as they walk on and lift their instrument, everything clicks into place – the persona of the performer clicks into place – and off they go…
And your coping mechanism, ‘becoming’ someone else – that’s method acting, in a way. It is also the same thing as the violinist moving from standing in the wings and shaking, to ‘becoming’ the performer.
The anxiety is the driving force. Necessary, in a weird sort of way, to make you do the best job you could possibly do.
The awareness of the anxiety is something that will vary in degree, from person to person. Some people suppress it more than others…
Ok, I’ll get my coat now!
Crikey! Have you secretly invaded my body?! Those thoughts could be exactly mine . I teach in a primary school. Indeed I have taught my own children (not advisable!) – who inform me that when I’m teaching I become a different person!! Doh! My children dears, now you have solved secret of teaching – we are all Oscar winning performers putting on a show . Isn’t t that odd?! I too inwardly crumble at social situations yet not even my nearest friends might guess at the agonies. Lists to talk about – tick! Hiding behind a persona – tick! Keep on rockin’ and writing girl – you make me feel I’m not alone!! Ps I shall now fret about the fact you may believe me to be some sort of sociopath…….
Sylv: you – no, WE – are not alone. At worst, we have each other 🙂 And come on, there must be some more of ‘us’ out there …
Fiona: yes! it was possibly like stage fright, it did vanish (largely) when the curtain rose. And I agree that something more than pleasant anticipation but short of fear does boost performance (sport, acting, singing); it’s only that it went past that sort of ‘I can manage this on a day-to-day-basis’ level, sometimes, for me, anyway.
There is SO much I want to respond to here.
1) I am so resistant to the whole “brand” talk that is happening in the craft industry. I am a person, not a brand. I resent having to “define my brand” and “be brand-consistent” because I am just me. And like everybody else, I am forever a work-in-progress.
2) I do have a persona I hide behind if I have to talk. I used to be in academia and it was so much easier to speak in public because I had my academic credentials and my academic uniform on. Because knitting started out as a hobby that turned into a job I feel more exposed. I can still stand in front of a crowd and talk, but if I am working at an event and I have to socially engage with a lot of people, I am one big bundle of nerves inside. I feel overwhelmed by crowds anyway and it’s worse when I have to interact with the crowd! It’s not that I don’t like people – I just get easily overwhelmed!
3) We all censor ourselves online. This does not mean we are not being honest – it just means we are being sensible. I don’t write about my private life, I don’t write about personal health concerns, and I do not write about anything I would not like my mother to know. But we cannot control what other people do with our words – one of my literary blog readers had mental health issues, for instance, and began stalking me. It was not my fault and it was not my blogging’s fault. It took me a long time to accept that.
4) I do hope to meet you sometime because my own sense of humour can be fairly acidic too. We need to exchange war stories too. x
I am the same – I am a person, not a brand!
Love the phrase ‘work in progress’ to describe us as people. So true, I hope I am never ‘done’.
One of my previous jobs involved public speaking and sometimes radio or telly interviews (local, I hasten to add). Because I was speaking on subjects I was very comfortable with, usually economics and business, I was never more than ‘keyed up’, certainly not anxious or scared. It is therefore also true of me that this has mainly become an issue as for me, like for you, knitting has morphed into a job. Maybe it’s because I love it so much. I liked economics – I mean, I was keen on it – but not passionate, or consumed, as knitting and designing can do.
I had not considered this aspect until you made that point. Why wasn’t I literally terrified when addressing a lecture theatre full of people? Because, I really wasn’t. Yet walking into the Showroom at The Mill could have me jibbering?! (only if teaching, not just wandering in, as it were..)
I am very hopeful that one day we WILL meet and get to know one another in ‘real life’. X