Stage... Anxiety

In Beginning Theatre, we're doing our first memorized performances (though we're still allowed- encouraged, in fact- to bring our scripts onstage with us as "security blankets" this time around). And I'm a little anxious. I've never really had stage fright; I've been a dancer since I was about five, and I've performed with a professional ballet company at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC, for y'all Nashville savvies). You get over stage fright when you do that. But it still takes a big, heaving push to get me in front of people. So what do I do? I take Theatre.

It's helped. It really has. I still have to take a breath before I go on, and at first I'm a little tense, but I don't feel like I'm going to throw up like some of my classmates have said they do. I just get anxious.

It's like I need encouragement or something. I dunno. I never think I'm doing something right, regardless of whether I am, in reality, doing it correctly or not. It's a thing I have. Like counting stuff. (I count stuff: letters in words, steps on a staircase, etc.) It's me. It's a quirk of mine, I suppose.

Or a mental disorder.

Whichever, really.