I told my therapist I had stage fright. I guess that’s what it would be called, though this fright is not limited to the stage. For me, it’s closer to a singing-in-front-of-people-anywhere-anytime-even-as-a-pixelated-rectangle-on-your-screen fright.

“I would like to not feel this anymore,” I told him, hoping for a setting he could toggle off.

I have lived a life that seemingly should inoculate against this, being a professional singer-in-front-of-people for most of my life. I have had two major record deals (and left two major record deals). I’ve performed in coffee shops and fairgrounds, bars and offices, done showcases and opening slots for famous people. I have been told I will be a famous person by many Serious Professionals Who Know What They Are Talking About.

Upon signing my second record deal, there enters a small, pale pill — beta blockers, the cheat code I discovered like a hidden level. They helped, or so I thought, until an exec from the label told me that people did not connect to me, that it was as though I was hiding both on the internet and on the stage. I was “too cool, which really means cold when you think about it.” And there I was thinking I was being vulnerable, putting my deepest secrets and naked thoughts to melodies. More front-facing videos was the proposed solution.

A few years removed from that deal, I perform less and post way (way) less, but I am still afflicted with this niche problem of just… so many songs. They stack up in me, asking their quiet, repetitive question: what else are we for, if not being heard?

So I keep doing the one thing that answers them. And before each doing there is the same long prelude: the shaking hands, throat that narrows to a keyhole, anticipatory dread announcing that what should be second nature by now is, inexplicably, not. It is a ritual with no audience.

“What if you think of it like sharing yourself with the crowd,” my therapist said, “rather than performing for them?”

I was surprised at the immediacy with which my answer leapt from my mouth: “Why would anyone want me to do that?”

He blinked.

I tried to answer my answer, which was a question after all. Who would possibly care about me sharing myself? The one whose hair falls in her face when she plays guitar? Whose voice blushes shy when meeting the spotlights under which Actual Artists come alive? Of course they want me to perform. They want me to either fake it or make it, to spread my arms like a bird. And forget in-person audiences — sharing myself on the internet? The platforms are already a floodplain. Isn’t there enough sharing of selves happening — videos, captions, songs fed into the nauseating machinery of distribution? There are AI influencers, literally not real figments of a prompt “people,” with hundreds of thousands of followers. People don’t connect to me, this seems to confirm. Share myself, okay, like the last bit of pasta I could not choke down.

“What would you say to a friend who said these things about their art and personhood?” he asked, head tilted.

I am not sure what I would actually say to them, I tell him, but I would probably be thinking that that friend is most likely right. Most likely there is no point to any of it; everything we do is a drop in the ocean that no one would miss if it evaporated.

I said this out loud and heard, as if from a different room, how final it sounded. And then another thought, softer, formed: what if every drop that made up that ocean did, in fact, evaporate? If every human person decided the tide of AI and over-saturation and SO.MUCH.MUSIC was not worth pushing against? If art and humanity instead was composed entirely of hesitations that had resolved themselves into silence?

I suppose there would be no ocean at all. Just an endless sea of slop loops, baby pineapples eating pineapples, photos of Trump as a “doctor.”

It surprised me, the feeling that followed. Gratitude, of all things. For the people who continue to risk the small, embarrassing act of meaning something. For hearts worn on sleeves, in public or private, even when they get rained on and tugged at and ripped. Whether anyone connects or not begins to feel like the wrong metric, a ruler held up to water.

I don’t know if people connect to me. I know only that we are already connected in ways that ignore our preferences. Independence the great illusion. The songs insist on this. They arrive as if from a commons, not a private room; but in no part a performance.

I guess I am writing this in the same way — some wobbly attempt at sharing myself. Because of course, it is never really the fear of singing in front of people. It is the fear of singing badly. Of being weighed in the balance and found wanting. Only one way to combat that, I suppose: joining the great ocean, one drop amongst many. The beautiful freedom of not mattering in the slightest, yet mattering distinctly and gravely, equally and at once.

If I keep at it, maybe I won’t have much use for stage fright anymore. Maybe I’ll be able to leave it behind with every other worthless thing, the scattered debris of past. Maybe next to the pineapples eating pineapples, and the stray words I have no business carrying with me anymore.