Author name: Roz

  Waiting for the cue light to signal my entrance to the stage for my final scene, I tried to summon up my first line. But there was nothing. Not a fragment, not a phrase, not a word. Total blank. I had no idea what the hell was supposed to happen in the scene let alone what on earth I was supposed to say. As my breath began to hitch in my throat, an unpleasant sensation began to snake up my legs and arms. A tingling that bordered on discomfort and a sudden wave of rising heat began to engulf me. I jiggled, I bounced, I gasped for air. This was not your usual run of the mill pre-entrance anxiety. Something altogether more unknowable; all-consuming and absolutely terrifying was occurring. Straining, I couldn’t pick out individual voices from the stage because an enormous freight train had started to fill my head with a relentless roar and the voices of the actors were distorted, sounding like they were underwater and moving further and further away. Certain that I was about to die; my heart beating outside my body, when the cue light eventually flickered green for my entrance, I had the Pavlovian response of every theatre actor and blindly staggered for the upstage door and entered the scene. My memory of it is a jumbled nightmare of garish images. I couldn’t hear anything save for the bellowing train and the pounding of my surely-close-to-expiring heart.   Catching sight of the front row of the audience in the spill from the footlights I recall their faces, a mask of horror and dismay. Because I was deafened by the death march of my career, convinced I was getting no laughs during my “hilarious” dialogue, I pushed, I floundered, I flailed.  The faces of the other actors on stage were various displays of alarm and irritation which only made me more wildly desperate. I made up lines, I spoke over other people’s lines, I fluffed lines, I shouted some, whispered others, having forgotten all my blocking, I careened wildly about the stage arms windmilling – desperately trying to claw back control, of the scene, of my breath, of my sanity. The rest of the performance is blank. Nothing. A very vague memory of the final curtain call and then a crystal-clear memory of me scrabbling to get out of costume and out the stage door. Stumbling to the car park, I remember clearing the boom gate and absolutely gunning it – setting off wildly into the night looking for a pylon to crash into. To save me from this. To save me from ever feeling like this again. And to save me from having to set foot on stage ever again. And I didn’t. Not for five whole years. After a series of urgent phone calls early the next day in which I hysterically insisted that I had to pull out of the production effective immediately, it was agreed via my agent and the theatre company that a press release would announce that I had to suddenly and regrettably leave the show after having ‘contracted a virus’ (back before Covid was even a twinkle in a pandemic’s eye). For the next month – the whole run of the play, I stayed under the covers in my bed at my parents’ house where I was staying, full of shame, self-loathing and embarrassment. Utterly certain that my career was over. Leaving the house only to go for long walks at night and weekly trips to a psychologist. The fallout from the panic attack was the onset of major anxiety that presented as Glossophobia (fear of public speaking – obvs not ideal for an actor) Phagophobia (fear of swallowing – not ideal for an eater) frequent bouts of vertigo (just not ideal full stop) and regular cold sores the size of a small Pacific nation (also not flash when your face is regularly on the telly). Having always been a people pleaser, sure that the first words I ever uttered were ‘I’m sorry’, I’ve been a recovering Catholic with a strong line in unworthiness and a fear of retribution since day dot however, this new level of dis-regulation was truly peaking, even for me. On one dark night of the soul about three years post first panic attack, I genuinely asked myself “Is this my life now?  Terrified?  Unable to eat with anyone within twenty metres?   Perpetually in a state of fight or flight and developing an unhealthy obsession with Zvorax?” From the very depths of somewhere, the tiniest whisper of an answer came back.  “No it’s bloody not.  Fight for it.  Fight for yourself.  Fight for future Roz. Fight for little Roz.  Fight for Roz.” And so I did. Over the course of this blog, I’ll share the techniques and tips that got me back on stage and frankly gave me my life back.  And these are the tools that I now share: breath work, guided visualisation, qi gong, power posing and the absolute game changer, as far as I’m concerned – EFT tapping.