I was sitting in the break room at the winery, having just finished my lunch. It was a chilly, sunny day, and the break room has a really nice window that looks out on the terrace, the waterfall feature on the grounds, and beyond that over the valley.
I was debating how to best pull off the rest of the week, crank out a new bread recipe for my chef’s latest special, and what kind of desserts I should do for the seasonal menu change. I was grateful for the distraction. The toxicity of social media around the Israel-Hamas War was still trickling through despite me pulling back. When that many lives and that much culture is on the line and the generational trauma of two entire peoples is simultaneously triggered, there’s too much at stake for it to be managed through TikTok videos, memes, and idiotic flame wars- but here we are.
It made my heart hurt, and my mental health required me backing off, so I’d resolved to do what I’d always done when feeling pained and powerless- feed people, and put good things into the world that weren’t there before.
Then my phone rang. It was my wife, nearly in tears. Life was about to provide an object lesson in Pain, Powerlessness, what we do in the face of it, and the things that mean more than posting “the right things” on social media.
a person who is an adept conversationalist at table
– Dictionary.com
Whenever I get asked why I got into music and writing young, my pat answer has always been “because pens and clarinets don’t stammer.”
Most of the people I call friends today who didn’t know me as a kid find it hard to believe I had a speech impediment. It’s taken me quite a long time to get some control over the how and why my tongue would tie itself up, and I still stammer when I get excited or upset.
“Stammer” isn’t quite accurate, though. I think it’s actually called a hesitancy, but everyone knows what a Stammer or Stutter sounds like. Hesitancy in speech is when your brain gives orders to say words faster than you physically can manage them, so you buffer with a lot of “Uhs” and “Ums.”
Why yes, this does like both a symptom and cause of Anxiety- as does my tendency to hate recordings of myself speaking where I’m not reading off a script. Coping mechanisms for a hesitancy include the tendency to mentally “rehearse” statements and deliberately speaking slowly with pauses between sentences, both of which increase the likelihood of being spoken over or interrupted.
Neither is great for ones self-confidence, especially in a Jewish household in New Jersey where conversation is more like a demolition derby than an exchange of information.
Here I am though, describing myself as an amateur storyteller, a deipnosophist and a raconteur– all of which are very fancy words for “chatty bitch.” I’m an introvert who frequently “runs out of people minutes” but who extols the Life-Changing Magic of Talking to Strangers.
Clearly there was a grand struggle, a great effort made to conquer my disability and emerge from my Bullied Child Cocoon as a Magnificently Eccentric Social Butterfly.
Nope. Nothing nearly so interesting as that. I just became really really good at telling stories. I don’t stammer when I’m reciting from a script- so I learned to treat telling stories as recitations.
“Confidence is what we call the equanimity we see in others.” The ability to look social anxiety and fear in the eye and say “Whatever, I’m not going to let you affect me.” Some liquid courage may or may not be involved in shaking off social inhibition, but when it comes to Talking To Strangers or being a raconteur, I don’t really have “tricks” or “hacks” for being a good conversationalist. At least, I don’t have any that aren’t covered in greater detail by others.
There was no “a-ha” moment of conquest over my anxiety and stammer. The only “trick” I can point to was literally just building that confidenceequanimity for speaking to strangers… and that developed over time.
It’s psychological, and it won’t be shaken off overnight- or ever completely really- but the first step for me was finding opportunities to be brave and practice pushing the anxiety aside for a few minutes, an hour, the length of an evening.
I won’t lie to you, it’ll feel really weird. As a relatively tall, bearded, hairy dude, I was terrified of coming off as a creep. That’s where deciding to let equanimity rule will come in clutch, and the best feeling in the world will really just come from finding kind people.
The best way to find kind people? Start off with something kind. Even if it doesn’t turn into a stirring conversation, you will have made someone feel good. It can- and probably should– be something casual and surface-level. “Dude, love the suit.” “That’s a super cute outfit!” To this day, I sometimes worry that that’ll sound creepy, but truth be told? Most folks are just happy to be noticed kindly.
After that, for me, came something harder. The fact is people are really good at picking up on sham or fakeness. Any place you have to act fake to “fit in” isn’t somewhere you belong OR will enjoy being. Being told to “be yourself” is trite bullshit and too easy- you have to learn to be okay with being yourself. To quote Dr. Brene Brown, “We belong anywhere we show up as our authentic selves. Everywhere, and nowhere at all.”
That is a tall order… and having friends, loved ones, and the company of kind people make it easier. My friends don’t care if I stutter when I’m excited- they know I have something worthwhile to say. Enough kind people have responded well that, despite the anxiety, I know that I can be my chatty, eccentric, Anthony Bourdain/ Jimmy Buffett/ Bilbo Baggins mashed-together self.
That’s one thing I should mention, though- it probably is my single biggest “trick” to being a storyteller. Any storyteller, writer, artist, or creative of any type will likely tell you something similar, but here’s my version.
To have space made for you, make space for others. If you want to tell great stories, you have to listen to the stories of others.
That’s the biggest perk of talking to others- you don’t always talk. You listen, you learn, you absorb, and you connect.
At least until you run out of people minutes… then you get to hide out, recharge, and think of more brave ways to tell and hear new stories. Not a bad way to spend a night out in any case, right?
He’s the admiral of the ocean the lone eagle in the sky. He gave me my first sextant and he taught me how to fly I saw him through my telescope on a cloudless night in June as he rested between voyages at his Beach House on the Moon
– Jimmy Buffett, “Beach House on the Moon”
There is no internship for becoming a writer. All we have is the writers and creators we love, their body of work, the will to dive into it voraciously and- ideally- add our own selves to the mix. Back in high school, one of my teachers encouraged all of us to find our literary “genealogies.” We should pick our favorite writers, find their favorite writers and read all their work, then find their favorite writers, and so dive deep into the sources of our own styles.
At the time Mr. Murphy charged us with this task, the majority of my literary heroes were long dead and their heroes were Early Modern or even antiquity. The only remotely contemporary writers I enjoyed at the time were Kerouac and Langston Hughes.
As I sit in a thankfully unfamiliar dive bar patio sipping a memorial margarita, I know that one of my influences has passed on and, in a strange way, I’m glad I never got to meet him.
Good evening, friends and neighbors! Sorry this blog is a day late- I was a little tied up for the same reason there wasn’t a “Whiskey and Jellybeans” yesterday. Namely, finally celebrating Passover with my family!
After a fashion, anyway
I did take the opportunity to do a little writing and thinking on the subject though. So let’s start with a seriously impolitic question today.
The last time I wrote a “Snapshots,” I was working the morning bake shift. Since then, I’ve taken over the completely opposite end of the day- evening pastry prep.
I’ve gone from managing the oven and getting the bakery off to a good start each day to watching it slowly empty out, till I shut everything down as the last man left.
If you’re wondering what a bakery looks like as the day dies down, here we go.
The Black Hat Baker 