Faith and Running: Nerves

Bear with me. This post is going to bring some quite painful sharing. It'll be worth it, my pain will most likely be to your amusement.

I am not always the most confident of people. I think I've well established this fact. When it comes to talking to people, the more I feel a need to get it right, the more certain it is I will freeze up and become a nervous mess. Give me a bit of time and patience and I'll probably be the polar opposite - embarrassing myself from being a bit too comfortable and doing weird things like hiding under edit suites or curling up on the floor or writing poems about codecs. (Not that I've done any of those things ever...ahem)

Back to my rubbish over-thinking-every-moment self. Imagine my shaking (sadly literally, more on that later), trembling self when someone I'm a huge fan of was a client at work for a while. I'm talking a huge star who's worked on many shows that I'm a little bit in love with. Imagine, then read the painful reality.

So let me put off telling you for a moment, in order to pre-emptively and fairly pointlessly try and redeem myself. There maybe could have been ways I could have avoided putting myself across so catastrophically. I have, believe it or not, been known to be able to communicate clearly and happily with people I want to in the past. A spare moment to have even a brief conversation that wasn't about lunch or drink orders, or if I hadn't known this person would be there in advance, for example, would have kept Overly-Anxious-Naomi at bay. However, since there was a door sign with their name on for days before their arrival (which I may have even put up), and every time I went in the room everyone was engrossed in their work, I over-thought things before I even got to the door, and then when I did get the other side of it I found it very difficult to judge the room and just sort of floundered.

The wording of which has pushed me straight into embarrassing 'Naomi looks like an idiot in front of famous people' moment number 1.

She walks through the door, and, despite the million panicky, frantic yet completely useless thoughts running through her head, she manages to hand out the drinks with a relative calmness. (Comparative to a duck appearing calm whilst paddling madly under the surface, albeit the duck's still shaking a little). She spots some used mugs on the desk, so she dutifully collects them up. One is empty and one about a quarter full. 
'That's a relief' she thinks. 'Carrying full mugs in these circumstances could only lead to bad things.'
The suite's habitants get back to work. Excellent. She's almost appeared normal. Time to get out fast.
Unfortunately, as a clumsy person, this is one the worst decisions she had ever made. She may have pondered this upon her exit had she not walked fairly violently into the door frame at that particular moment. Violently enough to cause the quarter-full mug to become slightly less than a quarter full. Quite spectacularly. 

When it comes to other things, like a piece of editing or an exam, I can use that nervous energy and really make the best of it, but when it comes to this sort of situation I sort of fall apart a bit, and walk into door frames, apparently.

I should clarify for anyone who knows/works out who it is I met, the person in question was extremely lovely and remarkably patient with me. They clearly made the effort to learn my name because they used it once and I certainly hadn't the wits about me to introduce myself.

And here's the thing that really annoys me about the way I was. As much as I admire their work, they are still just a person, a human being who more than likely just wants to be treated as such.
There is a small comfort to be found in that I have floundered in front of many people, not just ones involved in telly, but it really is the tiniest of comforts. Yes, ok, I'm putting off 'Naomi looks like an idiot in front of famous people' moment number 2.

She walks into the edit suite, coffee on tray and tray on hand. Challenge 1. Don't walk into door frame. Challenge complete. Challenge 2. Hand out drinks. For a person who over-thinks every second of their life, this is somewhat trickier. Option 1: Hand drink over to the client, this is slightly awkward as only one person can get the handle, leaving the other with the scalding hot mug. Option 2: Put drink on table, a safer option but somehow always feels a bit abrupt and impolite. 

Sadly, she went for both options. Not quite at the same time, but nonetheless very quickly, one after the other, in the process accidentally taunting the client as to whether they'd get their coffee or not. Fantastic.

In my defence, I'd like to point out that I'm normally much better at my job. Honest.

Believe it or not, there are many points about my faith I could pull from this, but, with hindsight, I think this is the most significant one - sometimes it's better that we don't know what's coming. I am convinced that had I simply walked unknowingly into the room with my usual smile and 'good morning!', the tone would have been set and my shell well and truly smashed before it could make so much as an appearance. Granted, I may have been somewhat shocked but I would have just had to deal with it.
After all, I had, in some ways been unknowingly preparing for this. I spend all day serving people who's work in the industry I greatly admire, and at first it was daunting and scary but it was what I had to do day-in, day-out so I got used to it and learned that the best way to handle myself was to simply realise that these people are real, hard working human beings and try to give them the best service possible.

In my desperation to make it in the world of editing I always really want to know what's coming next and if that big chance is ever going to happen, but that's for God to know and me to find out. That's not to say He doesn't always tell people where they're going to end up (or that I'm going to stop really wanting to know) but He knows when it's good for us to know and when it's best for us to just walk through that door and find out, perhaps be a little shell-shocked, let Him dust us off and carry on, using what we've already learned, the tone already set.

I'm already seeing great signs of hope in the television industry and that God has great plans for it. I look back at the past few months and can see that God is definitely preparing me for something or other. I really hope I'm the two are linked, but for now I'm going to do my very best to keep working away at my career, learning what I can about the job I want to do, without knowing for sure where it's going to lead me. It's the only way to avoid embarrassing coffee moments, metaphorical or otherwise.

I'm just going to hide under my duvet and pretend the world doesn't exist for a while now.