Forgive 'that voice'.
The other day, a frequent commenter suggested
“if you don’t want to write it - why not record it?”
I think I may have misrepresented myself. It’s not that I don’t want to write my thoughts down, it’s that I find the mechanism for doing so to be slow and torturous.
Lately I have begun to dislike being on camera. Partly due to the large amount of spots and blemishes on my face, but mainly because most of the time I feel uncomfortable in my own skin. When you’re simply writing down your thoughts, changing writing styles is easy and takes place so often in mainstream media that people barely notice. On video, however, it’s very hard to change style or present yourself differently without it seeming ‘hacky’ to your viewers. For example, I often feel much more comfortable speaking in an American accent, because it feels like it’s not really me talking. But people know that that’s not how I talk, and would call me out for being pretentious. Or a knob.
Feeling like I’m someone else in enticing, because a lot of my self-esteem issues are so wrapped up in how I feel I’m being judged by others. If I’m speaking as someone other than myself, I don’t have to worry about being judged.
One of the things that has, in the past, attracted me to acting is the fact that it’s all about being someone else. I feel like I’ve had very few moments of ‘true’ acting where I gave myself over to my character, but each of those moments had a sense of freeness that was intoxicating. It’s both exhilarating to remember and scary to think it might never happen again.
Right now I wish I could be doing this as a character. When I was writing the script for this post, I had to imagine myself speaking as a few other people, because I was paralyzed by the fear of being judged. It’s somewhat of a paradox that the truth of these words was only able to flow due to me ‘faking a personality’. It’s also a contradiction in my character that I fear being judged so much yet maintain a daily diary. We’ve talked before about how ‘not normal’ I am though, so we don’t need to go over that again.
I extremely enjoy other people’s video content, it’s just a shame that lately I don’t like to be on camera as much as I used to.
This is clearly something I need to work on. Hence, the below.