They sure as hell didn't have to ask twice
This week I was a guest on Slate's One Year podcast, talking about aliens and SETI and the Wow! Signal. The segment on ET messages starts about 40 minutes in, but the whole episode is great, please have a listen.
I love podcasting, is a shameful thought I often have. I love talking into a microphone and hearing it come through my headphones, knowing it's being committed to tape to be sent out to people, strangers, who will listen. I feel shame about that, in a way I don't feel about writing and wanting my work to be read, in a way I don't think I'd feel if I loved singing. But I did feel a bit of that shame about acting, back when I did that and it was the biggest thing that I loved (i.e. college). There, at least, it was couched in theatre, in the communal artistic production. But I loved being on stage, being lit, being loud, being heard.
(I did take perverse pleasure in the knowledge that when I was in the ensemble of musicals, my friend who ran the sound board turned my mic all the way down. Not because I couldn't find my notes—I usually could—but because even in the big mainstage auditorium, my voice always reached the back.)
In high school I competed in forensic speaking. I did debate, sure—we lost when the other team just fucking made up some statistics, and yes I'm still bitter—but my real event was impromptu speaking. You'd get some topic, and two minutes to prepare, and then... you'd talk. Crafting an argument out of thin air, on the go. Making sure this bigger thing cohered as you added each new piece, discovering what you would say just as you said it, wrapping up to a close right as the clock ran out. An extremely nerdy cousin of freestyling, I guess.
I chase that high in writing, now, which is why I can't draft freehand—typing, my hands move at the speed of thought, and it's a conduit from my brain to the screen, words unfurling before I can even think them. But I'm still missing the stage. It's the attention, sort of, but also the pressure. The pressure on me and the pressure in the air—the attention not about looking at me but a collective focus on something unfolding in real time.
(It is also partly the attention of looking—a few years ago my cousin digitized some old family videos, Passovers when I was three or four years old. And there I am, in my party dress, spying the camera and getting in front of it, dancing or singing, performing. Whatever shame I feel about loving being on a podcast, I felt it a millionfold when I saw that. A therapist or a parenting expert would ask, Who told you that there was something wrong about how you are? And that would be a good question.)
Part of what I loved about acting, too, was responding. People make fun of Meisner technique, the exercise where two actors say nonsense back and forth to each other—"Blue glasses." "Blue glasses." "Blue glasses."—until something happens. But I loved it, the empty phrases becoming infused with meaning, the communication and response and creation. Was it acting, though, or just... being? Just connecting with a classmate about who even knows what, about whatever you were feeling that day. Well it was really about connecting to whatever they were feeling that day, sensing it and responding, seeing what it made you feel right then.
I guess impromptu, or being on a podcast, or writing, is the same sort of in-the-moment response, but to a prompt, or a host's questions, or whatever's in my head or the sentence before.
The problem I ran into in acting, though, was that you can't just respond. You can't be an empty vessel. You have to make choices, too. For a while I thought that was lying. Then I realized it was... making something, anything, interesting.
But anyway, I realized in college that if I wasn't among the best in that small pond, I'd be absolutely screwed if I tried to keep going professionally. I also knew I wasn't pretty enough or thin at all, and I didn't want the precarity of living audition-to-audition, of my career and creative endeavors at the mercy of other people's decisions, other people who would more times than not decree rejection. (And then 15 years later I would become a freelance writer, sure, but that's another story and another sort of thing.)
So I'm left with... podcasts. Not all of the high of being onstage, but with the added pleasure of being asked to speak from a place of expertise. Did you know that when you spend a decade, on and off, researching a topic, it's very easy and enjoyable to talk about it? Especially if you already love talking?? And what a joy to discover that the things you have to say are useful, and not just for you, not just you bloviating but you informing and unfolding and inviting, welcoming other people into this weird little world you've been living in.
And how much even better when that weird little world is the world they live in, too, but a corner they weren't aware of, too dim or too dusty or actually a bit of the dark of the sky. But you can tell them about what we know, and the people who've been trying to learn, and how we fill in all those gaps with imagination.
So maybe it's not shameful vanity, after all. I will work on believing that.
Thank you for reading! Please pardon any typos or sentences that fade out half-way, they're what let me send this out free and weekly. If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is tinyletter.com/jaimealyse. You can also follow me on twitter here, and when my book is done and ready to be preordered this is where I will tell you about that.