I’m terrified of being on video… here’s why

A blurry and brightly sunlit selfie of Yours Truly, with an epic double rainbow lens flare. Photo mine. 

I’m not ashamed of this—fear of public speaking is one of the top human phobias, right up there with heights and spiders! I’m in good company.

It’s funny though, it’s a learned fear that I developed only in the last few years. I’m still just fine speaking or leading a class in front of a room full of people. It’s only video that truly gets me…

This block I have is getting in my way of being a more successful freelance artist in this, the social media age—if you can film YouTube classes or promote your services on Instagram with video content, you’re well on your way. Unfortunately I still need lots of work in this area!

(And I will be working on it. I will likely write more on the process as I go, and you’ll be able to follow along to some extent, but it is also a private and sometimes painful process that will take me an unknown amount of time!)

So, I want to talk about it. I often get asked to teach online classes, and, for right now, I still can’t. And this is my explanation for that.

Caveat: What follows is a simplified version of events—of course it was more complex than this with many outside factors, but all of the below is an accurate retelling from my perspective.

I also want to point out before I say anything more that the mission and purpose of the organization in question and the wonderful artist behind it are still held in my very highest esteem. That artist had absolutely nothing to do with any of this, and likely no knowledge of it until after the fact, if at all.

This is the one and only time I’m going to write about any work drama… but at least names have been omitted for obvious reasons!

Here’s the story:

When I moved here in early 2019, and for a full year following, I taught sketching classes outdoors in our local parks, working part-time for a prominent nature-based arts organization.

Outside in the fresh air surrounded by nature, with approximately ten enthusiastic students, this was an absolute joy of a dream job for me. In the winter we would hold our classes indoors in the warm and bright gallery surrounded by beautiful paintings, so that was hardly worse.

I thrived in that position and was still able to keep up my freelance illustration work on the side.

A blue darner dragonfly rested on my finger during a class at Elk Lake, one of many cherished memories in this position! Photo mine, fall of 2019. 

In early 2020, lockdown happened, and all our classes were cancelled. After several months, it became obvious to everyone that we had to pivot and take things online. So before long I was hosting our art classes over Zoom.

For several months I hosted the classes out of my bedroom, basically, with the blurry background filter on. This was just fine, and anyway it was meant to be temporary. Hopefully we would be back outdoors soon. I had ordered an overhead swing arm that clamps to my desk so that I could use my phone as a second login and overhead camera. As the host of the Zoom call I would just switch the spotlight back and forth between the overhead camera and my front-facing laptop webcam, as needed. I had a fair bit of autonomy teaching sketching and watercolour, and they were both fun and successful beyond our expectations.

However.

With at-home wifi being what it is, on one particular fall day in 2020 the downstairs tenants in the house were uploading something to YouTube and our wifi dumped me off the call twice in one class. This, obviously, was not acceptable. I wondered if I could teach the next week’s class from the gallery classroom itself—if nobody was there, then nobody else was on the wifi either. So I pitched this idea to my supervisor, and they okayed it.

This went well.

Regrettably, this was the beginning of the end for me, but it would take months of slowly falling apart for that to happen.

Someone in management decided they’d like to market the next round of classes for Christmas, and apply for grants so they could acquire a lot of new equipment like laptops and headsets and cameras and microphones and some kind of fancy input-splitter machine. They wanted to hire a producer, film things more formally and have them edited professionally…. all with me as the face of it all. (no pressure, right?)

I was not consulted about what I would prefer… This was about the bottom line, so this new plan was happening. It was basically implied that if I wanted to keep this job, then I would have to adapt. So... well, I tried.

While the marketing department used my face and artwork on the organization’s social media page, classes filled up from across the continent, and they needed to add more sections. I needed to stop my freelance illustration work to take this on full-time. I was teaching several sections of 30+ students, all while developing curriculum and assisting students who had access to me by email, as well as filming and editing additional time-lapse demo footage at home to supplement classes when necessary. We were able to greatly expand the reach of the organization (amazing), and for what I was doing I was paid reasonably well. So those were at least some wonderful positives, but it was very high pressure.

Every week through that winter and spring we seemed to have a different staff member acting as producer on short notice, each trying to figure things out and making some mistakes as we went. Eventually we had a consistent and capable producer, but there was always a new piece of equipment that wasn’t working properly yet. We had echoes, blank screens, no audio, recordings not recording, random pieces of equipment not talking to each other… the list goes on. There was not a single week I can recall where something major didn’t go sideways. That would have stood out as a kind of miracle. It was nerve-racking, and although none of this was really my fault, I still ended up developing some pretty intense on-camera anxiety.

This went on for months, unfortunately, and my anxiety got a little bit worse, and a little bit worse, every single session. With all this chaos I couldn’t keep my focus; even with my notes I struggled to remember what I was supposed to say or what was supposed to happen next. Even though I loved the organization as a whole (still do) and truly cared for my students (you know who you are), I started to dread going to work.

(I have to consider that this WAS mid-pandemic, so ALL of our baseline anxiety was much higher than usual, just in the day-to-day, and I was no different… that definitely made things worse!)

I went from autonomously teaching small, casual, part-time outdoor classes, to teaching large high-profile classes full time, micromanaged live on camera, in a stuffy tiny room, with malfunctioning equipment.

Not exactly what I signed up for.

Micromanaged? Well, I was given a very strict list of behavioural protocol for the classes, most of which were fine. But one of these requirements was to stay on camera at all times, not to leave the room under any circumstances, for the entire two hour live class.

And I don’t know about you, but when I am very anxious, the language centre of my brain just shuts down completely. I am usually a reasonably articulate person. Communication is one of my strengths. But when I’m very anxious, it is as though words don’t exist. My brain goes into a freeze response. I start stuttering and stammering, and I can’t complete sentences or explain myself, or even ask for what I need. And what I need is a break, a re-set, a change of scenery and a chance to breathe and regulate my emotions and pull myself together. But couldn’t leave—I had to do this live on camera. If I had been teaching live in person, it would’ve been okay to step out into the hallway. I could’ve gone and had a cry in the bathroom. Everyone would have understood and nobody would have minded.

Eventually I was forced to start taking the breaks I needed. When things got awful I had to pause, leave the room, breathe deeply, sometimes go wash my face, and then I could come back. I would leave the students with some kind of activity to keep them busy.

But teaching one class during the heat dome of June 2021 the tech was malfunctioning so very badly, and even though it was evening I was overheating in the little room and my anxiety was off the charts. On top of that, there were lots of unusual loud noises coming from the bar downstairs so we had to keep the windows closed for sound reasons. My skin prickled, I could hear nothing but my heart beat and tinnitus pulsing in my ears, and I started to experience tunnel vision, too.

It was too much—I had to switch off the video feed and exit the room so I could even breathe and come to my senses. I had started crying and just couldn’t stop. The broken tech couldn’t be fixed in a timely fashion either so we couldn’t salvage the lesson, so my producer cancelled the second half of the class and told me I could go home, even tho apparently they didn’t actually have the authority to give me that permission.

(Turns out most of the students didn’t even really mind; they were all at home in their kitchens and could keep working on their projects, everyone was used to being on the receiving end of Zoom hiccups by then. They could go make a cup of tea or get on with their evening routines, whatever. They’d see us next week.)

Anyway that next day was the hottest day of the year to date, and my supervisor called me at home and yelled at me. Instead of asking “I see you are still struggling pretty badly, is there anything you need, how can we help?” I was just criticized, at full volume, to change my behaviour.

I was furious. I could not apologize for my actions, for taking care of myself and my mental health, and for standing up to that kind of treatment. I was pigeonholed, and there was no alternative but to remind her that I was still not under contract that month. So I quit on the spot and hung up. (There had been some delay in processing the contracts for that session, so I was working on good faith alone. I was under no legal obligation to stay.)

I was devastated and heartbroken to leave a secure job that I otherwise loved, simply because I couldn’t keep myself together. I felt so broken, so unsupported, and I sunk into a pretty serious depression. There were other significant things going on in my life that didn’t help the situation, but I don’t need to go into that here.

(To add insult to injury, the noncompete clause that they made me sign when I left the job meant that I couldn’t teach any of my former students for two years. I probably didn’t actually have to sign it, but I did. Oh well. Anyway it’s all beside the point now that’s expired…)

In the face of all this in 2021 and 2022 I was full of big ideas and bravely tried to create my own video classes, but while I was editing them back I could just see on my face and hear in my voice all the pain I was in, the struggles I was facing, and I had to edit out the stutters and the gasps and pauses and umms and ahhs and the self-conscious gestures, to make it appear like everything was fine on the surface. I spent hours and hours on this and in the end it was all too much and I took them down; I wasn’t proud of them or of myself at the time, and I couldn’t face looking at that footage again.

I needed to take a break from it all and get a day job, this time in art supply retail, just for a break and some steady paycheques. It was the best decision at the time. I had health benefits for the first time in my single adult life, and I was able to pursue counselling, CBT, and ultimately an ADHD diagnosis.

I’m doing so much better now, and I’m able to freelance again. But I’m still not yet able to film myself speaking without freezing up. This is the main reason I’m not quite ready to teach groups online yet. (Individual lessons, coaching, and mentorships are great, however, and I’m really enjoying those!)

On some level it feels a bit petty to write all this and feel like I’m just complaining. But I’m not writing this to complain.

I’m explaining to myself and others why filming myself still feels so difficult to me. I’m shining a light on the fear here in hopes that helps it go away.

I want others who are facing their fears to know I’m facing mine too, and they’re not alone.

If you can learn fear you can unlearn fear, so it’s something that I’m slowly working on, seeking professional help for, and acclimating myself to.

I know what I need to do to practice and break these difficult associations.

Have patience folks, I will get there, and I’ll be accountable here. I will teach online classes again at some point. I am committed to making this happen. But, as with so many other things for me, it’ll take the time it takes.

I’m not going to let that stop me in the meantime. There’s lots of other ways of getting your story out there. (Blogs being one of them!)