Stepping Outside

I finally worked up the nerve to watch the video of my ErlangDC talk. I’ve been really anxious about it. I’d agreed to be a back-up speaker for the conference, but deep inside, I hadn’t believed I’d actually have to go through with it. I’d cobbled together a talk, but hadn’t thoroughly rehearsed it. It wasn’t until the day before the conference that I got word that one last speaker had had to bail (mid-winter plague) and I was on. I crammed that evening, but I was still under-prepared on the day. My memory of the talk is of long, awkward pauses, fumbling for words, and one dead stop where I completely forgot the next point I was supposed to make. But I wanted to see how bad it was, both as a spur to do better next time and to get some concrete ideas about what to fix.

I’ve never seen myself on video before. Not that I remember, and certainly not a half-hour of just me talking. I really had no idea how I come across. First off, my voice is deeper than I thought. When I hear it in my head, it still has this adolescent, nasal weediness to it. I talked with my hands more than I realized. It may because I was monologuing, or just nervous. (Am I normally like that?)

Time goes slower outside my head. I have a lot of pauses and filler words, especially at the beginning of the talk, but it doesn’t look as morbidly awkward as it felt at the time. The dead stop that seemed like an eternity is only about 10 seconds of hemming and hawing. At the time, I was mortified. I wanted to curl up in a corner and hide when I was done with the talk, but it’s not that bad.

Most importantly, I don’t look like an impostor. I look like somebody who should be up there presenting. Maybe somebody who should have run through his notes a few more times, but I’ve seen presentations by people who clearly are only up there under duress, and I don’t come across that way. I don’t have to be there; it’s not for school or work. Even when I’m fumbling for what I want to say or how to say it, I still want to be up there talking about it. I have an understanding to impart, knowledge to convey, and I care that people get it.

So all in all, a weird experience, but fascinating and revelatory. It makes me want to do more of this kinda thing, and think that I may not suck at it. It’s also striking to think that out of all of human history this has only been possible for the last century, and only commonplace for the last couple decades or so; for someone to be able to watch themselves from the outside, to get a sense of how others see them, to gain that self-awareness. It makes me wonder how kids will grow up with a different sense of themselves now that every first-world teenager has a video camera in their pocket.