Falling Forward

My experience of being the most anxious man in the room; what no one said in the beginning. By Corelle Rouse

I truly experienced panic attacks for the first time at Art Basel. At the age of thirty-seven, where my body decided to finally not put up with it anymore, in a building filled with people who I believed were my people.

It was certainly where I did not expect it to happen. Truth is, you get no warning for this, really. This is the problem with social anxiety, something I only understood well into my thirties: it never gives you a warning. It sits within you, dormant, for decades, disguised as a million different things. Shyness. Attitude. Being “low-key.” Being the guy who shows up late to every party and leaves early. I had an entire character constructed around something for which I did not even have a name back then.

It’s all around. You just have nowhere to set it outside. As a child, I could feel it before entering the room - a heaviness, a sensation that I needed to compress myself into a ball – but I didn’t have the vocabulary. And I did what most of us did. I did a paper fold. When the situation became too enormous, I’d go all the way to get under it. I encouraged myself not to participate in the gathering, in this discussion, in the context of the day that would necessitate my recognition. I coined it being calm. It was not so. It was a fallback.

And this is the worst part I took too long to accept. I got better at it. Really good. If you were disciplined enough, you could avoid the moment for a lifetime. You could be the guy who only watches the thing, not be the guy who is in the thing. You could turn your survival strategy into your character and never realize this. And I did that for two decades.

It was basically therapy and I’m just gonna be upfront about that because back home there is still a lot of stigma attached to it. You can talk about everything else. You can talk about the body and the money and the ladies and the family issues. But you can’t sit down and say, out loud, that you are afraid of a certain room. The first step for me was to get over that. Sitting across the table from someone and to finally be given the words for what I had spent my life carrying out there did something to me, I can’t even say what exactly. No, it does not make the anxiety just totally go away and if someone tells you that’s the goal they are trying to sell you something. What it did do is give me a word for it, it gave me a different kind of an approach to this feeling. It taught me that a freeze - which is what my body does, it just seems to totally lock up - is not the only thing you can do.

Today, I experience it and deal with it in principle that I had to learn the hard way: there is no way out but through. I term it as ’falling forward’. I used to allow pressure to make me shrink back. Now, when I sense the pressure building up, I have conditioned myself to fall forward instead of falling back. Not gracefully. Not with any rehearsed poise. I fall forward blindly, honestly. I do not know what I am going to say, I do not have it pre-planned, I do not have a clear script of how it is going to work out, I simply respond to what the room gives me in that moment.

My favorite part of that last game is essentially what I did. I tried to control the moment before it happened. I would play out the conversation over and over again in my head. I would think through every conceivable turn. I would build a wall of preparation and a labor of work to ensure nothing caught me already. And it never worked. Because the moment never goes how you’ve scripted it. It was the anxiety in the difference from what I had prepared to how it “really” was. So I quit preparing. I quit trying to engineer who I was going to be showing up and just began showing up - empty. A readiness to respond to whatever was in front of me.

It’s funny how that’s also how I create my content. There’s no planning for me to create the virality. I can’t. I just find it out after it happens – aka, I react to the thing the day created, and the truth is in the response. It dawned on me eventually that the way I figured out how to survive a room and how I learned to make things that people identify with are the same thing. Show up. Don’t plan it. Trust that you’ll respond to the moment if you’re there to meet it.

There are also the little things, the day-to-day things which, while not required, help it just a little. Instead of performing for the benefit of others, I run. Most days, I am up early to run my miles away from public view. Yes, running is exercise (and I do need that), but even more, it is the way I collect my thoughts before I have to be anything to anyone. When it is possible, I run on my own schedule. I give myself permission to be the first one to leave when I need to go. I no longer apologize for taking a second to gather my thoughts. I would suggest that no one feels beholden to whatever version of me who pretended to be at ease when I was no such thing. That person worked harder than was required, and for what? These days, I would a thousand times prefer to be honest about where I am than use that energy feigning calm. Supporting myself does not mean I knuckle down; it means I know what I need and I try to make it happen.

But I just want to be honest, because falling-forward could easily become a cute slogan, and the truth of the matter is far more complicated than that.

And while we were back in Basel, I felt crushed with questions and being pulled from every direction. And the pace of questions and emotions that I was receiving was much more than I was even able to handle. I am a person who needs to ground themselves. I cannot just be thrust into the middle of a space with no time to adjust to it, feel it out, acclimate myself before I can be present in it. And I was not given that. I was rushed. And, my body simply... Gave. The chest. The breath. All.

So what did it look like to fall forward in that moment? The opposite of what you probably think. It certainly wasn’t grinning and bearing it. It was instead stepping aside. Finding a quiet pocket. It was straight-up ghosting people – and not even the people who had just started talking to me; I had to tune out the people who were literally still talking to me, mid-sentence. I needed to go where I could grab a moment alone, and so I did. Deep breaths. Centeredness was my only priority in that moment. Getting back on my square. Nothing else in that moment mattered – not how it looked, not who I was leaving hanging, not creating an exit for the guy who just exited.

That was a lesson learned that I have been mulling over ever since. Forward movement doesn’t always mean sticking in the moment. Hyper-progressing isn’t always rushing forward – sometimes it is having the respect for oneself to know when to extract oneself and be okay, and knowing that retreating to consider one’s self is a power move too. The old me would have pushed through and then suffered for days. The new me now knows when there is merit in the stillness.

But the biggest impact wasn’t the statistics. It was the comments. Thousands of people – my people, people who look like me, who have the same cultural and familial background as the likes of me – saying the same thing back to me. Me too. I thought I was the only one. I also don’t have a word for this. For the first time in my life, I was not feeling the anxiety just in my own chest. I was seeing it out in the wild, and the people who are carrying the same chest of anxiety were giving me back my own anxiety. That made it real. Not a thing to hide from. A thing to share.

So this is why I am going to continue to shout again and again about the silent things. Because there is a young me somewhere — in a borough, in a kitchen — sitting, chest tight before some space, thinking there’s something wrong with him because he doesn’t know the words. I know the words now. And I’ve got the way through it. I don’t break — I break open; and when I need to, I step apart, I breathe, I ground myself, and I return.

It’s not a cure. It’s a admission of the truth. But, for the first time, it’s all that I need.

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