Something I Forgot To Tell You About Speaking In Public

Photo by wuz on Unsplash

My mum and dad are shrinking. In fairness, we’ve never been the most vertically blessed family. We didn’t have high shelves in our house when I was growing up. We were always sticking pins in our clothes and shortening them by at least three inches. Our mirrors were positioned so we could see more than our foreheads. At events, we booked seats near the front, so we didn’t have to lean around other people’s heads. But where once there may have been a degree of height equilibrium, I now tower over my parents. Due to a range of ailments, and as the cartilage between their joints gets worn out and their spinal columns compress, they are stooping and hunching and generally diminishing. And as they get smaller and smaller and decrease in stature and strength, the generational role reversal is becoming more and more obvious. As I look down on them from my just about five-foot nothingness, I have to remember they still have a voice.

There’s something I forgot to tell you, and I can’t believe I did this because it has been haunting me ever since it happened, and it happened in late June, and my excuse is that it was almost the summer and I was heading off on holiday and I took a writing break and then I got a bit obsessed with the close encounters I was having in airports and in the street and in other places and what this all meant. But this thing that happened is still available to watch on YouTube only I can’t watch it because as I mentioned, I am haunted by it, not specifically by what happened but by whether I could have changed anything about it.  

On the fourth Sunday in the sixth month of the year, I was asked to do a reading at church. It was a long reading, much longer than the average attention span, and there were words in it I wanted to make sure I pronounced correctly. I believe in preparation, and I learned a valuable lesson from once totally mispronouncing a word on the radio. (Ethereal if you must know). And so, I googled, and I used that audio thing which told me Bethsaida should be beth·say·ee·duh and that Caesarea Philippi, the Roman city, is as you’d expect pronounced in the same way as the Roman emperor like see·sar·e·a, even though I have many times heard sez·a·rea. Anyhow, I digress, but before I move on to what happened, it is important to note that there is a man with 1.6 million subscribers doing very well on the aforementioned online video sharing platform saying names from history in a really slow voice and I think I might be making too much effort in life.

And so, I approached the pulpit, grateful that the reading didn’t follow a hymn, and I could therefore avoid standing awkwardly in the pulpit beside the minister, singing a duet on camera. But as the minister finished the announcements, he bent down, and as my husband said later, seemed to disappear, and he thought he had collapsed, but it turned out he was retrieving the little step they use for the children to stand on and positioning it for me. And as my husband also said later, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I hadn’t made such a clunk as I climbed on to it. I was taken by surprise at the appearance of this step and my confidence took a momentary dip, and for some reason, I felt a flush of shame, and I wondered if I should have taken control of this situation, maybe in a semi-farcical comedy sketch way, batting the step away with my foot like an unnecessary prop, and proudly raising myself on to my tiptoes, stretching my calves like I practise at Pilates specifically for those moments when I find myself behind a tall lectern. And at the end of the service, no one mentioned the content of the reading nor my solid articulation, they only wanted to talk about the step.

I was reminded about the Sunday in June when someone shared an excerpt from a book by Amy Orr-Ewing on Instagram. It was about speaking in public, and it said, “unfortunately for women, clothes also matter. I don’t know any men who speak and expect to receive comments about their clothing. I don’t know any women who speak and don’t expect to receive comments about what they wore”¹. And I realised I have built up quite an armour to protect me when I use my voice in a professional capacity like checking the set-up and refusing to balance precariously on those high stools that cause dress-creep, and wearing something a mic can easily attach to, something with a belt or a pocket, so no one manhandles my chest, and removing jewellery to eliminate tangling, and relying on black to hide the inevitable nervous sweat, and always, always, stepping into a pair of heels because I will never not need that extra height.

And I try to predict what else might derail me and I now know that audiences don’t tend to be extravagant in their responsiveness because you’re doing something most of them have never done and they don’t realise the importance of eye contact and a smile. But I hadn’t predicted the children’s step. I’d worn the heels, but they weren’t high enough. I added the pulpit moment to my collection of all the other moments where people have reduced me because of my size and linked my physique to my personality and decided I must be soft and sweet and compliant and mentioned things like my wee face and concluded I’m cognitively helpless and definitely not as intelligent as them because after all, only six-feet-tall men are intelligent.

I listened to another story from a woman this week who had spoken on a platform in a place where patriarchy had become a normalised part of its culture and a man had said, “I don’t normally like listening to women, but you were good”. And to be allowed to speak publicly as a woman, you have to meet an impossible set of additional standards and you can’t speak too quickly or too slowly, too quietly or too loudly, too earnestly or too enthusiastically. You have to watch your pitch and what you do with your arms and never ever giggle. Too often, how you look will override anything you say. You’ll not only have to be good. You’ll have to be better. Someone off-stage will be judging you. There are many battles in this world but being a vertically challenged, introverted woman who has to be better is one of the toughest.  

I had a lightbulb moment this week. My book is now at the post copyediting stage. The big Word document is winging its way to the publisher. I have to pick a cover and agree a blurb and decide who I’m going to dedicate it to and how I’m going to sell it and so I met with my PR advisor to discuss promotion and a launch event which will probably be in March (if you wouldn’t mind just holding the whole month until I can confirm the date). And I realised in the process of bringing this book to market, I was trying to make everything about it smaller. I would only get so many copies printed in case I ended up with lots of boxes in my garage. I was describing it as ‘scratching the surface’ in case anyone accused me of lacking depth. I wasn’t doing it because I was worthy of it. It was a vanity project. It wouldn’t be a proper book launch, just a gathering of those who had supported me. There was a sensibleness, a preparedness, a protective armour in all of this. But I realised if I didn’t believe in this book, no one else would. If I didn’t think it was good, no one else would. If I made it small, then it would be small.

And I had to remember that this book was my voice.

And what Amy Orr-Ewing said, “Your voice is precious, unique, embodied. Find it, steward it, and use it”.

1. Lead Like The Real You by Amy Orr-Ewing.