One night I was bombing on stage, if you could call a parking lot a stage. It was an awkward venue. After COVID, the brewery I was performing at had the show outside. The comics performed on the opposite side of the parking lot from where the audience was. Imagine an entire parking lot between a performer and the audience. The staging did not foster the intimacy that stand up often requires. It was a Halloween show in late October so on top of it all, the cold autumn air penetrated myself and the audience. I was a special guest on the show which meant I wasn’t getting paid a lot, if anything. That also meant I was early in the line up of comedians so the audience was physically and performative cold! As I looked at the crowd staring back at me, I thought to myself, “I am so lucky I get to be here.”
In this moment I was reminded how much I missed performing stand up comedy to a live audience. Something occurred in the midst of this. There was a shift in how I thought about my presence as a stand up comedian both at a show and in the comedy scene in general. “I am so luck I get to be here” was my own self-talk, the inner dialogue that dictated how I thought and felt about my work as a comedian. At this point I had been doing comedy for nine years, a year and a half of that was during COVID, doing Zoom shows and performing at drive-ins.
Before this set in the parking lot my inner dialogue, nearly every time I got up onto a stage was “I don’t deserve to be here.” I had put stand up comedy on a pedestal my entire life and felt that I could never measure up to the people I admired and the art form I loved so dearly. I felt that I did not belong. What I was experiencing was impostor syndrome. It is the feeling that you are a fraud in the arena that you are working in. Many people who experience this, have the feeling that they some how slipped through the cracks and just waiting for someone to expose them that they don’t belong. Before this moment I usually was able to put my negative self-talk in check by telling myself to try my best, I am good enough for the show I am on and your material is just as good as everyone else who is performing.
For nine years the thought would race through my head that I didn’t belong. Nearly a decade! This one performance helped to shift all of this. “I am so luck I get to be here” replaced “I don’t deserve to be here.” Yes! There is still an element of impostor syndrome in this thought because of luck I am a comedian. Luck implies that it isn’t skill and hard work that gets me onto the stage, it is luck. Of corse I know, for the most part, that this is not true. Nonetheless, the small tweak in my thinking moves me further away from full blown impostor syndrome. Plus, every creative does need a little bit of luck.
Nina G Comedian 