I Taught My Hands to Shake Less on Stage
Every open mic since the breakdown is a small public victory.
The microphone heard it before anyone saw it: a soft rattle of paper, like rain starting on a tin roof.
That was my hands. That has always been my hands. And for two years, that sound was the reason I did not get on a stage at all.
Let me back up to the night everything stopped. The Tin Lantern, a Thursday open mic, March, two years ago. I was twenty eight, eight lines into a poem about my brother, when my heart decided the room was on fire.
There was no fire. There was a heat lamp, a bored bartender, and maybe nineteen people, and my body responded as if all nineteen of them were holding knives.
My vision went white at the edges. The paper in my hands made that tin roof sound, louder and louder, and I heard myself say "sorry" into the microphone, once, very clearly... and then I walked off the stage, out the side door, and into the kind of night you do not come back from quickly.
People are kind about these things now. Someone messaged me the next day: no worries, happens to everyone! But it was not stage fright, or not only. Within a month the thing that happened on that stage was happening in the grocery store, in my car, at my desk at the logistics company where I scheduled freight and quietly came apart between shipments. By June I had left the job. My doctor used the word breakdown gently, the way you hand someone a heavy box, with a warning to lift from the knees.
Here is what I want to say about the two years that followed: they were mostly boring. Recovery is boring. It is sleep hygiene and morning walks and a therapist named Priya asking, "And where do you feel that in your body?" until I stopped saying "everywhere"... and started saying "my hands."
My hands. Always the hands. The rest of me learned to sit still, but my hands kept the old alarm wired in.
I did not write for the first year. Then, slowly... I did, at the kitchen table at night with one candle lit, because the overhead light felt like an interrogation and the candle felt like company.
Small poems. Safe poems. Poems that could not hurt anyone, least of all me.
It was around then I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and one line sat down next to me and would not leave: a safe poem is a poem wearing oven mitts. I looked at my notebook. Every poem in it was wearing oven mitts. I had been writing things I would never tremble over, as a way of guaranteeing I would never have to tremble.
So I wrote the poem about my brother again.
The real one this time.
And then I had a problem, because a poem like that wants a room.
Priya and I built a ladder, actual exposure therapy, rung by rung, and I want to record the rungs here because nobody ever tells you how unglamorous courage looks at the start. Rung one: read the poem out loud to my cat, who left. Rung two: read it into my phone as a voice memo, thirty one takes. Rung three: read it to Priya, who did not leave. Rung four: I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, because a page cannot see your hands shake. It did not place, but a judge left a comment, four words, "the brother poem lands," and I carried those four words around like a lighter in my pocket. Rung five: read it to three friends in Dana's living room, standing up, using a wooden spoon as a microphone because Dana insisted realism mattered.
Rung six took five months. Rung six was the Tin Lantern.
I prepared like a heist. I printed the poem on heavy cardstock, because thick paper broadcasts a tremor less than thin paper, a thing I learned from a trombonist on a forum for performance anxiety. I memorized the first three lines cold, so I could start with my eyes up and let the shaking spend itself before I had to look down. I ate a banana at six, some folk remedy of Dana's. I stood outside the side door I had once escaped through and did the slow breathing, four counts in, six counts out, while the cold made my breath visible, proof I was still producing something.
My name got called third.
Walking up, I could feel my heart doing its early warning routine, and I did the thing Priya taught me, which sounds too simple to work and works: I named it. Out loud, under my breath. "Hi. You again. We're doing this anyway." The body hates being narrated. It is like a toddler caught mid tantrum in a mirror.
I got through the first three lines from memory, eyes up. Then I looked down at my cardstock and heard it, the tin roof sound, quieter than before but there... always there, and here is the difference two years makes: I did not read the sound as fire. I read it as weather. Rain starts, rain stops. I kept going.
My voice did a strange drop on line eight, the line I never got past the first time, like a plane dipping in turbulence, and then it climbed back and the poem ended where I had built it to end, and there was that one second of silence that is the best sound a room can make, and then the applause, which honestly I barely heard over my own pulse.
I would love to tell you the victory was the applause. It was not.
The victory came at the bar afterward, when a girl of maybe nineteen, all eyeliner and a backpack she never took off, tapped my elbow and said, "I could see your paper shaking." I braced. Old habit. And then she said, "That is why I stayed for the whole thing. I shake too. I have a notebook full of stuff I have never read to anyone. If yours can shake and you can still do it, then it is not a disqualification, right?"
Not a disqualification.
I think about her phrasing constantly.
For two years I had treated the shaking as evidence I did not belong on a stage. She had watched the same hands for three minutes and concluded the opposite: the shaking was the proof of purchase. It showed the poem cost me something, and everyone in that room knew what a poem that costs something is worth, because they were all carrying their own.
Courage was never the absence of shaking. It is the decision, made in front of witnesses, that the poem matters more than the tremor.
I have read at eleven open mics since. I keep a tally in the back of my notebook like a prisoner scratching days, except I am counting my way out of a smaller life instead of through a sentence.
The hands still shake, every single time... for about the length of one stanza. I have stopped negotiating for zero. Zero was never the deal. The deal is: they shake less, and I show up more, and some nights those two lines cross and it almost looks like grace. On the nights it goes badly, and some still do, I go home, light the candle, and write anyway, because I learned the hard way that healing is not a place you arrive at. It is a practice with terrible attendance some weeks. You go back.
The girl with the backpack read for the first time last month. Fourth slot, Tin Lantern, thin paper rattling like a downpour. She got through all of it. I clapped so hard my hands hurt, and for once, for one whole minute, that was the only thing they were doing.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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