5 minutes

5 minutes. 

My leg is bouncing up and down, my fingers tapping a furious rhythm on my knee. I wipe my sweaty palms up and down on the side of my slacks for the 20th time. Okay, I think. I need to calm down. If I don’t, I won’t be able to think straight, I won’t remember anything,I’ll freeze up and go red with embarrassment and the crowd will all start laughing...alright, not helping. Calming down is all I need to do right now. It’s surprising how hard such a simple task is to complete. It’s like a circle...you can’t concentrate enough to calm down unless you’re already calm enough which means that you must have already completed the task of calming down….okay, ALSO not helping. Deep breaths. Deep breaths are good right? I swear I’ve heard medical experts comment on the superb effects of taking deep, slow, belly breaths. Or maybe it was just my weird cousin who knows all that stuff, but then turns out to be wrong. Wait...does that mean deep breaths are actually bad for you if you want to calm down? Well. We will assume, for the convenience of my frayed emotions and mentally bewildered state, that I heard it from a medical expert. 

4 minutes. 

Oh my gosh. A whole minute went by, and I”ve only managed to decide to practice deep breathing, and not actually begin the task. My leg is now doing double time, and if I was standing up, I’m pretty sure I would have made the new world record for fastest and most jittery marathon. I try to fill my lungs with air, but it comes in all shakily, and I have to exhale fast. I try again, and this time meet with more success. I place my fingers on my belly, and feel it rise as I breath in, and out. In and out. In. Out. I close my eyes, and focus on the breaths. See, it’s alright! Yeah, I’m definitely pretty close to being positive that I heard about it from a medical health expert. My eyes close, and I forget all the world but breathing. 

3 minutes. 

Hey! Look at me go! A whole minute filled with productive breathing...not like I’ve ever not breathed in any other minute, and considering the fact that when you breath oxygen goes into your bloodstream which then transports it to all the cells in the body which gives them the power to complete all their functions, which in turn allows you to do everything you do, I’m pretty sure that every breath I’ve ever taken was productive. Great. Now my thoughts are spiralling, imagining what it would feel like to not breathe...all the cells slowly blinking out like tiny lights dying. They hold on as long as possible and then...wait. That makes me realize that I’ve been holding my breath for 47 seconds just to see what it would feel like and now I feel even more nervous and my hands are doing a serious shaking dance and...

2 minutes. 

Great. Two minutes. Two minutes till I determine my fate. Determine if I will take another productive breath. So, in order to survive that, I should have a clear head. Which means I should calm down. Which means I should find a way to do that, besides deep breathing. That didn’t turn out well. I get up off my chair, and realize that my pants are sticking to my sweaty legs. Gross. I start pacing, shaking all over and humming a tune that is really annoying, which is actually not helping me. Surprising right? Help! That’s what I need, help! How am I supposed to know how to calm down? I feel like as a citizen of the United States of America, I should have been issued a life coach the second I was born. They could have taught me everything I need to know about the serious art of calming down. I feel like I have somehow been cheated of a very important part of my education, and I’m bereft without it. For instance, if I had the training, I could have come up with a list of 5 handy and completely useless things to do when feeling nervous that all doctors hand out and seem to have never tested. 

1 minute. 

This is when I run to the mirror, smoothing my hair down, then fluffing it up, then giving up and just gaping at my red, scared face. I look like I’m about to go into hysterics. Ouch. Even if I was completely confident, competent, and charming, I would have had no chance with this face. And I don’t have the aforementioned qualities. Which means I am absolutely, definitely, utterly going to fail. My whole body does the shiver dance, the hairs on my arm standing up on end. My breaths are now ragged, coming in quick short breaths. Wiping my palms on my pants would have done nothing with the amount of sweat pouring off of them. My face is getting redder and redder by the second. Alright, I need to review. So….wait. What. No. Pleaseeeeee….no. I can’t remember anything….okay, fine, yes I remember my name. Something has to be seriously wrong with you to forget your name...like amnesia. I’m pretty sure (another one of the things I’m not quite sure about) that if you forget your name because you’re so nervous….well, you must be about to enter the Colosseum to fight 20 lions with a jeering crowd of Romans that are all armed. Which, thankfully I am not. So, yes, I remember my name. 

0 minutes. 

No more time. No more time to worry and breath and do shiver dances. So I turn around and square my shoulders in an effort to give myself more confidence. It doesn’t help. My legs move of their own accord, dragging me out onto the makeshift stage my cousins and I had erected for the 23rd play in a long line of stunningly boring performances for overly supportive extended family. It was my turn.It was the annual Jones’ family play.