The Toast My Hands Never Stopped Shaking Through

I gave a toast at my college roommate’s wedding two years ago, and my hands shook for the whole two minutes, badly enough that you could hear the note card rattling against the microphone. I’d rehearsed it four times that morning. I knew every line. My hands didn’t care. They’d decided, whatever I believed about the situation, that this was an emergency.

It isn’t a nervousness I know from the rest of my life. I’ve played a twelve-minute piano piece for two hundred strangers without my pulse going up, years of practice packed into something that, by the night of the recital, nearly plays itself. A toast has nothing like that to fall back on. Nobody handed me the words to drill into my fingers. Whatever came out at that microphone, I was the one who had to produce it, live, with nothing decided ahead of time.

The physiologist Walter Cannon gave the response its name in 1915: fight or flight. We now know more about how it runs, the amygdala flagging a threat, adrenaline and cortisol flooding in, heart rate up, blood sent to the big muscles, attention narrowing to a point. It evolved to get an animal ready to outrun or outfight something with teeth. A room of people holding champagne flutes has no teeth. My amygdala didn’t seem to know that.

The usual story calls this a design flaw: old wiring, modern world, a threat detector too crude to tell a predator from a room deciding whether you’re a decent public speaker. I don’t think that’s wrong, but it treats the shaking as a bug to patch, and I’m not sure that’s the best description of what was going on in my hands.

Søren Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), called one version of this feeling “the dizziness of freedom.” He was careful to keep it apart from ordinary fear, which always has an object: a dog, a deadline, a bad review. Anxiety, in his sense, has no object. It’s a mind looking down into possibility, with nothing decided yet and nothing in particular to blame. My first instinct is to say my hands were afraid of something with a name, the toast falling flat, the room noticing. That’s fear, not anxiety, and it’s probably the truer description of most of what I felt. But under the fear there was a thin layer of the other thing. Not “will this go badly” but the plain fact that I could have said anything at all into that microphone, that nothing but me stood between me and the wrong words, and that no one, me included, would know what I was going to say until I said it.

An earlier essay of mine describes the opposite state at the piano, the one where the self-conscious part of the mind steps back and the playing goes better without it. A toast is what happens when that self rushes back in instead. The mind that usually gets to run on rehearsed autopilot has nothing rehearsed to give itself, and has to watch itself choose, out loud, in front of people watching it choose. Kierkegaard’s dizziness is what’s left when you take the rehearsal away completely.

Epictetus would have looked at my hands and put the problem somewhere else. In the Enchiridion, compiled by his student Arrian in the second century, he says people are disturbed not by things but by their judgments about things. Most suffering, he thought, comes from treating what we don’t control, other people’s opinions, outcomes not yet decided, as if everything hung on it, while neglecting the one thing that really is ours, the judgment itself. On that view my hands weren’t registering freedom. They were making a mistake, treating strangers’ opinion of my toast as if it carried real weight, when the only thing in my control was whether I stood up and said it.

I’ve come to think Epictetus and Kierkegaard are describing different layers of the same shaking, and that this might be the answer rather than a leftover problem. The nameable fear, that the toast would go badly and people would notice, is the kind of judgment Epictetus means: an undecided outcome that my mind had blown up into something with far more riding on it than it had. His fix plausibly reaches that layer. The thinner dizziness underneath it, just being the one who had to choose the words, wasn’t a judgment about anything outside me that I could hold more loosely. There was nothing out there to misjudge. It was simply what choosing feels like from the inside, and I can’t see what a Stoic argument could correct in a feeling that was never a false belief in the first place.

What I tried, a year later, before a second toast at a different wedding, didn’t come from either philosopher. In 2014 the psychologist Alison Wood Brooks published experiments in which people who said “I am excited” out loud before a stressful task, instead of “I am calm,” did better at it, whether the task was public speaking, karaoke or a math test. The reasoning is almost embarrassingly simple. A racing heart and a tight chest feel nearly the same whether the brain labels them fear or anticipation, so relabeling costs nothing and sometimes helps. I said “I am excited” to myself in the bathroom at the venue. My hands shook exactly as much as they had the first time.

If Brooks is right, relabeling works on the same layer Epictetus was after, the judgment that a bad outcome would be a disaster, swapped out instead of argued away, and that is probably why the second toast felt different even though my hands didn’t. The nameable fear got handled, quickly, almost like a trick, doing in a sentence what the Stoics tried to do slowly through argument. What it didn’t touch, and what I don’t think three words in a bathroom could touch, was the other thing, the dizziness of being the one who had to pick the words, which was never a judgment about the audience and so was never going to be relabeled away. The note card shook through both toasts. I think it was two feelings sharing one pair of hands, one of them fixable and one of them just what it is to be a person who has to choose, and in the moment I still can’t always tell which one I’m feeling.