Flop Sweat

If you’ve ever performed in front of a crowd, you might have experienced a physiological phenomenon called flop sweat. It happens when your self-confidence suddenly feels misplaced. Your frontal cortex shrivels in humiliation and bails, leaving your cerebellum, the ancient lizard brain that only cares if you’re breathing—in charge. The cerebellum is great for survival, not so much for nuance. Faced with an audience, it panics and pulls the only levers it has (attack!! run like hell!!) Confused, the body splits the difference resulting in cold, clammy sweat, dry mouth and a thundering heart while you babble nonsense.

Last spring, my niece Jeanne called with a request. She’s the youngest of my sister’s kids, now an adult with a Big Job in a Big Corporation. She needed a TED-style presenter for a staff meeting and, for reasons still unknown, she picked me.

“Auntie Pam,” she cooed, “you write so well and you’re such a good storyteller…” She went on about what she wanted me to tell her staff; keeping a positive attitude in the face of adversity, how to be resilient. Fifteen minutes on Zoom. What could possibly go wrong in 15 minutes? I agreed.

Before retiring, I did plenty of presentations—workshops, business meetings, that sort of thing, so I went into presenter mode. I researched, I outlined, I bullet-pointed. By the end, I had five pages of notes for a 15-minute talk. (By now you’re getting the picture that I overthink everything.)

The morning of my presentation, I grabbed my notes, tossed in a few pictures of the wrecked RV at the last minute, and logged in. I didn’t realize it, but by doing that I just torpedoed myself. More about that later. My niece introduced me to dozens of faces in little squares on screen. Her voice caught just slightly as she talked about me, and my stomach did a little flip. I started my timer, began talking and clicked to the first photo of the accident.

And suddenly—I was there again, in the crash.

My frontal cortex bolted for the light pouring into my left ear. My cerebellum, horrified, yelled “Don’t leave me with her!” but it was too late. If cerebella had hands, I’m sure mine would have thrown them up in resignation. Cue flop sweat. Meanwhile, words kept spilling out of my mouth. I even pointed out one of my Crocs squashed in the wreckage. The faces in the little squares grew still as they checked their email. My timer dinged. I rushed through closing remarks, thanked everyone, and clicked “Leave Meeting.”

That’s the strange thing about trauma, grief, or PTSD. You think you’ve made peace with the experience. In reality, it just moves to the edge of consciousness where it sits patiently, waiting. A photo, a tone of voice, a tiny crack in your defenses—and bam, there it is, raw as the day it happened.

My family has weathered a lot in a short time: losing three beloved members in four years, then I came close to buying the farm the next. It’s a heavy emotional load for me and my sister’s kids. I hadn’t looked at wreck photos in ages, so that added to the catch in my niece’s voice, and suddenly I wasn’t a presenter delivering wisdom about resilience. I was Auntie Pam, reliving the accident with my niece in real time. No wonder my brain clocked out.

My mother’s first husband died in WWII and was buried in Hawaii. She didn’t visit his grave until she was nearly 80. She told me that standing there at his headstone, she wept as if it had just happened. Decades later, the grief still lived inside her. That’s how it works.

In our social media age, it’s easy to believe everyone else is fine—smiling selfies, scenery, pets, plates of food. But behind the photos, people carry whole universes of hurt and healing. If you know someone who’s been through Something Very Big, don’t assume they’re “over it,” no matter how much time has elapsed. You don’t have to do something big for them. Send a text. Share a song. Check in. Little gestures matter more than you think.

Maybe you don’t have a lot going on right now. Wonderful. But maybe you do. Maybe you’ve lived through something you thought would break you. Somehow it didn’t, so you moved forward the best you could. Just know that moving forward is different for everyone—and moving forward doesn’t erase what happened, it changes you at the molecular level. I’m coming up on two years since the RV wreck. Hard to believe, really. Most of the time it feels like it happened eons ago, and every now and then it seems like yesterday. I learned a big lesson from my flop sweat moment. If someone asks me to explain resilience, I’ll begin by focusing on how to move ahead rather than by looking back. I think I’ll do a better job of keeping my brain parts in check–though, that frontal cortex is often uncooperative!

(P.S., in case you're wondering, I'm signing "HELP!" in the title photo.)

–ONWARD!