Last Friday, I was sitting in another local high school press box where I've spent the majority of Friday nights over the last two months, and when we got on the air and I started doing the play-by-play, I realized that I was having a hard time getting out what I wanted to say. I was tripping over myself verbally and stumbling to find the right words to use so I would sound both intelligent and respectable on the air.
This isn't a new phenomenon for me and it's also quite frustrating, to be frank.
For reasons I've not been able to lock down as of yet, being able to say the right thing at the right time has always been an issue. The even bigger problem in my view is more often than not, I end up not only saying the wrong thing, but I also say WAY too much of the wrong things.
To be fair, some of it may be a simple case of my brain working faster than my mouth. For example, one of the things I do to work on my craft as a sports play-by-play broadcaster is when I'm playing one of my sports video games, I will call the game as I go for practice. Sounds silly, I know, but even we have to get our reps in somehow. When I'm playing baseball, I often will say the ball is hit to one side of the field, when in actuality, it went completely the other way.
My eyes clearly see that the ball went to right field, but in the time that information goes from there to my mouth, it somehow gets recoded and expelled that it went to LEFT field. That is more than a little frustrating because my job is to be as detail-oriented and on the ball with what I say into a microphone as possible, and knowing that can happen at pretty much any moment adds a degree of difficulty which can be hard to overcome sometimes.
The other problem I find is talking too much, spewing out 25 words or more at a time when maybe three or four will do.
To me, this is even more frustrating than being scatterbrained with my speech, because making vocal blunders is not something exclusive to me. But for some reason, when my mind gets going and I tap into the stream of consciousness which surges through my head at all times, that stream sometimes feels like it becomes a white-water churning river of everything I want to say, and I have to get it out in one breath or else it feels like a wasted opportunity.
This also rears its somewhat ugly head at times when I'm writing too, as often evidenced by this blog. I've noticed as I go back through my posts I have redundant ideas and elements, words are skipped, and rather than be concise with prose, I tend to ramble onto different tangents and thoughts.
It's the most frustrating when I try to engage in more emotional and personal conversations, as opposed to intellectual ones. You want to say the right things and give the proper input, and when you can't seem to do that, it does make you wonder why you bothered opening your mouth in the first place.
I don't know if this is purely a mental or psychosomatic issue or if there is some physical component at play. When I was a kid I had to fight through a slight stutter I'd developed and after I moved to the West Coast 25 years ago, getting rid of my very thick Boston accent took considerably more work. As I've gotten older, I've also noticed my spelling acumen has fallen off considerably and I often reverse words and phrases in sentences, which could imply a level of dyslexia, but then I don't really know for sure.
Speech and writing are the bedrock of our communicative system and one of the first milestones in our development from the time we're born is the first word we say. Being able to convey the thoughts and feelings I have to other people is very important to me, as I think it is to anyone else.
I just wish I was better at and felt more confident about how I do it, that's all.
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