"I think I was afraid of what I might say when I got onto someone's stage or in front of someone's camera"

The confession sounds less like stage fright than a worry about ownership and agency. The stage or the camera belongs to “someone,” and stepping onto it risks surrendering control over what your voice becomes in their frame. The fear is not of forgetting lines, but of the unscripted self: the impulse, the aside, the truth that slips out when lights are hot and attention is fixed. When art is mediated by others, producers, directors, interviewers, words can be edited, reframed, weaponized, or branded. That anxiety recognizes how public platforms magnify speech and how easily a performer can become a mouthpiece for stories or agendas they don’t own.

There is also the terror of authenticity. Under pressure, honest language can erupt, and honesty can be inconvenient to commerce, to career, to the fragile hierarchies of a set or stage. The actor’s instrument is the self; to speak is to expose. One misplaced sentence can calcify into a headline, a meme, a permanent digital shorthand that reduces a complex person to a single sound bite. The fear is double-edged: fear of betraying one’s inner convictions by staying silent, and fear of the consequences of voicing them. It is the push-pull between craft and conscience, between being professionally “clean” and being humanly true.

At the same time, that fear is a measure of integrity. It signals a refusal to be casual with language or complicit with someone else’s frame without awareness. It suggests a desire to choose the conditions under which one speaks, to ensure that speech is not merely content but intention. The path forward, then, is not muteness, but authorship: creating or seeking spaces where one can own the frame, set boundaries, and accept the responsibility that comes with amplification. Courage emerges not as bravado under lights, but as deliberate voice, used where it cannot be easily stolen or misused.