This is the second of three essays by Melina Gerosa Bellows on reinventing herself after 50. In Part 1, I Wasn’t Ready to Be the Woman Who Only Gets Asked About Her Dog, a friend asked the question she’d been dodging: What are you going to do to stay relevant?

A keynote in Mallorca I was sure I’d blown. The reviews said otherwise. My body never got the memo.

The trouble started the night before my keynote, when a loud BOOM! shook me in my hotel bed. I sat up. Was this a dream?

BOOM.

There it was again, rattling my window. I bolted from the covers and yanked open the blackout curtains. Blue and gold fireworks were exploding practically at eye level. A huge crowd from a convention at a neighboring hotel was partying its ass off on the beach below.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to die, I got super peeved with the DJ.

It was midnight. My presentation was at 8 o’clock the following morning. I ate half an Ambien and watched the clock. At 2 a.m., I chewed the other half. By then, the beach was deserted and quiet. I was wide awake.

God, starting over was hard. Figuring out a new way to be in the workplace as a 50-plus, single female was daunting in any industry, especially an ageist one like media. My book contract with Penguin Random House was ending, and I had to invent a way to stay relevant and get my two kids through college. My friend Annie, a National Geographic photographer, was raking it in as a speaker. She suggested I do the same.

This was my hell yes.

Ready to Go. Or So I Thought.

Public speaking both thrilled and terrified me, although I was forced to do it throughout my career. I’d even walked onstage in front of 30,000 students and educators in a gown and hat fashioned completely out of duct tape. I always overprepared, which gave me the confidence to wing it.

My agent got me a plum first gig. I was flown business class to Mallorca, Spain, to address 300 travel tech professionals whose company was in reinvention mode and about to go public. My thesis was that fun was good for business.

Which is how I wound up staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. in a fancy beach resort hating beautiful Mallorca. By the time I was blow-drying at 6:30 a.m., I felt like I hadn’t slept a wink.

I downed three cups of coffee and headed into the auditorium. Everything was very high-tech, with videos whipping around the walls, loud music, and freezing air conditioning. I was miked up like Madonna and ready to go.

This was it. I had flown all the way to Spain to deliver this hour-long speech. I was excited to get on with my second act.

The MC introduced me and handed me the clicker. I bounded onstage and thanked everyone for bringing me to this stunning setting. The lights blinded me beyond the front row, where the CEO and his team were sitting.

One of them was yawning, and I wasn’t even on my second slide.

As I launched into my spiel, postnasal drip lodged a frog in my throat, giving me that froggy double voice. I swallowed hard and kept going.

I suddenly hated the presentation I’d worked so hard on. The slides, full of children and animals, looked irrelevant to this sophisticated, international audience. I could hear my own voice in my head, and my train of thought left the station.

My hands were shaking, and then my legs. My heart was beating in my ears.

I started reading the slides (BOR-ING) instead of vamping and ad-libbing, which is how I prefer to present. The MC walked back onto the stage with a paper cup of water. Her expression looked pained. To me, it confirmed what I already knew.

This sucked. 

Somehow, I got through the rest of the slides, the statistics, the jokes. Then the Q&A.

Finally, I dropped back into my seat in the audience.

No one leaned over to say, “Good job.”

What Was I Trying to Prove?

I had always been nervous and shaky during presentations before, but I’d managed to pull it off. I’d addressed boards, pitched new businesses, made the case for things I believed in.

This felt like a failure. And it was personal, because I had thought speaking was going to be the next thing for me. I wanted to flee from the freezing white box and hide out in my room. Instead, I took my notebook out of my bag and started writing to myself.

“Maybe they didn’t know.”

“It’s over. You did the best you could.”

“You never have to do this again.”

I was a newcomer to positive self-talk. My coach Suzanne Eder asked me to put my hand on my heart and practice the feeling of delight. I did as she said. What I mostly felt was frustration.

“Watch the self-judgment,” she said. “Reach for the most loving thought you can.”

My homework was to notice delight. Well, bombing onstage wasn’t delightful, and it was hard not to be self-judgmental.

A month after Mallorca, my booking agent got the audience survey back. The client rated five categories, each on a scale of one to five stars. In all five, I got five out of five stars.

What?

My agent was thrilled that I had come across as “authentic” and “knowledgeable” and “engaged in their process.” The five-star ratings felt like an apology way after the fact. I was relieved, but they didn’t undo what had happened on that stage. I knew what I knew.

Or did I?

The audience was telling me one thing. My body was telling me another. Public speaking used to keep me up at night when I was in the corporate world. Why was I willingly signing myself up for the hardest part of a job that was now in my rearview mirror?

I was disappointed. I had wanted to knock it out of the park, but I had also wanted to feel like myself up there. Apparently, I had knocked it out of the park. I just hadn’t enjoyed it. If it was just for my ego, the price was simply too high.

And yet the speech did lead somewhere. Someone in the audience suggested me to the clinical associate professor of hospitality and tourism at the NYU School of Professional Studies. She thought the points I was making about seeking joy at work were particularly relevant for college students at the beginning of their careers.

That March, I taught a master class at NYU. I was later invited to deliver it to graduate students at Johns Hopkins. I loved engaging with the students, and I did want to share what I had learned.

But I was nervous before, during, and after, wondering if I was going to have another panic attack. I even tried a beta blocker, but it dulled me for days.

Speaking seemed like the perfect way to keep my hands on all the things I was afraid of losing: money, relevance, accomplishment, even applause. It maximized everything I already knew how to do. That was the problem. On paper, it was working. By every external measure, this was a success. But I felt flat, not fresh and new.

Maybe I wasn’t reinventing myself. Maybe I had just found a new place to perform the old version of me.

Read the series: Part 1, I Wasn’t Ready to Be the Woman Who Only Gets Asked About Her Dog 

Part 3 coming soon: I Couldn’t Think My Way to What’s Next. So I Floated.