Explaining a cryptic quotation about stage fright

On December 19, 2018, at his Manner of Speaking blog, John Zimmer posted Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 299) – Adam Duritz. Adam is a songwriter and singer who you might know about as a founding member of the band Counting Crows. That cryptic quote was:

“People ask me if I have stage fright. I say, ‘God no, I’m completely comfortable there. I have rest-of-the-day fright.”

That quote came from an article in Origin magazine on September 9, 2014. The entire paragraph is clearer:

“People ask me if I have stage fright. I say, ‘God no, I’m completely comfortable there. I have rest-of-the-day fright.’ I mean, the nice thing about being on stage is it’s not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I’m up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine. But the rest of life, I have no sense of that. It’s one of the problems I’ve always had in my life: I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.”

The Wikipedia article about Adam has a dead link to an article he wrote for Men’s Health magazine. It is from April 16, 2008 and is titled The lonely disease. Adam has a dissociative disorder (depersonalization) and had learned how to cope with it. You can read more about depersonalization in The Merck Manual here.

My favorite Counting Crows song is 1996’s A Long December – a hopeful song with a piano lead and accordion backwash.   

The silhouette of a crow came from Openclipart.