that wasn't so bad after all...

I've been seriously freaking out about my talk since Saturday, when I realised that analysing my data in a consistent way, rather than by subjective squinting made it look a lot worse than I'd thought. I ended up staying in the lab until 1am, trying to find a display that looked more like what I thought I'd seen. I missed my housemate's birthday party, too, which I feel really bad about, especially since another housemate already had a go at me about it. If I really had to analyse the data then I wouldn't feel so bad, but I was trying to get it done because I'd signed up for a ski trip on Sunday... Although it would have been awkward to pull out of that, too, given that I'd be abandoning another friend.
I did take my notebook with me on the ski trip, but obviously I didn't even open it and when I got home I was so tired and cold I just wanted to go to sleep under a big pile of blankets (although of course, I ended up staying up under well after midnight reading blogs).
Yesterday, I managed to find an analysis that actually agreed with my subjective interpretation and drew the graphs just in time for my advisor to take the slides for his talk at 5pm. I thought I was done then, but I'd forgotten that I hadn't actually drawn any of the other figures, which took me until almost 1am again. At this stage I still had no idea what I was going to say about my slides, despite having assured my advisor that I had the flow of my talk all planned out (I thought I did at the time; it was only later that I realised my plan only concerned the order of the slides, rather than any kind of logical transition from one slide to the next). I spent this morning hurriedly looking up some of the sweeping generalisations I'd used to justify my project, hoping nobody would ask me to actually back up those claims (I didn't make them up, I just didn't do much more than read the title of the papers and check the key figure to make sure they weren't exaggerating too much...); I ended up making them so non-specific as not to require detailed justification. As the first person gave her talk I was still trying to figure out what the slide summarising someone else's experiments actually meant.
I hadn't actually practised going through my presentation, which meant that it was only when I started talking that I realised the slides I'd copied from my advisor were full of animations, plus apparently the microphone wasn't working for the first quarter of the talk and I think I noticed my time was up when I still had my most detailed figures left to show, so I had to rush through all of those slides. I felt like I'd stumbled a lot and kept having to go back to slides because I'd forgotten to say something important. I could feel my face turning red, too and I kept fiddling with my ID with the hand that wasn't holding the laser pointer. So, where's the "not so bad after all part"? Well, I made it without completely messing up and I didn't get any impossible questions! Plus, it's over. Also, I actually have somewhat less of a problem with public speaking than I do with conversations one-on-one. When I had to give my honours talks it was the practices with just my advisor that made me cry and he was then shocked at my lack of freaking out on the actual day.
After the talk today, my advisor said something about how it was obviously easy for me and I'd have fun presenting at conferences. Ordinarily, I'd have no trouble dismissing people's comments to the effect of "good talk" as just being nice, but this was specific enough to make me wonder how much of an actual disconnect there is between other people's views of me and my own... (Some of this inadequacy might just be shtick? Surely not!)
I have to give the same talk on Friday now, to an audience that will probably be more informed on the details and will therefore ask harder questions. Unfortunately, the fact that it went okay today doesn't really help me feel any less nervous about Friday, although it does make me less motivated to do all the reading I should have done before today.