Reading to an audience - being a show-off

Today I took the book (my 2nd story book, it says on the front) in which I wrote when I was six and seven, and read from it to my fellow skiffers. I think it might have been an experiment. Why did I want my fellow skiffers to hear an account of a visit to Madame Tussaud's that my family made when I was six? Here and there I stopped and asked them if they remembered Mme Tussaud's when it had the Chamber of Horrors downstairs. It did generate some conversation.

What I am sorry about is that I clearly have a need to be a show-off. This is pretty annoying for everyone. A. says this: "Sometimes you're a bit showy." I don't like showy people myself. So why can I not hold this back?

When I was a teacher, I realised that I found teaching "a safe space" because my role was to hold the stage and communicate, and theirs was to communicate back within certain boundaries, and therefore I was in some way in control of the exchanges. So my problem is wanting to have control of a social situation, in which I possibly don't trust everyone, but I am also laying myself open. I am in some way being embarrassing, but I can't see how.

I must try to curtail this performing streak in myself.

But today I am also thinking that I need to get some form of therapy for my lack of emotion. I envy those who say that they feel some emotion about someone who died, as on the Marks and Spencer Twitter thread, where a woman writes that looking at the jumpers in M&S at Christmas reminds her so much of her lately deceased Dad, and it chokes her up. So many responses from people who miss their parents.