Ankh, is it any consolation if, say, someone older than you, but still roughly in you age group tells you to be proud of having the ability and shut up?
To chime in on the "mistakes that others don't see" part: Our school had a play based on a movie. We rehearsed over and over to eventually have two performances, with different main casts, but same supporting characters. Both were captured on DVD, which means I got to both be part of it and watch it.
The first performance was awesome.
The second? Not so much. Well, to start with, some of the girls, presumably hyped up and trying to live up to the standards of the first performance, got pretty drunk (not smashed, but one could notice.)
This is presumably while one of them ended up hyperventilating behind the stage, while being dressed in a tight corset, which caused a big stir unbeknown to the spectators. Ambulance had to be called, while some of the other girls escorted that one girl out.
This lead to some awkward pauses when people forgot parts of their text, the stagehands missed their cues etc. (I think the text part can be chalked up to the secondary cast not rehearsing properly, on account of being secondary.) The one girl that was supposed to sing stopped dead-short in the middle of her song; thankfully, people started applauding to encourage her, and she finished flawlessly.
To make it short, I felt like everything that could go wrong went wrong. Since I had seen the scenes rehearsed a dozen times up to the point where I could do almost all of the speech parts, I could see all the little mistakes.
I later watched the DVD with my girlfriend. While she agreed that the second performance was not as good as the first, she noticed only the really big fuckups (like the girl that stopped singing), and completely missed the parts where people left text out, missed their cues etc; she had seen the movie from which we
shamelessly copied borrowed 90% of the dialogue, and still couldn't make out the small errors.
This really brought home how the saying "90% of the audience won't notice 90% of the mistakes" holds true. You know how it is
supposed to go; the audience doesn't. All they hear is a guitar play.
Yes, there will be times when you really fuck up so much that they notice, but most of the time, you won't.