Step one. After weeks of anticipation, you show up to your first ballet class. You danced around in your brand new ballet slippers across the kitchen floor all day, and now you’re finally here. Holding fast to your mother’s hand, you walk inside, take it all in. There are so many other kids. They’re all young, 5 or 6 at best, just like you, but suddenly you feel yourself shutting down.
Recommended for you
You spend the whole class standing by the door, tears in your eyes, refusing to let go of your mother’s hand as she gently coaxes you to join your peers. But you won’t. That much is certain. This is life or death, and you would rather die than go socialize. And at the end, when the teacher starts handing out lollipops, she takes pity on you and invites you over with a wave of her hand to come take one too. All you can think about is how badly you want that blue raspberry Dum Dum pop, but it’s still not enough. Now you’re fully in tears, and she has to come over and hand it to your mother, who at last ends the misery by taking you home.
You never go back to that class.
Step two. You’re older now. You have accomplishments. You’re proud of talents that have surfaced over the years. You have successes and failures. By the age of 11, you’ve decided you have the whole world figured out.
You want to be a writer now. The only person who’s read your work— your mother—says it’s great and you have so much talent, and maybe she’s biased, but she’s also never steered you wrong yet. Then one day in class you have to write Thanksgiving poems, which is right up your alley. That’s when you get your first real “review” of your writing outside of your family, and your teacher thinks it’s great. Really great. In fact, she wants you to read it to the class, she’s so impressed.
But that isn’t cool. Something inside of you is so proud and wants to share it with the world (“the world” being a class of 10 or so other sixth graders), but public speaking, even with a small audience, is a major no-go. So your teacher begs, she reassures you it’s an excellent poem, and even a classmate or two asks you to read it. The girl who’s mean to you, your worst enemy, wants to hear it, and you want to prove to her that you can, except that you can’t. You can’t read something you wrote in front of all those people. It’s not an option. You can’t.
Step three. You’re 16 years old, and you’re about to graduate high school. Now you’re at a school where everyone seems to have a voice and isn’t afraid to use it… Well, everyone except you. But it’s inspiring to listen to them all speak their minds and hope someday you can too. You’re finally taking an elective class that seems to be made for you: creative writing, and it’s the best year of your life. Everything is perfect until one day your teacher announces that next you’ll be writing spoken word poetry.
Spoken word poetry.
Writing, good. Poetry, good. Speaking? No, thanks. Horrifying. It’s a worst-nightmare-come-to-life type of situation. But you’re watching some YouTube videos in class of people performing their poems, and your happy little writer brain is inspired, so you write your whole poem that very same day, even though you have two weeks to work on it.
When the day comes for everyone to read their poems, you watch everyone volunteer. You sit in the very back corner, and when everyone has finished and your teacher meets your eyes, you look away. When she asks if you want to read yours now (as if it’s a choice), you say, “Do I have to?”
And so it is with shaky legs and wide-eyed horror that you stand at the front of the class, living out the nightmare of your sixth-grade self. You read your poem, and something magical occurs in the classroom that day.
It doesn’t kill you.
This is the story of growing up shy. It’s the story of sitting at your desk in first grade and bouncing your legs like mad because you don’t want to raise your hand and ask to use the bathroom. It’s the story of sitting at lunch and crying, drinking your iced tea, because everyone else is making new friends, but all you want is to be alone. It’s a story of knowing an answer but not raising your hand, of your voice cracking when you have to talk to a teacher, of the feeling of your world caving in when you’re thrust into a situation where you have to interact with people you don’t know.
You won’t overcome it all at once, but hopefully someday you’ll hit step four. Your heart will beat a little faster and your palms will get sweaty, but you’ll be able to raise your hand in class when you have something to say. And hopefully, someday you’ll remember where you started, clutching your mother’s hand in the corner, and that small victory will make you proud.
