Attempting to respond to a question or simply just making a comment on a current discussion out loud during class was something that I struggled with up until around my junior year of high school. Imagine being a normal grade school student who just came up with a brilliant response to a math problem that you were so confident in. When the teacher calls on you to say the answer, you of course do so in an assuring manner. That is up until the room goes silent for a brief second and, suddenly, you feel as though you may have actually been wrong. Moments like this usually follow up with laughter and embarrassment at you which of course are not the greatest feelings. I want to say I was kind of traumatized from those type of experiences since kids would even say some offensive words or comments during those times which hindered my ability of speaking my mind for some time.
I understand now that I shouldn’t necessarily care how people view me but back then, the feeling of being judged by others made me overthink almost everything I said or did. Participation in class was a rare sighting to witness for me. I’d end up waiting out until the other students left to speak with my teacher face to face of any concerns I had. There was definitely a purpose for me to do this since my sentence structure is typically all over the place, so having that time to discuss with them what I was trying to say made it much easier. Otherwise, I would just be making myself seem like a fool in front of everyone else while thinking about each every word that came out of my mouth. At the end of my sophomore year of remote learning, I took the time to acknowledge that the idea of being around several people in a classroom was actually not so bad at all in the first place. It gave me a little bit more confidence to put myself out there socially as my junior year began.
