On 2^nd of July, I read two stories on Story Hour (click here for the recording). It was fun. It was wonderful. It was nerve-racking. Why? Because I have a tiny issue with public speaking.

Though I don’t always thrive when immersed in a crowd for a long time, I’m still mostly an extrovert, provided I’m allowed quiet, secluded breaks in between. I love talking to people. I even love performing in front of people. (Guess who savored having to enact the safety demo when still working as a flight attendant.)

One might think that public speaking is a breeze for me. It might have been if something significant hadn’t occurred in my childhood. It left a lasting effect and made expressing my (mostly) extrovert nature equal measures fun and stress.

Long ago, I was not only told I speak too fast; I was also criticized about it on multiple occasions in a way that was not constructive. It made me self-conscious about how I talked and added stress whenever I chose to speak up, which made me talk even faster.

So here I am, wishing, loving, needing to be out there and connect, while simultaneously not trusting myself to be able to communicate effectively. Consequently, I signed up to read on Story Hour with some unease.

On the one hand, I absolutely wanted to share my stories and even looked forward to it. On the other hand, the thought of being recorded while speaking in a situation that entails performative stress made me weak in the knees. I knew what could happen. The fast-talk engine might start, my words would slur, and no one will understand what I’m saying. Did I mention it was all to be recorded? Add to the mix that I speak English as a second language. Add to the mix that some words I only know how to spell. Normally, I’m bookishly proud of that sometimes inconvenient peculiarity, but not when I’ve signed up to read those words out loud.

Imagine my childhood ghosts surfacing from the dust of my memories. Imagine the fear rising from the dregs of one gone child’s still tender emotions. Oh, how that internal voice nagged: If you read too fast, people will think you’re less than. After all, you were seen as less than because of the way you spoke when you were a kid.

Not. Fun.

Here’s what happened. I spent a good amount of time on annotating the text for words I needed to pay extra attention to and for pauses. I practiced and practiced. I tried to remember to s-p-e-a-k–s-l-o-w-l-y. But I still chopped off parts of words, swallowed others, and fused yet others. Then I read the stories to my writing buddy. Yes, I again mumbled and mispronounced in some places. But what my friend did was tell me she liked my accent and helped me pronounce the words I didn’t know how to with compassion and patience and zero judgement.

I then practiced by my myself only once before reading to her again (so grateful for her time), and it was like a different person was reading (or at least, I felt I was a different person). I’m still trying to figure out what happened. My inkling is that my transformation in the end had less to do with that extra practice and more with the encouragement my friend provided. Professionally, she’d dealt with other people in similar situations and knew what to tell me and how to tell it to me so that I calmed down.

My takeaway from this is that one needs to be infinitely careful when commenting on the traits of another human being—especially a child, but adults are vulnerable, too. I don’t advocate dishonesty, yet there are ways to say things and then there are ways to say things.

My reading went fine. Did I make mistakes? Yes. Did they make my heart trampoline into my throat, accelerating my words to ultrasonic speed? No. It was OK. I have an understandable accent, and at least one person in the world likes it. People make mistakes. I was understood.

It was OK. I’d love to do it again.