Fear

The first time I remember feeling truly afraid at school was in seventh grade, when I had to memorize a poem and stand up before the class to recite it.

First, that fear kept me from choosing a poem to memorize. I had to enlist my mother’s aid on that. After several days of searching, I finally found one I thought would be easy to memorize, and Mama said it would come in handy to know it by heart when I told it to my children, someday.

She didn’t understand why memorizing poems was a good thing. When she was pregnant with me, Mama entered a poem she’d written into a radio contest and won a diamond ring. So poetry was something she loved.

I agree with her, though. Memorizing them is something offbeat for me – maybe an important line as a quote, but the whole thing? Studying, reading, and attempting to write them is way more important, I think.

In fact, I believe a lot of people hate and don’t understand poetry, precisely because of bad memories about having to memorize and recite poems.

It took two class sessions for everyone to recite the poem they chose. Naturally, I was almost the last one the teacher selected to read, so my fear seemed to last forever.

When I got up to recite, I was beet red and sweating profusely. I was scared to death. I handed her the copy to read while I recited. She took one look at it and said, “This is what you chose to recite, Rebecca?”

I was prepared and replied that it met all the guidelines, including the line count and the type of poem. ”Okay, I guess it does,” she replied.

So, I started:

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...

The class roared. I went from fear to embarrassment in a flash. I hurriedly stumbled through the poem, with the teacher having to prompt me on a couple of lines.

I looked at no one, walked back to my seat, and a boy in the back of the room popped up and wanted to know why he couldn’t have done that poem. He didn’t even know that was a poem.

Afterwards, kids I had never spoken with congratulated me on outsmarting the teacher. It took me years to realize what they meant by that.

The whole thing turned me from fear to pride. Someone even mentioned it to me years later in high school, and how great it was.

I was thirty-nine when I finally conquered my fear of public speaking. Now I can talk to anyone, anywhere, about any subject, even if I am not an expert. The worst that can happen is that I will be horribly wrong about something.

So what? Everybody is wrong sometimes.

The important things to remember are to admit it to yourself when you discover your wrong-headedness and to make the necessary changes in your thinking.

In other words: learn from your mistakes.