Reverberation

By: anonymous submission

Campaign: Anything and Everything

#literature

Lights flashed my eyes, blinding me. Cheers roared around me. People were all standing. 

I beat last year’s champion. 

My hands felt foreign as they held the shining trophy before me. 

Because years before that day, silence had been my refuge. 

Glossophobia had held my voice captive. And it wasn’t just the thought of standing in front of a crowd that brought me horror, it was the exposure. The vulnerability of being seen. Imagine walking in a room of only eight people when suddenly your chest tightens, your palms grow slick with sweat and your throat closes around words that once came easily. Nightmares haunt me. It was as if I were being punished for even daring to have a voice.

You still remember being in the doctor’s office, sterile and white, the smell of alcohol lingering in the air. You were desperately hoping for a solution, a way out of this invisible cage you’ve built around yourself. “There’s not much we can do,” the doctor had simply stated, her tone calm and almost disinterested. “Medication is an option.”

That was it, nothing more. No guidance, no therapy, no additional plans for getting the courage you’d never felt. You just sat there, waiting for something, anything to make you feel less small. But nothing comes. Just the muffled coughing of the next patient urging you to get up, and the quiet realization that no one’s going to save you from your own silence. 

You felt trapped. You wanted to speak, but your body and mind had simply refused to let you do so. Fear, it seemed, was incurable. 

But life has a wicked sense of humor. In 2017, it offered me the most unlikely antidote, a coworker I could barely stand. His name was Josh, who was confident, loud and infuriatingly talented. Rumor was that, he didn't like me either. However, for reasons I could only assume were cosmic irony, our dean, apparently found this amusing enough to put us on a project together.

Now, if you’ve ever tried to fit two cats into the same cardboard box, you can picture us in that first meeting. Silence, stiff shoulders and glares like shooting daggers. But somehow, as days stretched on into weeks, the tension gradually melted away. Awkward exchanges turned to conversations and sarcasm gave into laughters. And who would’ve thought? We became the best of friends. 

I soon learned that he was a part of something called Toastmasters. I didn’t even know what that was. “You’d be great at it,” he said “You have a lot of great personal stories. It would be awesome to share them.”

I smiled bitterly and told him “Josh, look, I don’t mind sharing these stories. The problem is I’m afraid of speaking in front of people.” 

“That's perfect!” he said  “That’s exactly why you should join.” And somehow, perhaps out of curiosity or sheer poor judgement, I said yes.  

But when I was standing there in front of everyone for my icebreaker speech at my first meeting in Changhua, I started regretting every single life decision that led me there. My legs and arms were shaking tremendously and I felt so nervous that I ended up throwing up in the bathroom. I thought about running away, but the only exit was blocked by the audience, so I was forced to speak for seven minutes straight, while my heart was beating so loudly in my ears that I couldn't quite hear myself speak. 

You expected judgement. Yet, they applauded. They smiled. And though you weren’t sure if it was out of sympathy or genuine support, it didnt matter to you, because it dawned on you that you had found a place where you’re encouraged to fail, a place where mistakes weren’t seen as the cause of your weakness but evidence of effort. You belonged. 

So I don’t regret it, because for the first time in years, I felt proud of myself for simply stepping across that line I’ve drawn between myself and the world. 

Josh coached me for the next three years, he pushed me past my comfort to a place where I thought I’d never reach. And through it all, I learned that you're never going to always have good moments. If you want to be a public speaker, you have to go through hardships, because those are the ones that actually make you better.

His efforts also constantly reminds me that growth, is rarely graceful. Like caterpillars transforming into butterflies, change doesn’t just happen overnight, they struggle and fight and stretch themselves until their wings unfold. 

Take my other mentor, Diana Watson, for example, also another one of my extremely unpredictable friends. Once, right after I had finished delivering a speech in front of fifty people she had invited without telling me, she literally shredded my script. Definitely not graceful. I stood there, petrified, as I watched as confetti made of my hard work fluttered to the floor.

“Do it again,” she said, eyes sharp as she pointed directly at me. “Do it again. This time, without using the words from the script.” “I want you to use your own words out of your mouth, from here.” she said, placing her hand over her heart like some kind of insane melodrama actor.

I thought she lost her mind. But I started speaking anyways. For the first few seconds, I was totally panicking, stuttering, hands flying around anxiously, far unlike the perfectly composed, and fluent version of me just five minutes earlier.

 But then something shifted. The words began to roll off my tongue naturally, it was as if they’ve  been waiting all this time to escape. The story found its rhythm and flowed, and for the first time, I sounded like me, I wasn’t telling someone else’s story anymore, I was telling mine. 

Later when I watched the recording, I realized how different it is between speaking perfectly and genuinely, between performing and actually connecting. It was that moment I learned that the most powerful voice you’d ever have is the one that doesn’t try to impress but only express.

Another time, in my second year at Toastmasters, I reached the finals in Kaohsiung. And usually it’s the same people every year. The veterans. So to them, I was the outsider, the underdog who slip in on accident.  

I remember that day, I was delivering one of my personal speeches, about my experience of diabetes. The opening was dramatic, I had to lie down on the floor, press my alarm bell, and pretend to wake up. I practiced it a hundred times. Everything went perfectly.

Unti my microphone disconnected halfway through. 

The audience gasped. Their faces all said the same thing, they thought you were doomed. And for a split moment, you believed it. You can almost hear your thoughts screaming for you to stop. but then somewhere in your heart, a voice tells you to keep going. So I did. No microphone. Just me and my voice, trembling but growing stronger with each word I spoke. And by the time I finished, the entire audience was on their feet. 

Then they called out my name. I got third place. I was too stunned to speak. But afterward the judges told me, “If your microphone hadn’t disconnected, we would’ve given you first place.”

So for the rest of the week, I felt devastated and I was angry at myself and I blamed the microphone. 

But later I realised, the failure wasn't a punishment. It was training. 

Because the following year, one of my students had experienced the same disaster.

Guess what? Mid-speech, her whole microphone slid down her face and dangled from her ear, and eventually trailed behind her like a leash. All the judges turned to me, uncertain, as if waiting for a signal to stop her. But I just shook my head and said, “Let her keep going.” 

She did. She finished strong. And she won.

That night, I was struck with something profound, some lessons meant for us aren't really for us at all, they’re also meant to be passed on, because if my microphone hadn't failed, I could never have taught her what to do when hers did. 

So when people often say that life is like a movie, I’d come to realize that’s not quite true. Movies are scripted and it ends all the same way, no matter how many times you watched it. For me, life is a stage. Anything can happen. Forgotten lines, broken microphones, unexpected applauses.

Glossophobia, all those years trapped in silence, were just my first act. The contests, students, lessons, Toastmasters became my evolving script of rediscovery, they were lines that I wrote for myself as I stumble and triumph, each no matter how painful or challenging, add a new line to the story I was still writing.

Somewhere along the way, I figured out how the script was never written for me, I write as I go. The stage is mine to fill, and the story? Mine to tell. And perhaps thats the lesson of it all, the fear would always come, mistakes would always be made, but courage is found when you step forward anyway, and life? It always follows the voice that dares to speak.