Selective mutism and me

MANILA, Philippines - When I was in kinder, it puzzled me when the school picked me to deliver the welcoming address for our graduation. It was to be delivered up on a stage overlooking a sea of strangers who could hear every memorized word I was going to say. On some days, I would get pulled out of class to rehearse, and this one time, I remember the silhouette of the school administrator looming over me, demanding that I speak louder. Four-year-old me burst into tears.

I was never a good orator, but I wasn’t really terrified of it until after that incident.

One of the scariest things I ever had to do in high school involved making a poem that rhymed, and reading it in front of my classmates. I literally cried my way through it, after stopping mid-stanza for a moment by myself in the restroom. I hid this fear of public speaking behind the fact that the poem I wrote was about my grandmother who had just died.

Over the years, rejection, ridicule and the embarrassment of getting corrected turned me off from public speaking. However, extemporaneous speeches, more reading of original poetry (gag!), soliloquies and oral defenses followed me everywhere. In college, I cried during a number of oral exams. The professors, except for one, were really nice about it. One of them even tried to coach me. The thing is, I knew the answers to their questions. I knew what to say, and I knew what they wanted to hear. I just didn’t know how to say all of these things without turning into a human fountain.

I was tasked to read one of Petruccio’s soliloquies in high school for English class. I rehearsed all the crests and troughs of the piece, and even added blocking and facial expressions into the mix. I made the conscious effort to not let this fear of public speaking get in the way of an A. When it was my turn to dramatize Petruccio talking to himself, I just stood there like a statue that could talk and I just spoke the words. All the bells and whistles that I had strung around my soliloquy? Gone. (I got a B.)

The fear of being wrong or being questioned just sits in your gut like a stone. An iciness washes over you and you’re paralyzed, kept from speaking eloquently or speaking at all. It’s like your brain is on autopilot, except it doesn’t go where you want it to go. For every speech and oral report, I have felt the caffeine-free palpitations and this preordained shame of failure overtaking all the faculties of my brain and body.

Now, the truly funny thing is that I just accepted a teaching position for next semester.

A lot of people have questioned this decision, asking why I said yes, when I was openly terrified of speaking in front of people. The three-hour class I am going to teach is a studio elective, which means that a lot of the time I just have to supervise the students as they do their assigned work. It’s not a class that’s built heavily on lectures, but as a professor, I obviously have to talk to my students at some point.

Talk to the town: Community’s Shirley Bennett overcame her speech anxieties for her business class with help from her study group mate, Pierce Hawthorne.

On these days leading up to the first day of school, I have often questioned this particular decision, but I always remind myself of why I said yes in the first place.

When I was still in college, the lack of teachers was one of our greatest frustrations. I picked my major because of the course list that was released online. But because there were very little qualified instructors and too many students, some of the electives failed to materialize. Right now, they’re fixing the curriculum to better fit what the students needed from the school. When some of the people I knew from school started teaching, I told myself that I wanted to be part of that change, too.

About two years ago, I graduated from the same university that I am about to teach in. I was overly shy and nervous about talking to people who weren’t my friends, even when it came to little things like business calls. Up until then, I’d spoken to my clients only via e-mail or SMS. One monumental step for me was picking up that phone and taking the call. I even remember stalling the phone call and writing this simple thing down as a sort of nudge into getting over this fear.

When I was younger, I immediately gravitated towards writing because I came across better and more articulate than I am when I am overcome with shyness and anxiety. I could “say” things without having to actually get up on a pedestal and talk to people. Sometimes, it’s enough to just write everything down, but the truth is that a lot of things are lost when we become too afraid to speak up.

The beautiful thing about all of this is that often, we have very little to lose and a lot of things to gain from speaking in public. Sure, there’s that one momentary drop in your stomach when you flub over a word or are embarrassed by something you accidentally said, but these things are easy to get over.

I am no longer afraid of phone calls, and I can now get through with interviews decently. I haven’t had the chance to do speeches in front of people yet, but on the first day of school this year, I’m going to give it a shot. If I stumble through it on that day, I have 15 more times to make up for it.

At this point, I would say that I hope none of my future students are reading this. But my real hope is that if some of them do come across this confession, they would find it hard to believe that it was me who wrote it.