Standing in the front of the classroom with thirty pairs of eyes on me, I could feel the sweat slowly dripping down my neck and my heart pounding hardly against my chest. The night before, I had spent maybe ten minutes in my bed, whispering Shakespeare lines to my ceiling. I convinced myself that I was ready with my most common phrase, “Whatever, what could go wrong anyway?”
But it did.
The measly ten minutes of preparation the previous night caught up to me when my name was called. A dreadful wave engulfed my mind, and I could feel every drop of my blood rushing to my brain with chills of nervousness, as if my body knew I was not prepared enough. The floor felt magnetized to my shoes as I struggled to shuffle to the podium. But I had no choice. It was not a situation that I could easily walk away from or “come back” to, a norm that I am accustomed to. The only path to the front of the class was a daunting realization for me that I could not reverse back in time to do things differently. I was given a week to memorize the passage, and in my head, I knew that was enough time to deliver a polished speech, leaving no room for excuses.
I stood there like an engraved statue rooted to the floor, glancing at the ceiling like last night, hoping the sentences would magically appear. The silence became louder, and I could only hear the awkward coughs and impatient clicking of my teacher’s pen. Trying to piece my memory together, I finished the speech with frequent pauses, paraphrasing and skipping lines. Convinced that I labeled myself as the embarrassing kid who didn’t memorize her speech, I avoided eye contact, feeling like my world just fell apart. But something strange happened that day.
I thought forgetting my speech in front of my class was like a mark of embarrassment tattooed across my forehead. But during lunch, no one mentioned it. My classmates acted like nothing had happened as if their classmate fumbling was like a leaf falling on the ground.
To everyone else it was just three minutes of their life, but why did I care about it so deeply? I think I’ve always tied my worth with my performance. Forgetting my lines felt like a curtain was lifted and everyone could see a version of me that wasn’t prepared among my classmates’ countless perfect speeches before me. School is a prime example of chasing perfection from the polished presentations to straight A’s. It’s the same for social media where videos are curated and edited to aim for a purpose for the audience. The absence of mistakes perpetrates the lie that perfection is standard, and we start to set that impossible standard for ourselves.
We don’t see people messing up enough. Making mistakes in public. So when it does happen, it feels like an isolating outcast and not something to simply shrug off and move on.
The reality is that we treat every minor mistake we make as catastrophic, an irreversible diversion from our usual routine. Framing imperfections as trivial doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting about our feelings. Truthfully, I was embarrassed. But that day didn’t change or define anyone’s opinions on me. It was just a small mistake, and it really was “whatever, what could go wrong,” because nothing did.
