Speech, the scariest thing I have to do...

If there's one thing that I hate, am bad at and am forced to do its public speaking. Our family just recently moved to Southern Oregon, were we have a lot of cousins. And pretty much all of them are involved in speech and debate club. When we moved I knew there was a very good possibility that I would be expected to join this club. So I came here with a lot a trepidation. You see I am much better with the written word than I am with anything spoken. If I am expected to speak in public, to people I have never met before of just recite something I become very nervous and more often than not queasy. It can be extremely annoying as speaking to people you have never met is an inevitable part of life and public speaking is an invaluable skill to have. Any way, when we arrived here in Oregon to my horror (but not my surprise) I found that my worst fear's were completely founded in reality and then some. Not only was I expected to participate, if I wanted to go visit my old home and family I would have to start this year and not get to wait until the next school year as I had planned. I was faced with an impossible dilemma. On the one hand I wanted nothing more than to get the chance to visit my home, which I dearly missed, on the other I had no desire to face one of my very worst fears. And the worst part of it all was I had no speech to preform which meant that the only option for me was the dreaded impromptu. Impromptu speech is where you go in an room and are given three pieces of paper. Each of these papers has a word phrase or saying, then you have 2 minutes of prep time, then the actual speech which can be any where between one and 5 minutes. Going into a room completely unprepared is scary even for people who like speech. So when I was faced with the prospect of having to do this I was to say the least, terrified. But I decided that I needed to overcome my fears and just do it. I cant say it was exactly that easy but I did it I didn't win any thing or even break to semi-finales. But I did get the satisfaction of knowing I conquered my fears and gave it 100% and that's all that counts. Now I'm already making plans for next year. I want to do something that will let me put my love of writing to use, so I think I'm going to do a biographical. A biographical, or bio as its called, is where you write and 10 minute speech on a person of your choice. I like this because you have to write it yourself. Your only allowed to have 30% of the speech not be your own original work. I think the writing part sounds like an amazing opportunity to work on my writing skills, the speech part is a little scary but I know from experience that I'll be okay!!!

B