I'm Shy, Are You?

_{Photo by Priscilla Du Preez}

All my life, I've always been that kid who never really wanted too much attention on myself. Like I prefer walking in and out of a room without anyone knowing that I was even there. It has always been my way of life and this was because I get shy easily so I try not to draw any attention to myself.

Usually, someone with this kind of behaviour will probably let you do anything to them in a room full of people (maybe take something belonging to me) and I will say nothing because I was trying not to draw the attention of everyone else in the room towards my direction. And this was my case for sometime until I started to grow and began to hate that character.

Irrespective of the fact that I still was a very shy kid, I made sure never to let the shyness stop me from doing something I normally would have done if I had not been shy. And the day I realized I was serious about this was one morning in high-school during our assembly.

You see, during high school, we had this routine we did every morning where the assembly prefect would randomly pick a student from the crowd and the student would climb up the podium and for a brief moment, will tell everyone what he or she had read the previous day. They would explain it to everyone and when they're done, they will be applauded and asked to go down. If you refused to say anything, you will be asked to kneel until the end of assembly and then punished by a teacher.

So on this faithful morning, this prefect decided to pick me. I remember shaking as I slowly climbed up the stairs. The problem wasn't what I was going to say (I had read the previous day), it was how I was going to say it.

"How would the words leave my mouth?"

I remember being so scared that day but one thing I promised myself was that I was never going to kneel right in front of everybody. I had made that promise to myself because I knew that would be a greater embarrassment. So when I finally got up there, I just looked up to the skies and started saying everything in my head. I didn't look down until I was done and when I was done, I remember looking at everyone down there as they all clapped for me.

I had not done it in a cool way like I would have wanted, but I did it anyway. I may be a shy lad, but this shyness isn't going to stop me from achieving anything a person who isn't shy would. That's a promise I made to myself and I'm keeping it.