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For silent sufferers, being afraid of public speaking is a hard thing to admit

Milam's Musings, milambc@miamioh.edu

I'm fidgety and my self-awareness that I'm fidgety makes me even more fidgety. This is particularly the case in class and especially on the first day of class.

My head rests on my left hand, then my right hand; now hands on my lap, hands on the table, hands on my legs, and then hands in my pockets. For god's sake, where do my hands go?

Sit up, then sit back, feet angle forward, then angle back under the chair. Then I'm sweating. For no reason. It drips down the middle of my back and my neck's hot.

All of this is before the syllabus is delivered. I look around me and these weirdos are jovially talking to each other. They're comfortable. Such is a foreign notion to me in a public setting.

Most find the first day of class routine. Get the syllabus, ask pertinent questions about the syllabus, joke with the teacher and move on with your day.

It is routine for me, but for a different reason. The first thing I do when encountering a syllabus is scan it for presentations or group work.

Others upon seeing a class has a presentation later in the semester want to know the details, when its due and so on. I want to know how to get out of it.

My world has just crashed down around me, as I have to figure out how I am going to survive this thing that isn't going to happen for another 8 weeks.

Then it gets internalized. Well, what the hell is wrong with me? Why does something so seemingly innocuous for other students seem like a ticking time bomb in my brain?

This routine - get the syllabus and peruse it for presentations - has been a fixture in my college career and earlier schooling. I've lost count of how many courses I've dropped over the years because I see the presentation menace on there.

Here's the funny thing about humans. One of our pitfalls is that we're better preachers than we are acting agents. This is no truer than in my own experience.

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I've used this space frequently to discuss the real problem of the stigmatization involved in mental health in terms of getting help or even speaking about it. Not only as it relates to a mental disease. If I had a headache, it would be normal to tell someone I had a headache. If my whole world comes crashing around me because I have to do a presentation in eight weeks, that doesn't seem so normal to verbalize.

I found myself, when contemplating this article or considering ways to seek real help with social anxiety, afraid to do so.

Afraid that I'd be seen as weak. Afraid that I'd be seen as a complainer. Afraid that I'd be looked at as somehow defective, a misfit.

Presentations, group work, these are a facet of a well-rounded education, right? Everyone hates public speaking, right?

According to Forbes, about 10 percent of the population actually enjoys public speaking. Freaks, I tell ya.

The majority, about 80 percent aren't particularly fond of it, but they'll survive it. The other 10 percent, which I seem to fall under, would be considered genuine glossophobics, those who are physically debilitated by even the thought of public speaking.

Naturally, I've read countless articles on public speaking; the "tricks" to surviving it and nothing has worked. I've been suffering through them for my entire schooling career. If those things worked - deep breathing, preparedness, repetition, that most people aren't paying attention to you anyway - then I wouldn't be writing this article.

The other day in my Black World Studies course, we had to do a current events presentation. Only three to five minutes to discuss a current event and then pose a question to the class to spur on discussion.

I chose an article I was intimately familiar with having blogged about it numerous times. I knew the subject in and out. Doesn't matter.

As I stand in front of the class of only 13 students, my knees are shaking so bad I'm afraid I won't be able to stand. I try to shift my weight to my right foot to quell the shaking. My face is hot and the self-awareness that people can see my red face makes me sweat even more.

A subject I would love to discuss at length because I know it so well is instead clipped down to the fastest way I can deliver the important points. Points I deliver through a shaky voice where my lungs feel like they're fighting to escape my chest.

Then just as soon as it started, it was over. My awareness of its brevity and immediacy doesn't change how traumatizing it was. Three minutes or 30 minutes makes no difference.

I rode in an airplane for the first time to an altitude of 10,000 feet two summers ago and then I jumped out of it. Yet, standing in front of 13 students for three minutes saying five short sentences debilitates me.

Admitting that sucks.

The frustration that I can't talk comfortably about a subject I not only know well, but am passionate about only adds to the self-hatred.

The frustration that I've had to work around a perpetually changing course schedule as I add and drop those courses that have the potential to terrify me adds to the self-hatred.

The frustration that I can't just walk into a classroom and talk jovially with other strangers adds to the self-hatred.

Which is why I need to write about it. Hopefully someone can read this and think, "I've suffered silently with you, too," and then I can do my small part to de-stigmatize speaking about these issues.

Instead of being the preacher with a hollow megaphone, I can be the acting agent affecting a different kind of change.