In my sophomore year of high school, I joined the debate team. I did about four tournaments and did about 160 meetings. It lasted about six months, meetings were twice a week from 4:30 to 6:00. I loathed debating and any related topics. I was never big on arguing beforehand, but the experiences I went through only worsened.
Sixteen year old me had anxiety. As unlikely as it seemed, it wasn't as nearly as bad as it used to be. I only felt stage fright in a sense, I had a horrible fear of public speaking. Maybe I was just good at covering up, but every time I was isolated out for everyone to pay attention and listen to me, my hands would go sweaty, the butterflies raged in my stomach, a rock was shoved down my throat, I often held my hands to try and cease their shaking.
The only thing was, it didn't matter who I was in front of, I was always nervous. I could be in front of four hundred people or four people, I was feel the nervousness creep in all too soon.
My first debate tournament was the worst experience I can remember. We arrived late, and rushed to our assigned rooms after grabbing our boxed dinners. The opposing team had already eaten and had their papers out. Only thing left was the judge. (During these tournaments, it was usually college kids that judged students for the little tournaments anyway. Most of them did it for volunteer hours, I learned this through half eavesdropping).
When our judge arrived, she sat at the desk and gave us a quick speech:
“Here's how not to piss me off:”
And proceeded to tell us what we shouldn't do as me and my partner desperately tried to finish our dried sandwiches. She didn't let us finish eating, and instead made us start as soon as she finished talking.
I didn't understand even half of what was going on. I just read the cards we picked out or what my partner told me to say. At the end, there's one last moment where the opposing team grills us with questions. The team going against us was a boy and a girl, the boy did most of the question-asking.
Except he gave me no time to answer. Apparently, this was a tactic to overwhelm the opponent. His lips flew and the questions lodged me like bullets, each question flowed into the next for three agonizing minutes. In the middle, I gave up on answering and waited for the timer to sound.
As the beep resounded throughout the empty classroom, my vision blurred. I walked slowly back to my seat, careful not to trip over my bag. I didn't want to speak, because my voice often broke when I was crying, but I still had one more turn.
I turned to my partner and begged him for what I should say. Although he told me, I couldn't do it.
“I can't do this.” I whispered to him.
“Yes you can, just say . . .”
We desperately tried to get together something during the prep time.
“It's working, just look at her face.” I heard the boy whisper to his partner.
In the end I stood for five minutes for the last rebuttal, but said not a single word. The other team won. I was forced to shake their hands, but by then enough whimpers were heard for everyone to understand I was crying.
My partner still consoled me as we left the room. I thanked him as best as I could, but didn't say much. Although the tears were flowing and my eyes were visibly red, he didn't say anything. Bless his heart.
I went to the bathroom and composed myself, but was relatively still upset. My coach asked what was wrong, but I still couldn't talk loud enough or clear enough for him to understand, so I just shook my head.
Somewhere in the middle, the coach was filled in on what happened. The whole time until ten o'clock I didn't want to talk. I pretended to be ok until I arrived in my mom's car.
I don't know what it is about her, but I could never stop myself from crying in front of her. The tears waterfalled down, and I started hyperventilating. I cried like a baby, it was so embarrassing. I hadn't cried like that since I was a child.
“What's wrong?”
I didn't answer her for a while, I knew I couldn't say anything coherent anyway.
“What happened?” she kept probing.
So I gave up and spoke, but as I suspected, nothing she could understand came out.
“Calm down and breath.”
So I did. But even as I was able to say something, I still hiccuped in between words and huffed breaths amount syllables.
“I don’t want to go back, I don’t wanna go back,” I kept desperately pleading.
“Just get some rest for tomorrow, it won’t be as bad,” my mother tried to console me. We both knew that wasn’t working very well.
The next morning I was very morbid, I still didn’t want to go back to the debate tournament, but I did so anyway. For the next three other tournaments, I barely won any rounds, I was honestly terrible at debating, but I also carried that scar around for the rest of my time on the team.
I wanted to quit debate after the first tournament, but didn’t because my mom and coach always said how proud they were that I stuck with debate despite my bad start. It made me feel so guilty, but eventually I couldn’t handle having an anxiety attack every time we had a debate round. So I found a job and used that as an excuse to quit, I never felt proud of it.
Even though I was fairly sure I had escaped that world, it always came back. My teachers at school then seemed so obsessed with debating and arguing. They would teach us what made a good argument and a bad argument, and showed us how the debate would be structured. Even worse, most of them made it so you only got points if you won a round, or made a good argument. My worst nightmare came back to life. I didn’t do well.
For at least two and a half years, I escaped having to do much talking in class at all. Disappointingly, I didn’t contribute much verbally to the class. But even this week, my Journalism teacher wants us to debate controversial topics assigned to us (based on pro or con of the topic), and I can’t help but remember all of this. Granted, the class is small, only about twelve people in the class, but my anxiety says otherwise.
Even now, I have a strong desire to avoid the class altogether now (which regretfully I have skipped some of my classes to avoid this), but I can’t skip first period.
I guess I’ve just realized that not all obstacles are ones I can overcome. Sometimes people sink rather than swim.