The day had come. It was the freshmen end-of-year speeches about a topic regarding health and wellness; I chose to write about how to get over nervousness during speeches. This was the speech that would determine my grade on the last test of the year. As my confident classmates finished their speeches and got a roaring applause from the rest of us, I got more and more nervous as my turn approached.

I knew this speech at the back of my hand and I could say it without looking at my twenty notecards, but I still had them with me just in case.

As soon as the person before me finished the teacher announced that I would be the last speech of the day, and just as she finished her sentence my nervousness shot up exponentially.

As I started to walk myself up to the front of the classroom, my clumsy self tripped, and just when I thought things could not become more embarrassing for me all my notecards went flying right out of my hand. I quickly picked up my cards and tried to move on.

When I glanced down for a quick reminder of how I start, all I saw was some random middle card; my cards just became utterly useless.

I take a deep breath and start, "Hello everyone, today I will be talking about how to get over anxiety while giving a speech. The first step is to have numbered notecards to help you relax and have a reference to look back to." It was now that I realized that this was an ironic statement, but I continued with, "The second step is to rehearse as much as possible to ensure that if you forget to number your cards, you can still make it through your speech". My friends and teachers all started to laugh at me, but little did they know that my cards were actually not numbered.