The following appeared first in the Spring 2019 GFA Magazine.
By Eva Ebbesen '19
I went into my eighth-grade speech with this idea that it was going to be a major turning point — that I really had to “go big” because it was my chance to show my school who I was and what I thought about important things. In middle school I felt like I had this negative reputation that a lot of teens tend to get placed on them while they are desperately trying to figure out a million complicated feelings at once. I saw the speech as a chance to prove to people I wasn’t as self-assured as my reputation made me out to be. As I sat and watched the leaders of the middle school give their speeches, I put pressure on the idea and myself to make it super meaningful. I’m glad I did.
I actually wrote a draft of my eighth-grade speech when I was in seventh grade while I was super into this new idea of empathy we were constantly talking about. (We had just read To Kill a Mockingbird with Ms. Hartt.) I discarded the draft after realizing it was basically just a jumble of my own thoughts and somewhat incomprehensible, but that first draft I wrote while I was in “the zone” one night informed my equally personal, but slightly more polished second draft.
During my time in the Middle School, body image was a very relevant topic. I had personally been struggling with my own perception of myself for years and felt I could offer a few nuggets of wisdom to younger girls in the same place. It was a very difficult topic to discuss in general, so naturally I chose to discuss it with the entire school. It was absolutely terrifying. What person wants to stand at a podium talking about how she looks at her own body while basically giving every person in the room a chance to check it out themselves? Obviously, no one really cared what I looked like, but I seriously thought they would.
For days leading up to my moment at the podium, I felt horrible. I would lie awake at night brainstorming techniques to calm my nerves. I would rant about how I “cooooullllddddnnnn’tttt doooo iiiiitttt.” I took a thousand deep breaths before going up. Did it help? Of course not. I basically cried right there giving the speech. But as I read, I gained confidence in my own words. At the end, I was relieved and so grateful to have shared my perspective with a community I felt generally misunderstood me.
After doing it, I began to feel appreciated by my community. My teachers could tell I was struggling to get the words out and a bunch of them came up to me saying they were impressed by my courage. For the first time I felt like I had done something at this school that actually mattered. It was the first step in claiming my place here at GFA and leaving my mark. It was a major turning point.
That act of bravery gave me more opportunities to be brave. At the end of eighth grade, I was asked to give the end-of-year graduation speech (scary), and then I was asked to give my eighth-grade speech again last year to some eighth graders (very scary), and I’ve been asked to be a Friday Speaker in the Upper School (the ultimate form of scary). And I completed each of these anxiety-inducing tasks only to be rewarded by the support of our community here at GFA.
A word of advice to the future speech writers of GFA:
Public speaking is something you can’t really avoid. But you shouldn’t want to. Taking risks is so rewarding. Consistent exposure to uncertainty shapes you; it allows you to grow. So go ahead: Seek discomfort. Choose the route that scares you. Tell a secret! Surprise people! Surprise yourself.