I Almost Didn't Graduate

With it being graduation season, I thought I should share the story of how I had to talk myself into graduating! Okay, I was going to graduate high school, but I had to decide if I wanted to do the ceremony.

Have you ever been faced with something that scared you but you knew you'd regret it forever if you didn't do it? That was me with graduating.

I hate, HATE, having people's attention on me. When I was younger, I was told that the more I performed, the easier it would get. Well, that has not been my experience. Piano recitals, plays, dance recitals, concerts, speech class... I still get so nervous just speaking in Sunday School class! So the thought of being on a stage for graduation and having several hundred people looking at me was, frankly, terrifying. But I just knew that, if I didn't do it, I would be looking back in five, ten, twenty years and wishing I had done it. So I pushed through.

They let me have a bottle of water under my chair on the stage and I barely ate anything before the ceremony. To be honest, I don't remember what the speaker said, or what my dad said in his speech. I remember a lot more of what happened after the ceremony :) But I'm glad I did it and how it set me up to choose to push through other scary opportunities that have come up (like my trip to California earlier this year).

I have to do a lot of things nervous and even really scared. Graduation was one of the first big ones I can recall but it certainly wasn't the last. I'm learning how to manage the fear and anxiety and how it's okay to let some things go. My filter is usually, "will I regret not doing this thing?" If the answer is "yes", I try to find a way to make it happen.

What was your graduation like? What have you done, even though you were scared, because you knew you'd regret not doing it?