It Was Scary. I Did It Anyway

Photo: Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

This summer, I found myself at a large dinner table with 15 more people, celebrating my good friend’s 30th birthday. Never having met most of them until that night, I quietly clung to my friend’s wife — also a friend of mine — and was lucky to be seated next to her. The restaurant was buzzing with chatter, as was our table; the night promised to be long and full of festivities.

I can’t remember who was the first person to stand up and make a toast. It took me by surprise — I hadn’t been at a table where actual toasts were made for many years. The last time must’ve been when I was still a kid.

But someone did stand up and, with a few dings on their wine glass, asked everyone for a moment of attention, and then delivered a speech with a short backstory of how they had met the birthday boy, and a number of beautiful wishes.

“Is this common? People toasting when you celebrate something among friends?” I whispered to my friend.

“Yeah, I’d say so. Everyone made a toast at my birthday a few months ago,” she replied, to my dismay.

Was everyone going to make a toast tonight? Would I be expected to?

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” my friend added comfortingly, as if reading my mind. I wasn’t comforted.

For the next hour or so, more people stood up to make a toast as I slowly succumbed to anxiety. I stopped enjoying myself and was frantically weighing my options. Which prospect terrified me more: making a toast in front of the people I barely knew or being remembered by them as the only one who didn’t make a toast?

I’m not a public speaker by any means, and I’m not particularly gregarious when surrounded by people I don’t know well. I can toast “to friendship” on wine nights with my best friend and I can toast “to us” when my Mum comes to visit, but any kind of speech making must be a matter of diligent preparation and hours of rehearsing in front of a mirror, not a spur of the moment kind of decision.

I withdrew into the depth of my mind and let myself spiral quietly. Every new toast made me feel hot and claustrophobic. It stopped being about celebrating my friend’s 30 and became all about me crumbling under the pressure of doing something I’d never done before and wasn’t comfortable with, watched by too many people most of whom I’d never met until that night. Standing up and speaking in front of these mostly strangers would certainly be a first.

Another glass or two of wine, and my mind was made up. With the resignation of someone sentenced to execution — though I hid it well, if I do say so myself — I stood up and looked around the table. By then it was understood what a single person standing with a glass in their hand meant. As everyone got silent, I did my best to steady my voice and said a few short, but sweet sentences about how I was grateful for having a friend on whose support I could count in difficult times and whose cheerful nature and undying sense of humor reduced me to tears every time we met. I ended on a humorous note with a little twist that caused a few chuckles — and finally, to the sound of an approving murmur and the clinging of glasses, I took my seat again, drunk not on wine but on relief.

Not only had I found the guts to do it, but I actually did rather well. I didn’t drag it on, so no one had the time to get bored, and I wouldn’t be remembered as the only one who didn’t make a toast.

The conversation resumed at the table, and no one’s eyes were fixed on me anymore. My body was starting to relax, and I felt eager to have fun again, exchange jokes, and just chat. The moment I’d been dreading for an hour lasted a few minutes, and when I got through it, I suddenly felt inspired to do more scary things. To have more firsts.

I could probably come up with a list of things I haven’t done because of some kind of fear. The fear of failure, the fear of learning I’m not good at something, the fear of embarrassing myself. I wasn’t happy about the prospect of making a toast in front of people I barely knew, and if I’m being completely honest, I’m not very pleased with how pressured I felt to do it — even when no one was actually forcing me to. But the bottom line is, it was scary, and yet I did it anyway.

And that raises a question: what else can I do? Should I go to a Spanish speakers meetup even though I know my Spanish isn’t good enough for an actual conversation? Should I write and share about that time I made a toast for the first time in my life, even though it’s a seemingly insignificant event?

In all honesty, that one act of courage alone probably won’t have a tremendous impact on my life or my approach to new experiences, but it has definitely tipped the scales a little in the case of deciding to do something for the first time. It’s made me more open to trying something new even when I’m scared. It has taught me that I have the strength and the courage to stand up even when my knees are trembling and my self-preservation instinct screams at me to remain seated. My motivation may not have been the best this time — I made that toast not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid of the impression I would make if I didn’t — but I did it anyway.

And maybe next time there’s a chance to make a toast, or practice my Spanish with native speakers, or put myself out there in any real way, I’ll do it not to please others, but because I really, genuinely want to.