A Life Lesson From Nerves

Participating on the previous panel.
Sadly, I have no photographic evidence of
the second panel.

         My mom always used to say that there was still decent people in the world; that it’s not that the world’s gone bad, just that the bad makes more noise than the good. This notion was then supported by one of my communications classes were I learned that people pay attention to tragic subjects because this is what they like, even if they don’t admit it. I believe this is true in all aspects of our life.

            If you know me or if you’ve read most of my posts, you probably know or have gotten the notion that I’m a perfectionist. Why? The answer’s simple: the bad—your mistakes—is what people remember. Therefore, I don’t want to give any leverage to anyone; it makes me feel vulnerable.

            On April 15, 2015 I had to face my fear head on. This was the day I participated in the 5th Anual Student Research and Writing Conference: Student Collaboration and Contributions Across the Disciplines. As you may recall from a blog post I posted yesterday, I was moderator and participant of a panel featured in said conference. In this post, I stated I didn’t feel nervous, but rather powerful. This day I also participated in a different panel of the conference, and my story in it is a completely different story from the previous panel.

Dr. Seuss
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The panel was titled Perspectives of Puerto Rico: A Journey Through Cyberspace. As part of it, my group and I had to give a presentation on the perception of Puerto Rico online. I can’t exactly pin point the reason why, but I felt completely nervous before stepping on stage as well as during officiating the presentation. Usually, if for some reason I feel nervous before walking on stage, when I step on it and utter my first words, I break the ice, and the nerves melt away. This time this did happen. While on stage, one of my favorite poems, “Oh, the PlacesYou’ll Go!” by the marvelous Dr. Seuss: “. . . there's a very good chance you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants”. I felt as if I was paralyzed. A terrible feeling of dread that something was about to go wrong clouded all my senses. Logically, this threw me off balance. My mind went blank, and a material I had known for weeks now seemed gibberish.

Maybe it was delayed nerves from the first panel since I hadn’t felt nervous at all at any point of the panel I moderated. Maybe it was the loss of control. In the previous panel I had control: I was the moderator—the one that called the shots. I don’t know how, but I got through it and, I might add, with minor mishaps compared to how nervous I felt.

"Oh! the Places You'll Go! book cover
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Nonetheless, I felt ashamed of myself. I was disappointed of giving a presentation that was less than perfect. I was afraid of having let down my teammates. I was afraid of having let down my professor who worked so hard to constitute this panel.

The good thing was the experience helped me remember there’s always room for improvement. No matter how confident you are one minute, doesn’t guarantee you won’t feel nervous the next. Likewise, in life, nothing is guaranteed. One minute everything will be perfect, the next they’ll be the complete opposite. It’s our duty to learn to cope and learn from those experiences; that’s the best we could hope for.