Personal Narrative: My Identity Into The Classroom

I am not an outgoing person. I am extremely shy. I have terrible social anxiety. On my first day of high school, I was marked absent for my first class because I was too scared to ask anyone where it was, and too scared to ask anyone for a map. Freshman year was not enjoyable due to theses reasons - until my introverted self stumbled across a call board in the director’s classroom for anybody interested in joining the invigorating world of speech.
I had worked my way into the theatre world through friends. I determined that I would forever be a wispy little stagehand, forever destined to repair costumes and restock the pancake makeup hidden behind a heavy fire curtain and the absence of house lights. I was involved in theatre, but not in an obvious kind of way. One day, I needed to discuss the fabric of a main character’s costume with the director, so I shakily trudged my way up into the upperclassmen wing to go to his classroom. Then, on the ancient cork call board was a minimalistic poster advertising the wondrous world of speech, which shouted of enrollment into the prestigious honor society that is the National Speech and Debate Association, as well as how fondly colleges looked on public speakers. Now, I’m not sure if that’s true, but because of speech, I am
Storytelling is an event where there are fifteen different stories taken from a selected book, all of which I had to learn well enough to tell them myself. I used silly voices and large movements, as well as distinct physicalities to emulate every character. To be fair, right off the bat, I was not good at it the first year. My scores were lower than even the very lowest score we had heard of. I tripped (a lot) and I was not very informed on the ways of speech. My “storytelling mama”, as well as the rest of that amazing team, taught me and supported my learning process in the world of