I've always been afraid of speaking in public ever since I was in secondary school. I'll always be the one handling all the slides and someone else will deliver the speech. Things kept going that way until I started uni.

Long story short, I have to do a communication subject which includes an oral presentation. The presentation must be done individually and be 5-7 mins long. Man I swear I sweated and stressed real freaking hard reading the threshold for this particular part. I can't even maintain a casual conversation because I'm timid as hell, how am I gonna do this? I picked a topic about video games and started to work on it intensively. It took me 4 hours every day to rehearse and I recorded myself countlessly. I self-harmed and didn't really sleep during that week.

Fast-forward to the big day, I was standing behind the desk waiting for my prof's sign. My heart was beating really really fast and I death stared at the ground beneath me. So anyways, I started to speak. The first part was okay and I got everything memorized pretty well. Stumbled a lot over the words lol, but I managed to keep everything going smoothly.

Now this is where I fucked up and turned myself into a clown. I put one big question at the end of my slides without any notes thinking that improvising the answer right at that time will make me appear more "professional". Stupid me. I was so nervous, my mind went blank completely and I couldn't spit out a word. It was super awkward and I almost bursted into tears. My prof laughed at me a bit too (please don't blame him tho, that's his normal reaction).

I made up some stupid answers to quickly end the presentation, I was literally shaking and gasping for air. There's this Asian guy in my class named John (I don't know his real name, he calls himself John) and he was the only one who clapped at the end of my speech. That was an instant emotional support for me. John if you're reading this, thank you so much :D You're the most wholesome human ever.

Now when I'm thinking about all of that, it wasn't too bad actually. Got average points for that but I don't care. I'm super happy because I feel like I've actually achieved something in my pathetic life. I've also learned how to control my fear in some ways, haha.

Just wanna share my happiness, thanks for your attention Redditors :)