Do something that scares you.

Some people from my church are going to Haiti on a missions trip this summer, and tonight they had a little fundraiser thing where people could perform, and there were baked goods and coffee and stuff like that.

Well, a few weeks ago, my friend Cathy (who was organizing the whole thing) put out a message that she still needed some performers, and on a whim, I messaged her and told her that I had a poem I would perform.

This poem, to be specific. The only poem I've ever written, though I did edit it a bit to make it flow better. It's so weird - I wasn't trying to write a poem. All of this just came out and it happened to make a good spoken word poem.

So yeah, that fundraiser was tonight, and I was so nervous beforehand that I was going to blank out on the words in the middle of it, but I didn't so yay! My voice did shake from nerves, but people really loved it, which made me feel good since it was my first time doing this.

I'm really glad I did this. It kind of makes me want to do it again. But I'm not going to force myself. I'm just going to wait for inspiration to hit like it did with this one. In this case, I just got one specific phrase ("butterflies and heart eyes") stuck in my head and everything else sort of built around it.

I feel really good and really proud of myself. I had a friend record it, and I listened to it back when I got home, and where normally I'm such a perfectionist that when I do that I start nitpicking apart everything I could have done better, tonight, I'm just really pleased. So yay.

I guess it's good to do something that scares you every now and then.