Tonight was my little presentation to the local Rotary Club chapter to talk about a group I've been volunteering with, the aim being convincing them to partner with us on an upcoming litter cleanup event, which is what we do.

Now, I need to give you a bit of history. All my life I've been petrified of public speaking. I guess it all started in high school when I had to give little presentations of one sort or another. I would turn beet red, sweat and even my voice would shake a little. All the boys would snicker. I hated it. Which led me to a lifelong fear of public speaking. When I was in law school, I knew I'd need to do some public speaking at the end of the first year, in front of 3 actual sitting judges. Somehow I fumbled through it. In various jobs to follow, I did everything I could to avoid further public speaking, and most of the time, I succeeded in avoiding it. I didn't feel good about the avoidance behavior, but I felt I would never, ever feel comfortable doing it.

Here I am, decades later, and I ran into the husband of a woman whose nonprofit I used to be involved with. I had taken my dad out to lunch at a local restaurant, realized who this man was, and introduced myself as dad and I were leaving. He is a Rotary member. One thing led to another and he said your group and my group should team up on a litter cleanup, and I agreed.

What I didn't anticipate was his invitation a month or two later to speak to the Rotary about my group so they could decide as a group if they would do this. Even with my public speaking phobia, I accepted. It was almost as if I knew this man didn't know anything about my background or my public speaking phobia, so I would "pretend" to be someone else: a confident woman who can speak to a group with ease. Fake it til you make it, as they say.

I sensed that something about me had fundamentally changed. It could quite simply be the passage of time! At this point in my life (60-something) I really don't give a s*** what other people thing of me, and I also have greater confidence in myself, and that I have an important message to share about my group. So I agreed to do the presentation, although I did invite some of my fellow board members to join me, knowing they probably would say no since they don't live in my area. And that's what happened.

So I definiely over-prepared for the meeting, rehearsing my little spiel to make sure that any kind of stage fright would not send my prepared talking points out of mind. Everything actually went very smoothly. Maybe I talked a tad too fast, but that was it. It helped that it's a restaurant that I'm very familiar with and is in fact the one where I met the Rotary guy with my dad. And everyone was very welcoming, introducing themselves before the meeting started, offering me beverages and even to share the meal with them. The guy who invited me to talk said nothing about that, and said that I would be talking during their dinner, so I assumed I would talk and leave. But once they realized I'd already eaten, they let me present before their meal began so I could get out of there.

I said everything I wanted to say and really felt rather unafraid. It was just amazing. A small group, maybe 20 people, and one of them was taking my picture with the head of the group for I guess the local paper. There were a lot of questions afterwards and people were raising their hands waiting for me to call on them and i wasn't even really focused on that at first as I'm not used to being in that position.

I can't tell you how liberating it is to feel I've conquered a lifelong fear. I feel I can do anything now. I have finally grown up.