Finding My Voice

This article by Collier is close to my heart....I am not the orignal author but at least somebody is there who thinks in cohesion with me...striking similarity with my thought process...so sharing it....take a shot..it is worth reading


I always had trouble talking to girls—until I met the one that really heard me.

May 18, 2006 -

As soon as I said the words to the beautiful woman I was falling in love with, I knew I had blown my chance. “I think that maybe I might like you.”

Good grief. I’ve never been much of a smooth talker, but come on. “Think?” “Maybe?” “Might?” Talk about hedging your bets. What was wrong with me? I should have told her how I really felt: that I thought she was beautiful and smart and funny and unlike anyone I’d ever met.

I’d been readying myself for this moment for weeks, ever since a friend at church introduced me to the pretty new blonde all the guys were talking about. For the last hour, as we walked along the river that ran past her apartment building, I’d been gathering my nerve, mulling over what I would say—and the best I could come up with was, “I think that maybe I might like you.”

Ugh.

Growing up, I had never enjoyed speaking. And not just in the public sense—I hated speaking in general, because I was terrible at it. I spoke too quickly. Words burst out of my mouth and scurried all over each other like mice fleeing a burning house. I had to repeat myself over and over and over. Slow down, people would tell me, breathe. I also had problems with enunciation. Words ending in “p” or “t” sounded anything but crisp when they came out of my mouth. How could I finish a word when another one was already barreling through my larynx?

These, of course, were mere mechanical issues. The real problem was that I had difficulty thinking of things to talk about. Not with my friends, that was easy. We’d talk about girls, or TV, or girls we’d seen on TV. But talking to girls, well, that wasn’t so easy.

When I was 15, the friend of a friend of a cutegirl from a nearby town stopped me in the hallway at school. She told me that her friend’s friend (the cute girl) liked me. I rang her up that night and we talked for a half hour. I thought we had a wonderful chat.

The following Friday, I hitched a ride to the cute girl’s town. When I entered the arcade where the local kids hung out, I saw her, and the look on her face said it all: she didn’t like me anymore. She said it would be best if we were just friends. We never spoke to each other again.

I spent the rest of the night sitting on the ground behind the hardware store, alone in the rain, feeling sorry for myself. The rain was cold and soaked through my jacket, but it seemed appropriate. I thought I was the biggest loser who ever lived. What had I said that was so bad?

Eventually, word got around that she thought I was boring. I’d talked a bit too much about my new running shoes. I didn’t recall talking about sneakers, but it was possible, I guess. I had been nervous; in truth, I didn’t recall much of what I’d said.

Things got better when I went to college. I still wasn’t the most confident guy around, but I was comfortable with who I was, or, at least, with who I was becoming. So what if I couldn’t dazzle girls with pretty talk? I was a nice guy. They would see that.

But my bumbling mouth continued to cloud their vision. One time, I was having coffee with a girl that I liked and the conversation turned to high-school activities. “I used to run track,” she said.

“You must have been in good shape back then,” I replied. I wasn’t implying that she wasn’t still in good shape, but that’s how she took it. She grabbed her coffee and left.

My roommate didn’t share my handicap. When he talked to a girl, his voice turned to syrup and he’d coo in her ear and tell her that he’d never felt “this way” about anyone before. If that didn’t work, he would share heartbreaking tales of his troubled childhood, even managing to squeeze out a tear or two. It was all show, of course, but a good one.

I didn’t want to be like him. The voice I spoke to my mother with was good enough for everyone else. I wasn’t going to make up stories to get attention. Besides, I knew that someone, someday, would give me a chance to make a second or even third impression. And, who knows, maybe she would see that a good heart is more important than good diction.

Years later, walking with the pretty blonde on the river by her apartment building on an unusually warm October evening, I had hoped she would be that someone. But with a typical display of verbal buffoonery, I’d erased that hope. Or so I thought.

She stopped walking and looked up at me. She laughed. It turned out, in spite of my less-than-impressive linguistic skills, she kinda sorta liked me, too. And two years later, she married me.

“I think that maybe I might like you.”

You know, now that I think of it, that’s not so bad. It’s cute, in an awkward sort of way. Maybe I’ll give Hallmark a call.

Collier lives in Ottawa, Canada.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.