My kid was a champ and stayed up past 10 to see/hear me get up in front of a room full of mostly strangers and read an excerpt from my article about being pregnant with her.
Before I went up, she had sympathetic anxiety about me public speaking, which at the time was funny because I didn’t feel nervous at all until I was actually speaking into the mic. Public speaking is a fairly regular part of my job, so I didn’t feel much anxiety until the moment it struck me that reading work I care about vs presenting slides I worked on is …very different.
During my reading, she told her dad that she couldn’t look at me while I was on the stage because she was about to cry hearing what I wrote 😭😭😭 . That was one hell of an experience to have in this life.
