Wednesday, March 189th 2025: My First Blog Post

Welcome to my first blog post! Whew, I was putting off adding this feature but I really love writing and yapping so here goes nothing!

I mostly want to talk about my most recent experience participating in a speech competition. I got selected at the top 15 finalist (out of 58) and got to talk on stage about how fast-paced everything's becoming and the need to slow down and enjoy art. That aside I didn't get into the top 3. It's ok! I learned a lot. One of which is that I am definitely not suited for this environment where a lot of people are molded into this ideas "public speaker" with the same cadence and body language.

I talked to one of the judges to ask for feedback (implicitly I wanted to know how they were grading the contestants) and boy. Boy howdy. I was surpsied to find out that one of them thought my script was too disjointed and had no running narrative when it HAS one, it's just subtle and implicit. Second of all I was shocked to find out they thought I had no closing, and that they didn't consider that a callback could serve as a closing also. These are quite rigid rules and explains why a lot of people fall back to safe "templates" in writing a speech instead of saying some actually groundbreaking or subversive things

Maybe I'm too used to academic writing and assuming my readers could pick up on subtlety to enter the arena that is public speaking competitions. I have stiff body language and a particular cadence that doesn't mesh well with neurotypicals' idea of what "confidence" looks like.

That's it for now! I'm not bitter since it was a valuable experience and I could tick that off my to-do list of "things to do on my self-discovery journey in my early 20s"