Recently, I wrapped up my time doing speech at North, and with few other blog topics in mind, I’m going to take the chance to talk about my speech experience this year.

 

Now I wrote a whole summary for my first three years of speech, and only after like 800 words did I realize it was way too long, so I’m gonna do a TL:DR. Freshman year: I was bad. Sophomore year: It was COVID and I did really bad. Junior year: I became a sweaty tryhard and I still did bad. 

 

So with that flawless contextualization of my speech career established, let us move into my senior year. This year, I was a bum.  I was focusing more on college apps, and frankly, I didn’t have any motivation to do speech given my past history of results (or lack thereof). I just stuck with impromptu, my primary event, and I didn’t even have anything ready until a week or two out from the first tournament. However, while I would have been ok with just performing at my usual level and doing badly, I started to absolutely toss my preliminary rounds in the early season. I would forget and freeze and lose to people that, even if I was washed, I should not have been ranking below. So that lit the fire back up in me to prove that I wasn’t complete trash and to put all my years of experience into play to at least achieve something in the twilight of my career. But of course, that just set me up for more disappointment when I kept falling short again and again, and thus I reverted straight back to my bum senior mindset.

POV: You get Frozen like Elsa in your prelims

 

 Eventually, the end of the season came once more. I was tired of the whole speech process in general: waking up too early on a Saturday, competing, getting disappointed when I didn’t make finals, going home tired, a little depressed, and with a lot of homework to catch up on. While I did still enjoy the company of all my speech friends this year, I was ready to be done by the time January hit, but I couldn’t rest just yet. Now, at the end of every regular season comes the state series for speech, which you can think of as the post season of the NFL. Additionally each school can only send one person per event to compete at state series, and given that I was the most senior member in impromptu, it was back to waking up early again for me.

 

State is split in 3 parts: regionals, sectionals, and state, one tournament a week, each progressing in difficulty. The past two years, I  had been eliminated at regionals (the earliest stage of course), and this year, I wasn’t expecting anything different. However, during the actual regional tournament, I felt that I could definitely move to the next stage given the level of competition, and that confidence carried me to the final round. Yet, tragedy struck as in that final round, I had one of the worst performances of my life, and I walked out so angry with myself. I was completely unable to accept that my final speech would be utter garbage and that my whole journey, a never ending story of failure, would end in complete shambles. But thankfully, that would not be my fate. Somehow, I managed to tie for 4th in finals, and because the ranks 1-4 from regionals moved onto sectionals. So, with the power of straight dumb luck, I moved on.

The judges watching me fumble my speech

 

 Going into Sectionals, I needed to clean up my act and make sure that I took full advantage of the chance that managed to fall onto my lap. This was greatly aided by Bill (the guy who won state last year in impromptu and who graduated from North just last year) calling me up and handing me his super secret recipe for victory which I can’t explain because this post is getting too long, and into sectionals I went. For more context, the sectional that North is part of (most likely) the most competitive sectional in the entire state, and people who advance from the sectional generally make it into the finals for state. Thus, I went in with the mindset that I would be ok not even making it into the final round because chances were that I wouldn’t. I just wanted to give good speeches and retire proud of my performance. Strangely, I didn’t feel very nervous either. I was just happy to be there and compete, and after my last preliminary round, I had made peace with being done with speech. Yet, by some mythical force, I made it into the final round, and I definitely thought I would not do well considering how stacked the competition was. So once again, I just decided to enjoy myself. I spun around in the chairs in the waiting room that the tournament had us wait in before going to speak, and being last, I had plenty of time to be trapped with my thoughts. After being called in to speak, I walked into that final round with no expectations, spewed what I thought would definitely be my final speech, and went to go wait for awards. 

 

Now the people running the tournament definitely planned for awards to be the most nerve racking thing ever, because they went so slowly and announced every finalist’s rank name, and school, literally exposing everyone for how close/far they were from making it to state. So when impromptu 6th and 5th place came up (only 6 people make it to finals), and miraculously, I didn’t hear myself at all, my relief was short lived when the all important 4th place. 4th place is super scary for everyone, because only top 3 from each sectional makes it to state. So when I heard the announcer say “In 4th place, from Naperville” and I thought that my journey was finally over. But as it turns out, the announcer said Naperville Central and not North, and so up I went to the stage, completely bamboozled as to how I had managed to make it to state.

 

State was a much different and more anti-climatic experience. I got on the bus, I hung out with the people from Naperville Central, competed, failed (of course), and went home. However, I will note that in the second (and final) preliminary round, I felt a very odd sense of calmness. It wasn’t like other rounds in my career or even in sectionals, I just felt very grounded and in control. Now, while I didn’t make it into the finals (apparently I was 7th and state only takes top 6 for finals so that’s fun), I managed to go home happy that I performed well in my final speech, and even more happy that I was finally done.

 

Now, if I were to go back in time and tell freshmen year me whether I thought speech was worth it, I would immediately think of all the early mornings I had to wake up on, the salty taste of failure that I became too familiar with, the amount of time and effort I sunk into speech and the pitiful amount of rewards that speech yielded out for me. But then, I would remember all the people who I met along the way, the fun conversations and relationships I made because of speech, how tough I have become and how much I’ve grown as a person all because of speech. Then I would turn to little freshmen me, and give the most definitive answer of my life.

No.