In my first semester of college, we have a subject called Communication. My college treats it like scripture — two classes a week, two hours each — that's four hours of learning how to speak. The idea is to polish our public speaking, improve our presence, shape our personality.
Every session the teacher plucks a random student from the crowd and asks them to speak on a topic. And every time, as the activity begins, I quietly build a small universe in my head — a dazzling speech with clever phrases and bold pauses. A speech so good even the teacher would nod. A speech ready to fly out if I'm picked.
Gladly, I never am.
Instead, I watch my classmates rise and speak their minds. They stumble, they shine, they simply do. And in me rises a hunger — a longing to stand, to let my Shakespeare-level speech pour out, to feel the words leave my mouth and enter the room. But every time, the period gets over before I find my courage. My "world-class" speech crumbles back into dust. This has been happening since the very first class. Sad life. (Lol.)
But why? Why does this feel like such a mountain to climb?
For me, at least, it is.
A few months ago, on the terrace of my house, a cool breeze moving like a thought across my skin, I finally saw it. That kind of weather makes you go inward, makes you measure yourself. And I realised: whatever I am today is because of my actions and my habits. But everything I could have been, and still am not, is because of a single shadow — the fear of what people will think, the fear of what people will say. The fear of judgement.
People say Gen-Z is bold. That we don't care about people's thoughts. That we just do our thing. I wish I matched even half of those adjectives. I don't. I care far too much.
Somewhere inside me lives an extrovert who never gets an invitation because the bouncer at the door is called Fear. This is why I slip out of social circles; why I go quiet in rooms; why my words and my looks and my actions feel like glass. Always visible. Always at risk of shattering.
I live in two worlds. One is real. The other is the one I visit every night before sleep: the imaginary world where I am confident, bold, and magnetic. Where I'm giving an inspiring powerful speech in a huge auditorium and the crowd is listening to me carefully, word by word. I am in awe of that version of me.
I don't know when it started — this caring so much about the world's verdict. But I know this: every insecurity, every complex I carry has roots in this soil. For a long time I thought my nervousness was because of overthinking. But when I followed the thread, I found it tied to one word: judgement.
Most of my overthinking is not random. It's me trying to predict how someone might see me.
Take a funny memory from school. One of my secret skills was matchmaking. (Yes, you read that right.) A few of my friends confessed to the girls they liked and actually got into relationships because of the plans I made for them. I'm not bragging — okay, maybe a little. So I plan all the moves for my friends, like what should they say to start a conversation, what should they reply and what they shouldn't, what should they behave like and then they follow the plan and succeed. I might not know much about women and what do they like in a man, but I certainly know what they don't like, because obviously I have two elder sisters, I have been educated on this enough. So credit to my sisters here.
One day my friends asked why I never liked any girl in school. I told them I did but I was fine on my own. They laughed, said I try to act like those idiot sigma male.
I'm not a sigma male. I'm straight. I like women. But I also live with a deeper fear: not of rejection, but of misjudgement. I can stay single my whole life, but I can't stand a girl thinking I'm creepy, desperate, or like the men she's learned to be wary of. This is why I never did what I helped my friends to do.
My "plan" now? To trust God to let the right girl confess first, after all I am god's favourite child. I know — optimism gone wild.
I even write long messages over explaining things. People sometimes text back: "Bro, one line was enough." They don't see why I do it — because I'm scared the person on the other side will misunderstand me.
And this makes me question: maybe I'm not introverted. Maybe I'm just scared. In front of my sisters or old friends, I'm absurd, loud, a total extrovert.
I'm trying to push past it here in college. I have a small group of friends. Slowly I've started to speak up. Once I said something in the group, nothing unusual happened — nobody stared or whispered — and yet, for the whole day, the sentence circled my head like a vulture. Did I say the wrong thing? Should I have stayed quiet?
So you see, people's opinions weigh on me more than they should.
I'm a deep thinker. I can usually answer my own questions. This is the only one where I'm still blank: why do random people's judgements matter to me this much?
It's like living in fragments. Not posting the photo you love. Not sharing the achievement you're proud of. Not cracking the joke you wanted to crack. Overexplaining everything. Feeling self-conscious in rooms that should feel safe.
I know the solution is to remove people's opinions from my equation. I'm trying. But progress feels like walking through syrup.
And I'm not writing this as some 45-year-old with a foolproof cure. If you're reading this hoping for a magic solution, I don't have one. I'm writing because this fear is my biggest enemy. Nine out of ten things that I want to do but don't is because of this.
I want to live confidently. Deliver that brilliant speech. Post that photo. Crack that joke. Write that one-sentence message instead of the paragraph. Dress the way I like. And do many more things that I currently don't.
I'm writing this because if you feel the same, you should know you're not alone. And because maybe together, we'll learn to stop living in fragments.
We'll learn to live beyond eyes.
To end this I have a very beautiful poetic ending by a famous poet:
"We're born whole, but break into fragments under the world's stare.
This is my attempt to gather the pieces."
-By Chat Gpt