I choked on my words during an interview.

DIMEJI
2 min readJun 24, 2022

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I have always fancied the idea of talking to strangers — and listening to them speak about their ideas, thoughts and experience across various subject. For some reason, It tickled my body to view life from other people point of view — and if they permit, tell a story about it.

Sad thing that I am extremely timid and I would usually stutter when I speak with strangers. As much as I can, I make effort to be comfortable, but as you can imagine,that doesn’t always work.

In the past, i have executed projects that required interviewing strangers — but that was different because it usually would be a team work. To save myself from the fear that envelops my mind whenever I was supposed to speak, I volunteered to be the guy behind the scene that does the recording and transcription.

In a bid to pick up new challenges and expand my limits, I opted to conduct an interview for a story but I flopped. This is practically what the voice in my head tells me. Truth is I do not plan to let anyone else listen to the audio, let alone give tell their opinions.

First off, why does my voice sound so weird? At intervals, I had to stop listening because it looked strange and absolutely cringe listening to my voice. On the contrary, the work had to be done so I had to live through it. Mid-conversation, i discovered that I spoke rather too fast or just choke on my words and I really can’t tell why I did that. Okay, I lied. I was scared that I wasn’t doing it right. I shouldn’t be telling y’all this but I think I started sweating profusely at the first “Hello”.

Does this happen to you too? Sigh!

On the brighter side, I had an amazing conversation and good thing that no one would be listening to the audio — so my ass is covered.

There’s a first time for everything,right? Although, I might not have performed perfectly as I wanted to — but it is a major milestone for me and I am certain that with time, I would improve and get acquainted with speaking to strangers without an iota of fear whatsoever.

I’m documenting this because I hope that someday I would be able to come back here and tell y’all how I stared directly into a stranger’s eyes and spoke to them about their business.

Till then,

All my love.

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