Preparation is everything. I can’t stress that enough. If you get an atrocious score on a test, I’d be willing to bet it’s because you didn’t study. If you run out of clean clothes on a vacation, whose fault is that? You didn’t pack enough. Do you understand now? Good. There are a lot of places where things can go wrong, and a good-sized portion of those are due to not preparing. I have first-hand experience.

     Imagine you’re giving a speech and you forget to prepare anything. It’s an abhorrent sensation. You’d feel about ready to die, right? I’m no stranger to this feeling. I’ve been straight into the belly of the beast and back, and now it’s hard coded in my brain to always stay diligent and prepare!

     To set the scene: it was October of 2021, and I was sitting in Mr. Ball’s classroom during Language Arts. It had been a pretty good day if you ignore there hadn't been much of a day yet, considering it was then around ten o’clock. I was chatting with a friend, waiting for class to start; there was not a shred of doubt in my mind that it was going to be a fine day at least, perhaps better.

     Something flipped the script completely out of the blue. It sloped from good to bad to worse after this. It was as if I was cheerfully ambling down the stairs of life, and suddenly, god himself shoved me. Mr. Ball had announced that today was the day of auditions for the student council.

     On the Ball and Miller team, we performed auditions for student council seats, which was simply delivering a speech for the class and voting on someone. The speeches were simple. Essentially, you just said who you were, where you were going, what plans you had for the council, and one - just one - good thing you’ve done in your life. No catch, just talking and a vote. The thing was, I had forgotten to prepare a speech. I had more than three whole, long weeks' notice, and yet I forgot to prepare anything. I am, sadly, a famous procrastinator.

     Darkness seized hold of my body. My knees buckled. My whole figure started to convulse and twist. My fingers, nearly numb, fumbled feebly for an index card. My eyes flooded with tears, but I had to restrain myself, in a public space, full of so many people armed with such swift and acute judgment. I saw my name near the bottom of the list. The teacher’s voice started to sound hellish, like a thing to fear. That was all I was feeling. Fear.

     My classmates spoke, one by one, calmly. They had prepared, and I was looking a deep, envious green. I half-listened wistfully while writing down a speech in helpless futility. Every word spoken was a second closer to my turn. With every person, their gait seemed calmer, as if trying to spite me. Some speeches were mediocre, but none as pathetic as I was feeling inside. They had all done something. I had done nothing of note at all during my short time on the earth so far, and yet so many people were accomplished already. Some had started a lemonade stand that had donated to charities. That made me feel worse. I had kept the meager profits from my own pitiful lemonade stand. I tried to compose myself. I could almost feel my soul slam into that first falling step of life.

     I slumped deeper into my chair, if that was even possible. One person told the class that they had started a small drive to donate to Ukraine. It was like they were telling me directly, to make me feel worse. My feet tapped with unending anxiety, excess adrenaline venting itself in involuntary ways. They said that another student in the class had done it with them, and it was obviously in the latter’s speech. Poignant fragments of regret penetrated my chest as I assimilated this. The two of them were just part of the faceless masses dreaming of stars but falling, inevitably, and whose names I was probably going to forget by the time I’m a senior; yet still, they were better than me.

     “Zade!” called that dreadful voice at the head of the room; it was concise, as if giving a very justified death sentence. I left the desk and the index card with it. It had about ten words on it of which were mostly conjunctions. Of course that was not good enough, like the rest of me. I stared at the stool in the front as I meandered ever closer. It was the electric chair. It was my end.

     The speech I gave, which was hardly a speech at all, was completely on-the-fly. I would like to mention that this part was a blur. I can’t really remember the speech, but I suppose that’s because I don’t want to remember the speech. 

     I stammered a few meaningless syllables, trying to filibuster my own speech. “Uh… um… fuh…” 

     Then Mr. Ball (being the good man he is) decided to help me out. “Why would you be a good choice for the student council?” he asked. I was completely thrown off guard. The on-the-fly answers were more difficult than scribbling useless drivel on an index card. I took a second to answer, but then the rest of the experience started to melt into itself and become one near-indecipherable mass of memory. I felt my ego bruise on those stairs.

     “What are your plans for the student council? What would you try to do?” asked a sensible man to a careless me. I didn’t regard myself as a person in that moment; I was a brainless pet rock at best (pet rocks are the worst type of rock, even worse than metamorphic). I couldn’t come up with an answer. I can shakily visualize going off on a strange tangent about “preparing dinner” as the one good thing I did in a tone so soft the students most likely couldn’t guess what I was saying. My enthusiasm hammered into the steps.

      He asked me to describe myself in two words. I must have said something generic and sad like helpful or creative. I wasn’t creative, not in the slightest, as displayed by my borderline inanimate behavior for the last few minutes of my (as of that moment) wasted life. The fact that I said I was creative proves I was not creative. The only thing I can really, really vividly recall is the next and worst part. Mr. Ball said, “He also has persistence, as he has just shown.” That made me feel utterly worthless. I hadn’t prepared a speech, I didn’t have half the imagination needed to fabricate a few words, and worst of all, I had only mumbled unrecognizable concepts when Mr. Ball had practically given me the answers.

     As I walked back to my seat, I knew this was no one’s fault but my own. With my eyes watering, I thought how much better I would have done had I just been responsible in the slightest. In my head, there was that word. Over and over again. Persistence. I know it was meant as a compliment, a helpful comment, but it was like the worst thing conceivable. It was a dagger in my heart. I felt it, and as I am writing this, I feel it again.

     Then, after two or three more uneventful speeches, it was voting time. It was an anonymous vote, which in school means you put your head down and raise your hand. There was an equal distribution of votes, a very close three-way tie of three votes each. Unsurprisingly and dishearteningly, I did not get any votes. The class chose two representatives, so I voted for my friend (during the tiebreaker vote), confident he would get a spot, and he did. It was a horrible day after that, and it was most of the day, considering the incident happened around ten o’clock. It was as if I could not get up from the fall on those infernal stairs of life.

    Do you remember a time in your life when you didn’t prepare? I’m willing to bet it didn’t go too well. A test, a big dinner party, or perhaps even Christmas shopping (the lowest of low moments if you forgot). Your self-esteem could be hurt. That’s one of the worst things to be hurt about you, take it from me. Walking down the stairs of life, a lot can happen. People forget to prepare. It never, never ends well. So, there’s one clear takeaway from this cautionary tale: if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

-Zade S.