There aren’t too many times growing up when you just stop and pause for a second, look around and realise what a crucial moment you are living. In that moment you just know, that when you look back one day, you’ll know that it will be this moment you will remember, that rare moment when you caught yourself becoming older, as if for just a fleeting few seconds it was as if you had stepped outside of your own body and were a stranger to yourself. 

You watch as you change right before your very eyes, the words you spoke echoing in your ears, the people that surrounded you, no matter how unfamiliar, always there, always present in that memory. 

I was in Montclair Library, New Jersey, standing before a Home Ed Book Club just seconds before I was about to speak when a moment like this happened to me. It was my very first event of Dawn of the Guardian’s North American leg of its Book Tour and I had spent the last two days working over my speech, usually reserved for Traditional School Visits or Assemblies, trying to find the perfect balance between easy-going and thought provoking, between memorable and serendipitous. 

After all, this was a last minute invitation to a Home Ed group meet-up that also included me giving a short talk on Dawn of the Guardian and my journey to publication. In short, I was laying my dreams out before them. I didn’t want to sound too formal or at the same time, too casual. I was collecting my thoughts about to address this group of children and teenagers and their parents when I realised my hands were shaking but strangely, not from the nerves that have plagued me leading up to this very moment. 

Whenever I try to explain the uncanny feeling of your stomach turning inside out like a washing machine gone mad, most people nod sympathetically before quickly following up with the words “But once you’re out there in front of everyone, you forget all about it don’t you? It just comes naturally and you can just talk.” 

Then it’s my turn to nod, trying to hide the fact that I’m not sure that I do forget. That no matter it be an Interview, a Presentation or a Public Speaking Engagement I’m always in a state of hyper awareness, conscious of every single movement and every single question and that my blood will only stop pounding like a drum when it is all said and done. The truth is, I’m never entirely sure what’s going to happen when I step out in front of a new group, my dream curled within my fingers, raw and real, and that behind my smile, I’m wishing with all my might, for nothing to go wrong and for my way with words not to freeze up like a lake encased with ice after a dark and brittle winter’s night. 

And so, there I stood, counting down the seconds to what I could only imagine would be a silence so very loud, watching the mother who leads Montclair’s Home Ed Book Club, the woman I had met only three minutes ago, to turn and face me so I know that it is my time to speak. She swivels around, so very slowly, her smile bright, her eyes encouraging and in that moment my muscles weaken and all at once it is as if I am floating. 

I see myself, my spine slightly curved and my ankles turned inwards by nerves. And all at once, as if a bright, clarifying spotlight has shone down onto me, I am forced to look my fear straight in the eye and in that same moment, I see it for all it is. All the intricacies, all the complexities, all so startlingly simple.

I take a step forward, clutching a copy of Dawn of the Guardian. My hands stop shaking and I push the hair out of my eye with a calm burning inside of me that I don’t remember experiencing before and then, as if we were all long lost friends, reunited after a journey and not just a group of people brought together by a shared love of books, I begin to speak. 

And for the first time and yet not, I know what it feels like to forget, to let the words flow like a waterfall, for the right word placed at the right time is like magic. It is only when I am done, after those peculiarly blurry, yet incredibly lucid four minutes that I know that when you open your heart out before people you have not yet met and lay your dreams into the palm of their hands, they will handle them with a care and kindness that you can only marvel at and that to trust is everything. But I had known this all along. 

I see these children and teenagers before me and I see my life reflected in their eyes and then without anyone knowing at all, I have changed. I have grown and I am not who I was just a few seconds ago. Without travel, without leaving my own little corner of the world and forcing myself into new and even uncomfortable situations, I never would have experienced that same all absorbing passion for writing and never truly looked deep into the very depths of my soul and listened to the whispers of my dreams.