Pizza or panic?

So I went to the local writer's group monthly meeting again last night. This time there wasn't a guest speaker so it was open mike night. No mike though, just a homemade podium that people stood behind to read their writing. I wasn't going to go to the meeting; I had spent most of the day working on a short story, and when it came time to make supper, I hadn't taken the pizza dough out of the fridge on time for it to warm up and start to rise. It was just a question of whether I should stay home and put the time into making the pizza all from scratch and miss the meeting, or open a couple of cans of soup and make it to the community centre on time.

I hummed and hawed about it for quite awhile though, back and forth, weighing my options, until it was even too late to put anything on for supper, except for the canned soup. So I took a shower, and got changed into what I hoped was my most 'writerly' looking clothing, - corduroy trousers, a wrinkled t-shirt , topped with a tasteful herringbone knit vest - and I printed off a couple of short stories just in case.

I guess I must have really wanted to read something, because when the speaker looked at me and asked if I had something to read, I didn't say no. I didn't allow myself to fade unnoticed into the background like I expected I would do. I told him, yes I had a story, but I had never read anything for a group before, so I wasn't sure.
With an encouraging smile, he told me that he took that to mean yes.

And I so I did it. I got up there and I read my story from beginning to end, and only with a few moments of complete panic that I somehow managed to swallow well enough to continue reading. I didn't do too badly, considering it was my first time. But it took a couple of hours for my pulse to settle down to normal, and when it did, I wondered just why it had been so important for me to do such a thing.

I finally came to the conclusion that in a way, I considered it a right of passage of some sort, that it was something I had to do to take myself seriously as a writer, putting myself out there in front of other writers and saying, look this is what I do. I write, and this is what I've written.

... I don't know if after hearing what I wrote has made anyone in the audience think of me as a writer, but I do, and right now that's what counts.