The Class I Almost Didn't Take (And What Showed Up When I Went Alone)
A specific, slightly strange experience, the version of myself I met there, and why I keep signing up for things that make me mildly uncomfortable.
It’s 6:15 PM on a Friday, and this parking lot is oppressively silent. No soft static of street noise. No people cittering over new purchases on the sidewalk to distract me. Just me, my thoughts, and a cinder block wall I have been staring at for longer than I’d like to admit.
Maybe I should just bail. Get some takeout as a consolation prize. Hide at home.
Introduction to Junk Journaling starts in fifteen minutes. It’s my solo adventure for June, and I am sitting in my car feeling like a complete fraud.
I create, organize, and transform Excel spreadsheets for a living. My planner is spick-and-span, assembled with whimsical but useful stickers, boxes, and stencils. Junk is not a positive word in my lexicon. I do not save trash for the memories. I always tell myself I should keep the birthday cards my mom sends me — and then I’m cleaning off my desk and the card is lost to the clutter purge. I am not the target audience for this.
Yet here I am. Signed up, fee paid, in the parking lot.
Sigh.
It takes four deep breaths to get from my car to the door. Well. Here goes nothing.
I Am Still Nervous Every Single Time
You would think I’d be an old pro at this by now. I’ve been taking solo classes since 2019. Alas, still nervous at the start of every single one.
My journey into solo class-taking started when I noticed I simply couldn’t begin things. It crept in the way these things often do — as an innocuous, almost playful quirk. I struggled to set up a plan to improve my cooking. Hundreds of recipes saved in folders, never to be seen again. I lived in fear of restarting Pilates. I hadn’t been in a class since college, and we didn’t use the fancy machines then. What if I embarrassed myself and fell off the reformer?
I didn’t know why I couldn’t just make it happen. Read the recipe and write the grocery list. Call the studio. Set up a free introductory class. The simplest things felt insurmountable. Blank Word documents where the cursor’s silent staccato mocked me. The inability to pick anything to start on. I was stagnant, stressed, and had nothing to show for all my worrying. The executive dysfunction was real: if I wasn’t already overwhelmed by the size of a task, I was frozen by the fear of not showing up perfect.
Booking and attending a class forced me to complete something, start to finish, often with people watching. I was terrified. Still am, sometimes. But I go. And by going, I’ve done something. That’s the whole trick.
What Actually Happened Inside
The class is softer than I expected. I am greeted by a warm chorus of welcomes from the staff and teacher.
We didn’t have to bring anything. Thank god, because trash day was Wednesday and junk I was a-lackin’. We each got our own box with a curated selection of materials and a brand-new journal. I settle into the end seat at the first table I see, fidgeting with my fingers. It’s all women here. A local romance bookstore hosts the event, so no surprises there.
I recognize a few faces. We exchange polite hellos. Some of the women start talking about books, and I listen as the tension begins to leave me. By the time we’ve moved on to the new Brynne Weaver dark romance, the teacher signals that we’re starting.
I feel my nerves kick back up.
I open my box and start pulling things out, making a small pile of items that feel like my vibe. It isn’t much — most of the materials are bright pastels, and I am more of a rich, moody girl — but I can work with this. I start slow, decide I don’t like it, and sweep everything off the page. Start again. Still not feeling it. Woosh. I have not even torn the packaging on my glue stick. Nothing has been permanently set. I am the only one with a blank page, and I can feel the imposter syndrome knocking. The you don’t belong here‘s. A whispered this isn’t your thing.
The teacher has been talking this whole time, but I haven’t been listening. Until this:
“You should crumple some paper. It makes it feel more lived-in. Real. It doesn’t need to be immaculate.”
That line gets through.
I stop. I take the paper I keep wanting to use as a background, crumple it, unmash it, and glue it to the page without second-guessing myself. That texture on my previously blank void settles something in me. Character caused by crinkling, then flattening, somehow makes everything better. I am no longer staring at the barrenness, asking it to give me something. I have added the first life to the page.
One small change. An uneven surface. And all of a sudden, it works.
A reminder of something I often forget: I don’t have to be perfect. I need only show up. Trying before you are ready is exactly what builds your confidence.
The Version of Myself I Keep Meeting in These Rooms
Solo classes have become a trust exercise: letting myself do something without judgment, and allowing myself to discover new parts of who I am.
I get lost, sometimes, in the ideas other people hold of me. I need to show up as the rigorous data analyst. The understanding friend. The helpful daughter. These are real parts of me. But I spend so much time in those roles that I forget to step out of them and just be Laura for a while. The muscles of my personality atrophying from neglect, I look in the mirror and see myself but don’t quite feel myself.
The push into solo adventures came from a book: How to Be Yourself by Ellen Hendriksen. I read it in 2019, in the middle of a relationship that had quietly emptied me. I would go to sleep thinking I was never going to move forward because I couldn’t accomplish even one thing, including leaving a relationship with someone who made me feel less interesting than beige paint.
Hendriksen has a chapter called Get Started and Your Confidence Will Catch Up. The premise: most of us wait to feel like doing something before we do it, when in reality the opposite is true. If you do the thing, you show yourself you can, and that’s how trust in yourself builds, slowly, over time.
When I read that, I knew I had to take a leap. One single step in the right direction, no matter how small, even if I was shaking the entire time. I just needed one. And if it was awful, I promised myself I would never do it again.
So, armed with my Groupon app — it was 2019; Groupon was still good! — I scrolled through available experiences and bought a two-class ballroom dance package. To stop myself from chickening out, I called the second the confirmation hit my inbox. I was learning the cha-cha two days later, having the time of my life dancing to Danza Kuduro.
It worked. It keeps working.
The me who arrives at the beginning of a class is completely different from the me who leaves. The Laura from two hours ago? Don’t know her. Personable ballroom dance beginner? Check. Encouraging cozy craft lady? She is me.
Each class, I get to learn something new about myself while proving to myself I can do hard things. I’ve learned I love to chiffonade my herbs and ask people what their favorite meal of all time was. That the bachata is the best ballroom dance, and I was put on this earth to do as many cha-cha walks as a dance floor allows. I contain multitudes, and they all deserve some time in the spotlight.
Going alone lets me be fully in the moment, and fully in the challenge. There’s no friend to lean on, no one to hide behind. My learning and enjoyment are just mine to hold. It has become a sacred ritual: allowing myself the space to see who I am when I am standing alone. No life vest. Sink or swim.
More often than not, I get to float on a cloud of joy.
You Have My Permission
Being open to being bad at something often means you end up being halfway decent at it, because at the end of the class, the page isn’t blank. You’ve cooked something new. You’ve existed in a new space. And that is genuinely incredible.
So go forth. Sign up for the class you’ve been thinking about for months. Or do a quick search right now and pick the first one that sounds interesting. You don’t have to be ready. You just have to get from your car to the door.
You can come back and tell me everything.
But first — what’s one thing you’ve almost talked yourself out of, and what happened when you didn’t?
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