Courage — Say It

The professor had written 1920 on the board.

Maya had written it in her notebook and stopped. She looked at it. Then back at the board.

1919. She was almost sure. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. She’d read it twice in the textbook. But the professor had a PhD and had taught this course for eleven years, and there were forty people in the room all writing 1920 without question, and maybe she was wrong, and maybe it didn’t matter, and maybe—

She looked around. Nobody else had paused. The girl next to her had already moved on to the next line.

Maybe I’m remembering wrong.

The professor kept talking. The board still said 1920.

Here’s the thing about courage that nobody tells you: it almost never arrives as certainty.

The moment before Maya raised her hand, she was not confident. She was not sure. She had already constructed a complete and convincing argument for staying quiet: I might be wrong. It’s just a date. He’ll catch it later. Everyone will be annoyed at having to re-erase.

All of this was possibly true.

She raised her hand anyway.

“1919,” the professor said, after a pause. “You’re right. Good catch.”

He corrected the board. A few students groaned and erased. The girl next to Maya quietly fixed her notes and gave her a small nod — the kind that doesn’t require any words.

It was over in thirty seconds.

What Maya didn’t know in that moment, and wouldn’t know until years later: she’d done it before. In a different class, in a different year, about a different wrong thing written on a board. And she’d probably do it again.

Not because it got easier. It didn’t, really. Not the breath before the hand goes up. Not the half-second of exposure before you know if you’re right.

But because she’d learned something about the moment after. That it was survivable. That the small version of the thing was the same shape as the larger version — same hesitation, same calculation, same decision.

The math of courage is simple: the more times you choose to say the thing when it’s small, the shorter the gap becomes between the moment you notice something is wrong and the moment you say so.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick.

It never gets easier. You just get faster at deciding.