People love to tell you to be confident, to trust yourself, to seize the moment. What nobody warns you about is that confidence, unchecked, is basically just a setup for a really good story later. Here are two of mine.

Part One: Fire Drill Confidence

Picture it: fourteen years old, a fire drill, the one event specifically designed to test whether humans can walk in a straight line under mild pressure. Everyone else is doing their best confused-sheep impression, and I, a literal teenager with the self-awareness of a brick, decide this is the moment to showcase my Olympic-level wheelchair piloting skills. No training required. I was simply built different. Fourteen-year-old me had main character energy and zero evidence to back it up.

Reader, I drove off a step like it personally owed me money.

Not a cute little stumble. A full, dramatic, front-wheels-first nosedive, the kind of move that makes gravity sit up and take notes. One moment I’m the picture of evacuation excellence, the next I’m folded forward like a turtle who’s just realised its shell comes with absolutely zero airbags. In front of my entire school. At fourteen. The one age group guaranteed to never, ever let you forget something like this.

And the real tragedy isn’t even the fall, it’s the sheer, unearned confidence seconds before it. That smug little “I’ve got this” thought, broadcasting live in my teenage brain, apparently existing for the sole purpose of being humiliated on a tight deadline. Alarm blaring, adrenaline pumping, and somehow I still had bandwidth to appreciate the comedic timing. Impressive multitasking for a kid who could barely remember his locker combination.

Did I laugh immediately at my own demise. Obviously. Did I spend the rest of high school insisting this was a freak accident and not a pattern. Also obviously, and we are both choosing not to discuss the pattern further.

Moral of the story: fire drills don’t just test the building’s emergency response, they test your ego, your spatial awareness, and your ability to transform into a startled turtle on command, all while your entire year group watches. 10/10 experience. Would absolutely rate fourteen-year-old me a flawless driver again tomorrow. The step, clearly, was the one with the attitude problem.

Part Two: The Day My Swimming Helper Forgot I Need Oxygen

Swimming lessons. Already a chaotic environment at the best of times, now add a brand new helper who has clearly never read a client file in her life. The task was simple: go under the water for five seconds, then come back up, and quickly cross the pool. Five seconds. A number so small a goldfish could manage it.

Enter my new helper, who apparently skipped the “humans require air” section of training.

She puts me under. Fine, so far, totally normal. Five seconds pass. Then ten. Then what felt like a small geological era. I’m down there having an increasingly urgent internal monologue about whether this woman thinks I come factory fitted with a snorkel. Meanwhile, instead of the brisk, purposeful walk across the pool that every other client was getting, I’m being escorted underwater at the pace of someone casually window shopping. No rush. No urgency. Just a leisurely stroll, client fully submerged, like we had all the time in the world and oxygen was merely a suggestion.

I would love to know what exactly she thought was happening down there. Did she assume I’d evolved. Did she think cerebral palsy came with a bonus set of gills nobody mentioned. Because the only logical explanation for that stroll is that she genuinely believed I could breathe underwater, and frankly, I respect the confidence even as I was quietly running out of air.

When I finally surfaced, equal parts relieved and personally offended, there was no dramatic gasping, no slow-motion hero moment. Just me, eyebrows raised, silently calculating how close that was to becoming a very different kind of pool story.

Moral of the story: new helpers should come with a basic orientation packet, and item one should read, in bold, “the client cannot breathe underwater, no matter how calm they look.” 10/10 swimming lesson. Zero out of ten lung capacity testing method.

Closing Thoughts

Two incidents, one recurring theme: confidence (mine or someone else’s) consistently outpacing actual competence. Would I change either outcome? Absolutely not. Great stories don’t write themselves, apparently they require nearly drowning or nosediving off a step first.