I kept journaling, writing about how once I got to college I was going to talk to people, how I was going to change, how I was going to face my fears as if my life depended on it (which it did). This journaling was a form of precommitment: nine months of telling myself that I would take action would force me to swallow those promises if I didn’t follow through, and knowing that helped make me believe that I could do it.
