Courage is doing the right thing with your voice shaking and your friends watching.

Courage usually gets pictured as being unafraid, which excuses nearly everybody. The real version is far less impressive from the inside. Your voice is unsteady, you know exactly how it will land, the people whose opinion you care about are standing right there, and you say it anyway. That is the whole of it.

Think about the sentence you have been not saying. Keep it short and plain, because long explanations hand everyone something to argue with. Accept that you will replay it that night, and that it will matter less by the weekend than it does in the moment.