Risking embarrassment is cheap. Most people won’t remember your awkward moment past the weekend.

You are the only person who replays it. Everyone else is running their own highlight reel of things they said wrong, and your stumble is a minor item in somebody else’s Tuesday, gone by Friday. The fear is calculated as if the audience will carry it for years, and almost nobody does.

Use that to do the thing you have been avoiding on the grounds of looking stupid: the question in class, the audition, the ask. Keep a note of one old embarrassment and check whether anybody has mentioned it since. The answer tends to be instructive.