When Things Turn Out Not As Horrendously As You Thought They Would

Have you ever tried something new – scared to death as you went into it, but once you were in it, or once you were out of it, you realized it was a pretty great experience?

Sometimes, when you are about to try Brussels sprouts or fried calamari for the first time, you are bracing yourself for the nastiest taste your taste buds will ever come in contact with, but then you take the plunge, and lo and behold your taste buds feel happy!

Sometimes the plunge you are about to take is the literal one that entails jumping out of a soaring airplane. You are strapped to a big strong guy who knows what he’s doing, but your timbers are still shivering, clear up until the brief moment you’re crouching down and leaning forward out the wide-open airplane door… You’re like “holy %@$#!& what am I doing here!? mommy!!!!” But then, before you can blink one more blink, you’re careening thousands and thousands and thousands of feet downward in crisp clean cool fresh air, at a top speed of 130 miles per hour, with your facial skin attractively flapping in the wind. You safely and gently land on the ground, and you’re like “when can we do that again!?” ……and then you embarrassingly realize you’ve been hugging your big strong tandem instructor anaconda-style for literally a couple of minutes…… (because there’s just so much adrenaline still pumping full-blast in your blood, and you’re just so appreciative of him for helping you have the swellest skydiving experience ever!)

Sometimes you ask a handsome gentleman out on a date, face to face. For good reasons that have nothing to do with you, you get rejected, but you don’t feel dejected. On the contrary. You feel uplifted. Delighted, even. Obviously not because you just got a date, but because you and the gentleman both had just politely and respectfully communicated a conversation that was born with two inherent and distinct potentials: the potential to turn awkward, and the potential to improve the acquaintance you already had with each other. Your conversation ended up doing the latter; you both may have been nervous while talking, but after you had finished talking and parted ways, you eventually discovered that the future was filled with further mutual conversations during which you and the gentleman felt more at ease than ever before, because you both had effectively broken the ice once upon a time when you asked him out.

Sometimes you are a college freshman, and your adorable Tennessee roommate begs you to try out for the university’s cheerleading squad with her. Your initial response is “are you phreeking kidding me? don’t you understand how inadequate I am for that? I never cheerleaded a day in my life!” Oddly enough, though, you surprise yourself by going to the tryouts anyway. Your former-high-school-cheerleader roommate ends up making the team, and you expectedly don’t, because the painful truth is that you can’t tumble, toe-touch, or rhythmically clap while cutely yelling if all of the universe’s inhabitants depended on you and you alone to save them from their rapidly impending and inevitable atrocious doom. But there is something really neat that you took away from your mostly-ridiculous audition: you triumphantly learned the slick trick of being a backspot, which means you learned how to steady the tiniest cheerleader’s feet as she stood straight up, high in the air, for all the world to see, and then you caught her under her armpits once she gracefully and artistically fell back down. After the mostly-pointless tryouts were over, you went home not feeling utterly and completely humiliated; rather, you went home feeling like you learned a nifty skill—a forevermore useless skill—but a nifty one, nonetheless.

So I asked it once, and I’ll ask it again: have you ever tried something new, which you were astoundingly afraid to do, but you did it anyway, and you walked away from it feeling positively empowered? I wouldn’t be shocked if you have done this.

In the future, we will unavoidably happen upon more opportunities to try new things—opportunities that will deliver ants into our pants just thinking about them. When those opportunities present themselves, we can remember when we’ve successfully accomplished previous scary or milestone things. We’ve accomplished before, and we can accomplish again!