Eleanor Roosevelt was right...

There's a magnet on my fridge back home that, while I'd always found pleasant, had never given much thought to. It's a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: "Do one thing everyday that scares you." It was easy enough to ponder over that phrase while I scouted the fridge for a gallon of iced coffee, but putting that advice into practice proved more difficult after the inconveniences of school, work and chores got in the way of my motivation. How could I go bunjee jumping when I had twenty pages of world history to crawl through?

I'm not a fan of being scared. I hide under covers during horror movies. I was a disaster whenever I had to take a shower after watching Psycho. But I realized that Roosevelt's words weren't telling us to be insane and go cliff diving or something. This quote is really reminding us that we should take the time to acknowledge our fears and to step outside our comfort zone once in a while.

And so begins the quest of getting over discomfort over most of life. Maybe the anxious of sorts can be perceptive writers, good listeners, yadda yadda, but it can be a real pain to look at every new situation as a death wish. That's not really living--that's observing others' lives and blending into them.

So maybe I won't be chatting up strangers by tomorrow evening, nor will I be flying jet planes anytime soon (or ever). But I'm not going to disregard every small step towards being a more relaxed, happy person. Even presenting this goal to the internet world was slightly intimidating. But now that y'all know about it, I can't back out, right? ;) So hey, if you see me on campus and whatnot, stop me and ask how project Eleanor is going.

As for today, the thing that scared me was submitting one of my short stories to Problem Child--a literary magazine at Penn State. Tonight the whole club is going to review and discuss it without knowing said submitter is sitting in that very room. Generally I take constructive criticism very personally, which is silly, because a suggestion to more fully round a character isn't saying I'm a hopeless failure at life who should just sit in my room with a tub of cookie dough. And yet my brain enjoys toying with me and jumping to such conclusions. So it should be interesting to see how I react to real criticism, not those polite peer reviews I've experienced in high school where the whole point is to play nice with the other children and not step on any toes. I'm tempted to skip this meeting and just pretend that my short story was a raving success, but that makes for a much less interesting story, no?

What's the worst that can happen? I can curl up in fetal position for a few hours and gain a pound or two from pity ice cream. Shit happens.

Namaste.