The black and blue badge of courage

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, Alfred. This is your friendly "mis-happed" columnist checking in with my latest adventure. In the spirit of healthy relationships, I have a confession to make. Through my column, I was attempting to pan handle moral support from you. I was a mere click of the mouse (or tap of the touchpad) away from sending off my piece titled, “Just one more reason why I’m awesome” to the Fiat. Well, I hadn’t really titled it yet, but that was more or less the direction that I was headed in.

The reason that I was feeling so self-satisfied is that I took my first snowboarding lesson last weekend. It was magical! I had a wonderful time and felt elated with myself for several days afterward. Aside from one grapefruit sized bruise on my arm and some surprisingly sore upper body muscles, I didn’t incur any serious bodily harm. While I was nervous to try the extreme sport (or decidedly less than extreme sport, in my case), I can’t say that it was a life changing experience. It was a step in the right direction, if anything at all, but certainly not worth the anxiety that I had invested into it.

I’m not saying that it was easy learning how to stand up on a piece of wood and then slide downhill sideways without crushing any small children, because there is a knack to all of those things. I can happily say that none of my “face plants” involved any innocent bystanders. Through excellent guidance from my Swain-appointed instructor, I even learned how to turn and stop, which is more than I can say for my last downhill skiing experience. Let us just say that walking down the slope with ski patrol is extremely humbling. Surely I'm not ready to challenge Sean White, or even to talk to him lest he catch some “weird and terrible snowboard funk” from me, because I am still a beginner after all and therefore a loathsome obstacle on the slopes. I can make it all the way down the “bunny hill” without falling, but I can not disembark the ski lift gracefully. Nope, I can’t get off the thing without numbing the old derrière. On the bright side, I am sure I’ve given the lift’s operator a few laughs.

It’s a strange approach to root against myself, but I thought that if I did poorly at snowboarding, I would have had a better story to write about in my column. Much to my dismay, it wasn’t as bad as I had expected. My success was pretty upsetting, because I had been putting it off for a long time. I just decided that I couldn’t do it, kind of like the way a finicky kid decides not to like onions before tasting them. Everybody loses. As a result, I’ve been missing out on something that I really enjoy, giant bruise and all. Just think of all the fun that I could have been having if I wasn’t such a coward. So in a way my success has proven that there are worse things in life than failing miserably at something, there is being too afraid to try it.

So that settles it, I will no longer be telling myself that I’m going to fail before I try something new and I will also do my best to stop soliciting therapy from my readers … you’ve already done enough. That last part might be difficult because I have a tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve and to use terrible clichés on a regular basis, but I hope that you’ll overlook these things in the interest of curiosity and find some entertainment in my stories. Until next time, try new things and give yourself a little slack if you don’t succeed the first time. If you were born great at everything, there’s a good chance people would secretly hate you.