by Kate Newman on February 1, 2012

My first impression of university president Jim Danko as he addressed the sophomore class shocked me: This guy was nervous. The president! Nervous! He fiddled with his microphone, searched the audience for his wife, very similarly to all of the things I do when I give a speech in class and feel more like vomiting and running from the room than actually speaking.

According to Pres. Danko, I should probably have that feeling more often. This speech is well-timed for much of the sophomore class, a time that is so often referred to as a “slump” that it is cliché (and where there’s smoke, there’s fire with those sort of things. Love is blind! Reach for the stars! Go with your gut!)

I’ve found that the best way to pull myself out of a slump is to do something that gives me that first-day-of-class-introduction-speech-in-a-foreign-language wave of nausea.  Whether it’s trying hot peppers on pizza (I never looked back after that one) or diving into a new relationship (or in some cases out of an old one), the things that seem terrifying usually turn out pretty wonderfully.  Or not. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

As a kid, I was as much in love with piles of mud and pill bugs as any other squirt on the playground, but my adventurous streak was more or less suffocated by my desire to be “the good one” for my recently divorced parents (and, I’ll admit, occasionally to see my little brother in trouble—sorry Mike!). I didn’t like mushrooms, didn’t ride roller coasters, didn’t publish my poetry under my own name in the school literary magazine.

I was a chicken, and my life got pretty boring. NO MORE! I now put mushrooms in, on, or around most things I eat. I rode TWO roller coasters this summer with moderate success (thank God for Dramamine). I’m still a little shy about sharing my poetry, but hey—my name’s on this blog, isn’t it?