Back in my good ol’ college days, I spent one summer working as a counselor at a camp for troubled-by-Jesus teens.1See also: Wrestling the Machine It being a camp painfully trying to impress these youths, it included such amenities as a zipline, swimming pool, snack bar, and, critical to this story, a paintball field.
Once a week or so, us counselors had the option of engaging in paintball wars alongside the kids in our respective cabins. I took advantage of this on occasion, but didn’t really enjoy it nearly as much as I expected I would.
The main reason why was because engaging in these wars taught me something very discomforting about myself:
In general, I am one timid pussycat.
Okay maybe it’s fairer to say that I’m “extremely risk-adverse, even when the stakes are embarassingly low.”
Shamefully, my instinctive battlefield strategy was to hide out like a sniper, hoping my more bold teammates would do all the dirty work for me. For some dumb reason, I was deathly afraid of getting hit by a stupid little paintball. This was further stupified by the fact that, unless you were a fancy kid and brought your own high-quality paintball gun, you were stuck with a standard-issue, low-muzzle-velocity gun that the camp provided.
I mean, it would probably more effective and painful if we were just throwing them at each other.
As I am wont to extreme introspection, I found myself diving deep into my psyche, trying to understand this fear of slow-flying paintballs, and how I could better my image of myself in my own eyes. After all, if a man-boy doesn’t have his pride, then what does he have?
So what solution did I come up with? I was going to stare down my fears head-on…by means of a firing squad.
You see, the camp had a policy that required that “any paintballs taken onto the paintball field must remain on the paintball field.” So at the end of the match, if there were any unfired rounds, they had to be expended. In other words, the participants were already pointlessly shooting off an immense amount of ammo. Instead of letting all ‘dem ballz go to waste, why not just have them all unloaded on me?
Following the next session after I had had this ----- brilliant idea, I gathered my campers around and explained my plan to them. Sure, it took a little convincing them that this was what I did indeed want to do, but I was ultimately able to get them on board with my awesome, can’t-go-wrong plan.
Wearing no more protective gear than a face mask, I took 25 paces from where they had been instructed to line up shoulder-to-shoulder.2Bonus points for historically accuracy, right? I gently crossed my hands over my own precious paintballs–after all I had my legacy to protect–and yelled:
Alright you little mother ----- , give me all you got–and don’t stop until you got nothing left in the barrel!
Somebody THat was implicitly hired to be A positive role model
I had to resist the urge to dodge them, given that most of them were coming at me so slowly that I could have gone all Matrix on them. But two of those little ----- had brought their own weaponry…and, not coincidentally, knew how to aim. Yeah, they made me pay the price for my hair-brained idea.
Afterwards I counted around 25 welts and bruises covering me from neck-to-toe. You can bet your sweet butt that I wore every single one them as a badge of honor. Though it wasn’t my plan, I ended up being revered as a God3Sorry Mom, if I try to use g-o-d (with a little “g”), it gets censored, and then this sentence makes no ----- sense. walking amongst those teenage boys the rest of that week.
And I though I wasn’t some sort of paintball pro after that, at least I could be a true fearless leader to them youngsters. No longer afraid of death, my new strategy for being a positive role model was charging head-on at the pubescent enemies in an insane manner as possible. Usually I would go down in a blaze of glory–but not before providing more than enough cover for my kids to come in behind me and take out all those enemy chumps.
The point of the story is that sometimes you just gotta face down your fears in the most uncomfortable way possible if you want to truly overcome them. As a bonus, you just might inadvertently demonstrate to some kids what it looks like to have someone willing to “die” for them.
Well, won’t you look at that? In the midst of my sheer stupidity, them kids got their Jesus-themed lesson in after all…
Content created on: 12 & 13 March 2020 (Thursday/Friday)
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