The best way to conquer your fear is to understand that which you fear. Except spiders. Even though I have watched multiple documentaries on those things, they never fail to creep me out.

The reason I bring this up is because I recently had a violin recital, and for this recital that left me shaking for an hour afterwards (I have extreme stage fright), I had to wear a dress that required a steamer to clean it so the dress didn't have to be put in the washing machine, because we don't want to wear things out that we will most likely only put on ten times max. So a steamer appeared in our kitchen. Now, I say 'appeared' because I really don't know how it got here. Either we've had it all along and I just didn't notice it during my very fast trips to the basement, which is home to many spiders and very long, hairy centipedes, or my parents rented it to steam my dress. Either way, I walked into the dark kitchen, turned on the lights, and almost knocked over the steamer because anything that scares the shit out of me gets punched (except for spiders, I just screech while running away to get lighter fluid).

This episode also doubles as a PSA to any possible burglars. Your life will be on the line if I catch you with anything less than military-grade armor.

Luckily for the steamer, I had freshly filled water bottles in my hands, and I'm not risking the wrath of the wet sock and hardwood gods by dropping those puppies. So the steamer remained intact, and I tried to get my heart rate back down to zero, because I have been told multiple times that I do not posses a heart. I realized that I would probably have nightmares about that stupid steamer because in the dark it looked creepy as fuck, and my subconscious can be a dick. So, to prevent any possible variation in my regular schedule of terrible sleep, I tried to understand how it worked, and after fiddling around with things that might have possibly broken it, I understood how easy it was to ruin it. Now I'm not terrified of it at all, and will continue to wake up in a cold sweat every night due to extreme terror not caused by a steamer.

Fun.

At the beginning of this episode you probably thought I was going to talk about how I conquered my stage fright, so LOLOLOL. But seriously, I wish. Really, any tips would help. I wasn't supposed to play the entire piece using ricochet (for anyone who doesn't play a string instrument, ricochet is a technique where you bounce your bow on your string in a very hard-to-manage way. My hand was shaking that much).