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Credit: Stephanie Dever

As I begin to write this column, my first column of the summer, I’m in my room surrounded by an intense amount of clothes, a couple boxes and other crap. Yeah, you guessed it, I’m moving. I’m getting the hell out of Northeast Ohio, thank God. I’m going to Western New York for this thing they call an internship for the summer.

I’ve lived my entire life in Akron, and now Kent, and moving away for the summer – even if it’s only two hours away – is rather intimidating, now that the time to go is right around the corner.

If any of you know me, you might know I like to consider myself a badass. (For example, see my Facebook profile picture. In it, I’m throwing up the proverbial middle finger to the Facebook world in the form of this column’s headshot, which obviously constitutes badassness.) I like to think I have this fantastic sense of sarcastic humor that hurts people’s feelings. Well, it doesn’t. And I know that, because I’m really not a badass. This comes as a surprise, I know. I’m really this short, skinny, 20-year-old girl who is scared to death to move out of Northeast Ohio.

This is the paragraph where I make myself vulnerable, which I’m not very good at (but who is, really?). I talk all this crap about wanting to “get the hell out of Northeast Ohio” (see above), but in reality, this summer I’m leaving a lot of things behind that I’ve never left before. There are a million people my age who leave their family and friends to go far away to college and they are happy to do so. But I can’t help being scared.

And really, I should probably just suck it up. It would make this whole transition easier. However, I’m not into making things easy. I would rather things be hard. I would rather be scared. I would rather revoke my self-imposed badassness than to have it easy because I think if it’s hard, that makes it worth it.

I think people often take the easy way out. I could have very well not taken an internship this summer. I could have lived at home, spent time with family and friends and flipped pizzas at Hungry Howie’s for yet another summer. I just finished my sophomore year, and really, this internship won’t even count as a course credit for Kent State. However, I decided, in order to kick-start my career as soon as possible, I would take this internship and run with it.

Now that I think about it, maybe because I’m taking the slightly harder road, perhaps that fact alone makes me a badass. Maybe, just the fact that many of us overcome the inevitable initial fear and move on to accomplish great things makes us stronger. In that case, I think I will re-invoke my self-imposed badassness, then.

So here I am, days away from walking away from everything I know so well and getting ready to step into a new life for two months. This opportunity in New York should make for some interesting and scary experiences this summer, and it would probably be much less boring if I could get some decent columns out of those experiences, but I’m not promising anything.

Kristina Deckert is a junior information design major and a columnist for the Summer Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].