Lyle Monroe Bensley, a 19 year old from Galveston, Texas, attacked a random woman in her home Aug. 17. According to MSNBC, Bensley hissed at the woman, warned her he needed to feed, and attempted to suck her blood by biting her neck. He later claimed to be a 500 year old vampire.

Let’s assume our goals for the new school year are average; we want to avoid pain, suffering, Mt. Everest sized piles of homework, and stress. If we spent every moment petrified that Bensley’s buff, biker-gang older brother felt like visiting our street, we probably wouldn’t get a lot done. We’d get an armed escort and when we came home each day, we’d be too terrified to do homework and would spend the night welding titanium bars over all the windows. Thus, homework piles would reach perilous levels, causing them to topple, which causes pain, suffering and stress.

The point of this anecdote is not to glaze people’s eyeballs with absurd amounts of frankly bizarre drivel. The single common denominator relating Bensley and our new school year is fear.

Most people are afraid of something. According to a 2006 article in Forbes magazine, the average child today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the ‘50s. Certainly most high school students fret about their grades, jobs and bank accounts. Unfortunately, we run the risk of being swallowed by our worries, consumed by them until we are smothered and can’t even figure out how to change our lifestyle to alleviate them.

The solution? Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about Bensley’s nonexistent older brother or a potential tower of assignments. Especially freshmen, or those who are freshmen at heart, don’t be afraid to take up a new sport or try something you’ve never heard of before. You don’t want to have regrets at the end of the year, or wish you’d challenged yourself a little more. #

(Columns represent the opinion of the writer)