Fear + Courage
Reading Time: 3 min
Building resiliency through outdoor adventure is a subject I’ve spent a lot of time on, but I haven’t shared much about how stretching my tolerance for discomfort shows up in my “indoor” life. For better or worse, most of life happens indoors for many of us. I really thrive off being outside on a trail or a river, but I can’t do laundry or work a 40-hour work week from my packraft (unfortunately).
I’ve had 3 events this year that have activated a level of fear that is not dissimilar from spending a night in the woods being stalked by wild animals. The reason I think this is important to talk about is because from the outside fear can be invisible. There’s a common misconception that courage is the absence of fear, but in fact to be courageous is to invite fear along. Fear only becomes unhelpful when we resist it. That’s not to say it ever becomes comfortable - it’s very uncomfortable. So in the spirit of embracing fear and celebrating courage, here’s what has scared the ***t out of me this year:
Taking my first live shift as a volunteer youth crisis counselor. There’s no amount of training that can prepare you for supporting someone that may be relying on you in a life or death moment. It sucks while it’s happening, and it sucks afterwards because you will never hear about or talk to that person ever again. This was during my winter whitewater paddling season, and I remember being scared at the top of so many rapids, grateful for the opportunity to practice regulating my nervous system so I could keep it together during my crisis counseling shifts. Grateful and scared.
Coming out in the voter’s pamphlet. I’ve lived in the same community for 14 years and most people don’t (didn’t) know that I’m queer and trans. Being a visibly queer person in a leadership position was one of the reasons I ran for the school board, so of course I had to identify myself as LGBTQ+ in my candidate’s statement. I felt sick to my stomach submitting it. My fear was telling me that I’d just invited a wave of hate crimes into my life. When the pamphlet showed up in my mailbox (and everyone else’s!), it took a few days for me to be able to open it.
Being interviewed on a podcast. My immediate thoughts after being asked to be a guest on a podcast were “no no no no” and “yeah I’m probably going to do that.” Also known as fear and courage. They’re an odd couple. After spending several weeks dreading the interview, and then more stressful weeks waiting for the episode to be produced, I got an email with a link to the recording. I made a plan to listen to it the following day with my partner, and spent the night waking up intermittently, gripped with anxiety. The 22 minutes it took to listen to it were miserable. I felt like I was about to witness my own horrible accident. And then it was over, and nothing bad happened.
The funny thing about each of these events is that I could do them all over again and they wouldn’t be half as scary. Each one felt like a precipice, just like a 10’ rock roll on my mountain bike. No matter how confident I am in my skills, the fear is all over me like a heavy blanket and all I can do is let it stop me, or take it along for the ride. We don’t always make it without crashing or swimming a gnarly rapid, but to this day I don’t have any regrets about the risks I’ve taken, indoors or outdoors.
