Looking at Fear's Ugly Face

Fear said 'hello' to me again when one weekend my friends were planning to go wall-climbing and asked me to come along. I went along, but I didn't go climbing. I just sat down looking at them climb that wall and went wondering whether or not I'd be able to face it again.

My fear of heights. Of falling. Of dying.

As I sat there on the bench looking up at that wall, at my friends scaling it, I recalled events that happened almost 8 years ago during college. Fresh in my early twenties, I just got off a potentially deadly traffic accident. I was unscathed, and the car only sustained minor damages. If things were only an inch different (or a second too early, a second too late, a heartbeat away), I'd probably have said good bye to this life 8 years ago. But that was not the case, and at the time I suddenly felt invincible.

It might be considered foolish, but I felt as if I could face anything. Thus, I chose to go do some outdoor activities. I was always wondering whether or not I could survive out there. At the time in my campus there's this nature lover group that was recruiting new members, and it was probably easy to guess that I signed up for it. To be accepted, we have to go through this initiation process where we have to try every routine activities they had back then (camping, rock climbing, kayak-ing, cave exploration, rafting, SAR simulation, survival in nature, etc.). Before the initiation activities we had to learn all the necessary skills in theory classes that our seniors had set up (tying knots, setting up camps, packing your bags, etc.).

I only realized that we were in for a rough time when they told us that we need to carry our at-least-15-kg-heavy back packs all the time. It was not such a good idea after all, I thought to myself.

I could not back out of it. I was already in too deep, backing out would make me feel like a wimp for the rest of my life. However, something was pulling me back so hard at the time, telling me that going was a really bad idea. Maybe it was the idea of leaving the comfort of proper civilization that was pulling me back. Maybe it was my sudden lack of confidence. Anyways, when I tried that heavy bag on I knew that it was not going to be easy. But, like I said, I was in too deep and I felt that there were no other choices.

One by one my friends started to climb that wall, and my mind took me back to a night so long ago when I was sleeping along with the other would-be members of the nature-loving group. We set up camp under a cliff that night, a cliff that some of my friends were assuming we would be climbing the next day. Turned out that it was not, but the cliff I climbed was somewhere near. This is where I faced my biggest fear. Rock-climbing has always been one of the items in my list of things I would probably never do in my life due to my fear of heights. I remembered how scared I was that day, how frustrated my seniors were from trying to tell me to go ahead and give it a try anyways. Finally, I put my right hand on the first grip that I could find and started climbing. The cliff was not hard to climb, in all truthfulness, as there were a lot of grip points. My biggest challenge was facing my fear of heights and of falling. My energy was mostly taken away just to muster up courage to pull myself up ever so slowly. Halfway my senior yelled from the ground and told me to yell the group's name. Took awhile to tore my eyes from looking at the cliff face and looked down. It came out more like a whisper than a yell...

They told me to yell again when I finally got on top. It came out okay, but felt a little held back. I knew that it was not over.

Looking at a friend hitting the wall when he was being belayed down snapped me back to the present. When he finally came back to solid ground I told him to...

"Use your feet to break your impact against the cliff face!" My senior from the ground below yelled at me as I attempted to rapple down the cliff face. I was hugging the cliff face using my knees, afraid to let go and afraid of the heights. I kept telling myself that I would have to go down, there's no other way to avoid it. After some time, slowly I gathered my courage and using both my feet I propelled myself against the cliff face while slowly letting go of the rope. The going was slow, but as I neared the ground everything started to go smooth as I know that I would soon be relieved from the strain of having to muster up courage everytime I propelled myself against that cliff face.

The wall my friends were climbing was not as hard as the cliff face. The grips were large and quite comfortable. As I sat there, I knew that I could scale that wall. Fear, however, lurked behind my mind and teased. It reared its ugly face at me and it scared me.

For some strange reason, however, it excited me as well.

Many things happened during that journey to nature 8 years ago (the stories can make one long entry, something that I'm not keen on doing at the moment but will probably do so in the future). My personal fear visitted many times during that journey. It would probably too far-fetched to say that the journey completely changed who I was, but I did learn a lot of things about myself. I saw the dark side of me then (and was not proud of it, knowing that I could have been better). I also learn that fear is air with my face on it. But I believe that the most important thing I learned during the journey was that it created in me a heightened sense of respect towards nature in all its beauty and dangers. There's never a moment in my life when I look at the mountains and not think about whether or not I could make it again. The journey. There's never a moment in my life when I look at nature and did not feel an ever-growing respect towards it.

Maybe I did change.

In any case, this old friend visitted me again, and I felt its challenge. I vowed to myself to face it and get it over with the next weekend.

And get it over with I did.