Face your fears…and have a good time doing it.

On Sunday, I went skiing with two of my roommates and one of their friends. I haven’t been on skis in almost exactly 10 years, and the last time I was on the slopes I got banged up pretty bad snowboarding about 5 years ago. Over that time period, I developed a (rational? irrational?) fear of snow sports, as each time I’ve been, I’ve been either injured beforehand or afterwards.

Fast backward 10 years –

During the winter break of my freshman year of college, I met up with a high school friend for a college ski night at a local mountain in Pennsylvania. I had been skiing only once prior as a kid, and it seemed like my friend was a bit more experienced. Throughout the night, I stuck to the easy slopes, but eventually about the time it was getting dark, he got a little frustrated with my lack of skill and wanted to try a more difficult slope. “You’ll be fine!” he told me.

Not wanting to chicken out, I decided to give it a shot. When we got off the ski lift, I immediately regretted it. The trail he wanted to do looked to me like a sheer drop off a cliff combined with a series of alternating 90-degree turns, with a healthy dose of insanity mixed in. I wanted no part in that; I truthfully was not capable of completing the run safely, and have the scar to prove it.

He set off in front, and I bravely followed. The first 90-degree turn? I completely missed it. In my defense, it looked more like a jump to me, which in my brilliant split-second thinking offered a way out: if I went over the “jump”, I wouldn’t have to fail to complete the turn and wipe out into the trees behind it.

So over the “jump” I went, already travelling way too fast. Turns out “french fry” is the ski term for “gas pedal to the floor”. Up, up, and away I sailed! My airspeed and elevation above ground both were far greater than I had ever imagined possible when I had been evaluating my ski skill potential not just three hours earlier.

The unfortunate thing about being a low-mass object immediately next to a high-mass object (i.e. the Earth) is that when separated, even by a relatively brief distance, you tend to collide again rather violently. Well, violently for you - the Earth never seems to notice. As I reached the apex of my trajectory, I realized two things: first, I was approximately a full story above the ground, and second, the ground itself was mostly full of rocks, with a bit of snow sprinkled in here and there. Being as I was in this unfortunate, high-speed situation, I did not have any sort of time to ponder which of these two conditions was of more immediate concern.

It turns out they both were equally relevant to my next position of distress. The collision was brief; the majority of the impact was taken by my right knee, my skis, and my boots. Somehow I managed to avoid any injury to my head or torso, or damage to my gear. I lay in shock and amazement in the middle of this newly discovered field of skiing-incompatible objects (I’d find out later that it was actually a trail they had closed because they didn’t have enough fake snow to go around). After a while, I decided to get up and realize that my knee hurt. Pretty badly. But my momma didn’t raise any weaklings, so I grabbed my skis and hobbled over to the slope. I put them back on and did my best to complete the trail, but eventually I gave up halfway and repeatedly sequenced through putting the skis on, immediately regretting it, and limping down the hill.

I truthfully don’t remember what happened next - sometimes when I tell the story, I say that I skied the rest of the night, but it’s also possible I just went back to the lodge and waited to find my friend. In any event, about an hour or so later, we’re in the rental area: me, my friend, his older sister, and her friend. I’m pulling my boots and jeans off (I wore sweatpants underneath), when I receive the first sign that something is seriously wrong: my right sock was completely soaked with blood. I mean soaked literally - I had never seen so much blood in my life. Up until that point, I thought I had just bruised my knee kinda bad, one of those “just walk it off, kid” scenarios.

My friend’s sister happens to look over and immediately becomes pale. It’s not just my sock that’s soaked, it’s the entire lower part of the leg of my sweatpants. I’m pretty upset - those were one of my favorite pairs of sweatpants; I had earned them during my senior wrestling season and wouldn’t be able to replace them.

The rest of the story isn’t exceptionally interesting. I finished the night with about 8 stitches just above my kneecap, no more serious injuries, and (apparently) a small pebble permanently stuck under my skin that the doctor either couldn’t find or was too lazy to bother to retrieve. What’s more interesting is how this traumatic event both shaped and didn’t shape my psyche for years later.

After I was completely healed (I had a follow-up with a orthopedic specialist about a week later and was still in a lot of pain; word-for-word his advice to me was “man up, it’s not that bad and you shouldn’t be in that much pain”), the incident contributed to (a) my perception of someone who was adaptable and could take the punches and keep on rolling and (b) my perception of myself as someone who should never put on a pair of skis ever again.

I’ve never had much interest in skiing, so believing (b) was of little consequence to me, but believing a) was at that time a core part of my identity. Not until I was diagnosed with diabetes over 5 years later did that start to change.

Fast-forward to present-day –

All of my three roommates are skiers, some more avid than others. One roommate suggested a ski trip this weekend (I’ve turned them down in the past, solely due to my concern for injury), but since it was going to be the last good day of the season, I decided to give it a shot. My other roommate was going and apparently was very rusty, so at least I had someone to hit the greens and (maybe) blues with.

The day went off to a slow start, but after a couple runs (and some pointed coaching on my friends’ part), I finally got the hang of french fry instead of the pizza technique I had previously been so reluctantly fond of. During my last few runs, I was carving up the snow and more or less looking like a natural. My friends were impressed, and truthfully so was I. I didn’t always have all that much confidence; one of the blue trails absolutely frightened me and I had to mentally fight my way through my fear to get down the hill.

During my last run, I was by myself and feeling pretty great. I was exhausted from a combination of too little sleep and too much adrenaline, and the mantra “Do something that scares you! Do something that scares you!” stuck in my head as I zip-zagged my way down the mountain. I wiped out twice - both falls were the worst out of the half-dozen or so times I fell during the course of the day - but each time I picked myself back up and reminded myself of the ever-so-eloquent “I’m just plain good at stuff” that I remind myself every time I try something new that I’m surprisingly not bad at. This new confidence has translated well in many areas of my life: if you approach a situation with confidence, you astronomically improve your chances of success on any metric that you might choose.

The ski trip was a blast. I had a lot of fun not only skiing, but also because I faced some extreme anxieties and overcame them. Every time I saw an exceptionally steep hill, or lost my stability and threatened to fall, I flashed back to that moment in the lodge staring at my blood-drenched leg, or on the table at the urgent care facility, the same leg numb from local anesthesia (but covered in far less blood!), unable to take my eyes off the doctor sewing my shredded flesh back together. Now those memories have been appended with a series of far more pleasant ones, ones that remind me of happy times and that make me feel proud to be myself.

Face your fears, and have a good time doing it.