Janine Krippner
I clearly remember my last night before I moved out of home to Hamilton for the start of my university education. I was terrified and struggled to get to sleep. Having lived in the same home my entire life, the thought of leaving it was the scariest thing I had faced so far. I have now lived in two other countries, visited around 30 volcanoes in about seven countries, and moved houses on average once per year.
A common reaction to my adventures is “I’m not brave enough to do that”. The thing is, being brave is not the absence of fear. I moved to the USA to start my PhD having never visited the country. I was scared. It was scary moving back home too. My way of coping has been focusing on what could go right.
One of the hardest scary times was heading to Kamchatka, Russia, for the second time to work on a couple of volcanoes. My first trip had gone horribly wrong. A plane was shot down over Ukraine when we were in the middle of nowhere with limited communications and little idea of what it meant. When I was back in the city of Petropavlovsk the pavement collapsed below my feet to expose an entire room below me. I miraculously caught myself with only minor cuts but was left with a lasting fear of walking across underground places like manholes. On top of that, near the end of the trip I experienced throat-tightening anaphylaxis with no help around.
Heading back the following year I was nearly paralysed with fear. I was in such a major state of denial, unable to face returning, that I prepared for the trip on autopilot, hoping that my visa wouldn’t show up so I couldn’t go. Once the plane took off I settled into a state of acceptance of my fate. I needed the data for my PhD. This ended up being one of the most amazing trips of my life with incredible Russian colleagues, a scalding hot two-year-old lava flow, bear encounters, and a diet of fresh salmon and caviar. I even witnessed a tiny eruption!
A lesson had been deeply ingrained from this experience – even when I’m feeling physically sick with fear, I can put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. We actually can get through scary things, and we can go forward stronger because of it, once we have done the inner work to recover from the ordeal.
We can do great things even when full of fear. People doing amazing things can still be totally unsure of themselves – we all have our silent battles and challenges to overcome. To understand volcanoes we go to some scary places with everything in place to reduce our risk of harm, knowing well what can happen if things go wrong. This isn’t unique to volcanology – look at our first responders, loggers, the deep-sea fishing industry. When you take a step back and look at humanity, we are far more impressive than we realise.
You can do the hard things, even when you don’t believe in yourself. You are stronger than you think.
