Figure It Out
Learning to Trust Yourself
In the summer of 2022, I became a whitewater raft guide in Buena Vista, Colorado. To become a guide, you need to complete two weeks of training and pass a test. Training is two weeks of hell, trauma bonding and rethinking all previous life decisions. My rookie year, we spent the first week getting snowed on while swimming class 3+ rapids. In a twenty-four-hour period, I rafted in a snowstorm, swam a class 4 rapid, got hypothermia, and went into anaphylactic shock. Training pushes you to limits you didn’t know you had, physically and mentally. A trainer tells you to get out of the boat, and you have to decide whether you’re going to jump into thirty-five-degree water or get cut. Moving abroad is a lot like raft guide training.
We have a saying at my company: we look at one another and scream at the top of our lungs, “FIGURE IT OUT.” This comes from training, when on day two, our trainers threw themselves into freezing water and started screaming, “Save me, save me!” When we had no idea what to do, one of them looked me in the eye and screamed, “Figure it out! That’s your job!” In whitewater, you make split-second decisions. If something goes wrong and people are swimming, it’s on you to get them out of the water, to right a flipped raft, to keep people safe. It’s on us, as guides, to figure it out. This was a running joke at my company, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve whispered it to myself these past ten weeks.
Week one of rafting - this was a scary trip for all of us :)
I told myself this when I decided to adopt a dog, I would figure it out. And then, when I decided to move to Spain, I would figure out how to get Cinder there. Once I arrived in Madrid, I had to figure out where to live, how to find roommates, how to navigate the language barrier, and how to connect with students twenty years older than me.
The inside of the van we lived in after my car was totaled
My entire adulthood has been built on a foundation of figuring it out. Friends, family, teachers, coaches, love to ask questions I don’t have the answers to. “If you get a dog at 19, how are you going to travel?” At nineteen I didn’t know about pet visa’s, or that moving to Europe was even something I wanted. But I had enough faith in myself that I would be able to work around the obstacles. I’ve had family members accuse me of getting a degree that couldn’t be translated into a career. At the time I didn’t have answers for them, but I trusted that I could make it work. The first time I went abroad I ran into a huge roadblock in my visa, and called my dad in tears. “Sounds like you’re just not going to Spain. Sorry”. I refused that answer, that simply wasn’t an option. I found another way around.
The “Figuring it out” isn’t always as much fun as it sounds. Being homeless in Madrid, working through calling landlords that didn’t speak English, that didn’t like Americans, that didn’t want to lease to people in their twenties, was brutal. Going to sleep some nights realizing I didn’t know where I was going to sleep the following day was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. However, I promised myself when I committed to this program that I wouldn’t give up because it got hard. I trusted myself to take on the massive challenge that is moving abroad, and had enough faith in my intelligence, people skills, and all around grit to make it work.
We’re socialized to think we need answers to all of the questions about our futures: to know exactly what we want and just how we’re going to get it. But if you’ve ever rafted, you know half the fun is not knowing exactly what’s going to happen. Knowing that you’re capable of handling a situation when something goes wrong is what opens up endless opportunities.
So here’s to Ben, the marine turned raft guide, for reminding me to 'figure it out!' every chance he got. It’s what I told myself with every landlord that denied me, every roommate that bailed on me, and every person that told me moving abroad was a bad idea.