Trekking forces honesty. The kind you can’t fake. You don’t get to outthink exhaustion. You don’t get to ignore your burning legs. The mountain doesn’t care if you’d rather pretend you’re fine. You either face what’s happening in your body, or it stops you in your tracks.
It’s a lesson I’ve tried to dodge in life. Pain shows up, and my first instinct is to sidestep it. Stay busy. Scroll mindlessly. Pretend it’s nothing. But pain ignored doesn’t fade—it festers. A quiet discomfort turns into something heavy, something that grips tighter the longer you look away.
The brain is always learning. Dodge a feeling, and it assumes that feeling must be dangerous. That’s why you’re avoiding it, right? So the next time sadness, fear, or frustration surface, your brain doesn’t just log them as unpleasant—it throws up alarms. Now, instead of just feeling bad, you’re afraid of feeling bad. That’s how you trap yourself.
People mistake endurance for strength. They think pushing through without acknowledging emotions is resilience. It’s not. Trekking has taught me that pretending everything is fine doesn’t make you tough—it makes you afraid of your own experience. The days I admitted, “I hate this climb, and my legs feel like lead,” were the days I actually made it to the top. Not because venting made the trek easier, but because honesty took the fear out of the struggle.
The same thing happens with emotions. Talking about them—even to yourself—teaches your brain they’re not threats. “I feel awful today.” “This is hard.” “I don’t know what to do with this feeling.” Say it. Let the words exist without rushing to fix them. Let them sit like an open window instead of a locked door. Because emotions aren’t problems. They’re just signals, and signals don’t need to be buried.
The moment you stop running from emotions, they stop chasing you. Just like that brutal ascent—once you turn to face it, it’s steep, it’s hard, but it’s never as impossible as your mind made it out to be. The fear was always the bigger problem.
So the next time your instinct is to shove an emotion into the background, don’t. Feel it. Name it. Let it unfold without resistance. Because the sooner you stop treating emotions like something to outrun, the sooner you realize they were never the enemy.
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