Blue Monreal

Fears. We all have them, some useful, others not. At their best, they give us a healthy dose of caution and promote self reflection. At their worst, they can be daunting, all-consuming and limiting. When we stay quiet about them, they control us. To regain control, we have to confront our fears. In this column, five brave interviewees are sharing with us how they face theirs. Our first conversation was with the amazing Lillian Frank ’25, an enthusiastic Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) leader and whitewater paddler.

Whitewater paddling is a fear-filled sport, but for Frank, it was an escape. It was something that she had to do to feel okay.

“I was coming to college with … a lot of fear, emotion and not feeling very present in my body,” Frank said.

Her fears came from scary things happening around her, like climate change, and from frightening experiences in her past. It was hard for her to feel like she was still grounded. The water was where she returned to her body, and now, where she finds joy.

“A lot of getting away from these all-encompassing fears I had was trying to come back to a way that I could experience joy again in a full and encompassing way,” Frank said. “Because, when you have those encompassing fears or there are really horrible things that happened to you, you can feel like you’ve never felt joy. It can be years where you think, ‘I don’t think I’m ever going to feel that feeling. I don’t even remember what that feels like anymore.’… Doing the whitewater stuff and then going abroad and then writing everything out brought me to that point where I felt like, ‘I can do this again.’”

At first, being in the water was about absolutely needing to do something. Frank intentionally put herself in high adrenaline situations “where you have to do this next thing in order to stay alive.” Having fallen out of a boat in whitewater, “you have to swim, you have to keep going because you don’t have a choice.”

Rivers were not the only body of water that helped Frank in this way. When her fears were overwhelming, she biked to the ocean, where she could immerse herself in the water until she had to stand up to breathe. She put herself in situations where her body needed to move. When fears pulled her into her head and away from her body, the water brought her back.

In the absence of water, when she feels overwhelmed by her fears, what is Lillian’s go-to?

“A bone crushing hug,” Frank said. “I’ve got some friends who give pretty great hugs…. And I think of the ocean as one big hug.”

The water and the hugs can all bring her back to her body, but hugs hold something more. Hugs reminded her that we are not alone. She said that a good cry helps too.

Frank’s journey to push through her fears was not a solitary one. She was lucky to have a huge support system, especially in her mother and the staff and students at the BOC. Her friendships at Bowdoin are unlike any she’s had before.

“[BOC Director Mike Woodruff] provides the space and opportunity to go paddling when you need to paddle it out,” Frank said. “If I was having a tough day, we’d just go paddle.”

Eventually, Frank began to experience joy again. She spent the summer of 2023 on the water, sailing the Schooner Bowdoin, the same vessel that Donald B. MacMillan commissioned to navigate the Arctic in 1920.

“The hardest thing I’ve ever experienced has made the first joy I felt again after it the most wonderful thing ever,” Frank said. “On the Schooner, … we were sailing in the middle of the night…. I was standing on the bow, and I watched these dolphins start coming around our boat bathed in bioluminescence. And so they look[ed] like things out of ‘Avatar’ or something. And they were just dancing along the boat and jumping up and down [alongside] the bow. And it was just like that moment in nature when you think, ‘I’ve never seen something this beautiful.’ But I also thought, ‘I’m worthy of experiencing this moment.’ And tears were coming down my face.”

“We’re not going to age out of our fears,” Frank said. Instead, Frank believes we just need to not give them so much power. Frank recalls her mom asking her, “Lilli, where’s your Lilli power?” Lilli responded, “It’s right here. It was gone for a while, but it’s back now.”

Frank hopes that sharing her story will help people who have had similar experiences and wants to be a supportive resource for anyone who would like to talk.

Lillian Frank is a member of the Bowdoin Orient.