Photo courtesy of Brodie Muyskens.

I grew up believing that nothing in the wilderness could scare me. I crave new experiences, new places, and I love teaching people about being wild. I’ve scaled 13,000-foot peaks in a lightning storm, galloped on horseback through the Yellowstone River, lived out of an 80-pound pack for a hundred miles through the Rockies, carried canoes across my sunburnt shoulders on trails threatened by bears. I had never feared the wilderness.

But during Leadership Training (LT), for the first time, I got stuck.

I am a confident flat-water canoer, ten years in the stern, addicted to the ache of steering and the slow, delirious conversations that come with it. I thought whitewater would be the same rush, just louder.

However, the current didn’t care about my ten years of confidence. The rushing water beneath the canoe made my hands shake the paddle and my heart beat into my suffocating life vest. Tess McDonald ’29 and I flailed into the eddy on strokes I invented out of pure panic, and when it was over, I felt no relief at all.

Where was my confidence? My eagerness? I sat on a wet rock, red-eyed, beating myself up for failing at something I thought I loved.

The second run hammered me with icy spray, and I was too weak to dig my paddle in. I watched the gap between our boat and the group widen. I cried after, humiliated, certain that everyone saw me as a fraud. I was afraid of something I had grown up loving, and I didn’t have a name for that fear––but this one sat in my chest and stayed. I didn’t understand why something I thought I knew how to do made me so scared.

Anna paddled over and had me explain what was happening in my head, and through shallow breaths, I told her I felt mentally and physically weak, like ten years of confidence had dissolved in a hundred feet of rocky water. She listened and just let me experience the feeling. Then she moved me into her bow––a comforting yet embarrassing act of reassurance. To me, being moved felt like proof that I was weak.

Instead, it was a reassignment of trust. My job was to watch the water, call the rocks, read the current and guide the stern from the front. I had no room to spiral. I slapped the “BORN TO KILL” tape Patrick Sullivan ’26 put on my helmet and got it together.

LT taught me that fear and love are not opposites, but sometimes they live in the same place—and that’s not a failure. I had always assumed courage meant the absence of fear. LT taught me that real leadership means learning to sit with fear without letting it define you. No one in my group ever made me feel lesser than for shaking in the stern of that canoe. No one lost trust in my abilities, and no one saw my tears on that rock as weakness. Instead, I was met with something I didn’t know how to receive at first: patience without pity. Growth doesn’t require mastery, and leadership doesn’t require being unshakeable. It requires being trusted, even mid-shake.

LT became a family, not because we never struggled in front of each other, but because we did, constantly, and kept showing up anyway. You will be undone in front of people, and they will not flinch. You will learn your limits and discover that naming them isn’t weak––but an act of leadership. You will be uncomfortable, and you will learn to be comfortable with the unknown. You will meet people whose paths you would never otherwise cross, who will change your life in unimaginable ways. Maybe you’ll meet someone with questionable music taste and incredible stories. Someone whose musical talents mesmerize you. Someone so intellectually curious they keep your mind racing for weeks. Someone who makes even eating backcountry dishes feel like something worth doing together. Someone whose laugh makes your whole day, and someone who is, without question, going to eat your soggy wrap that has overheated in your pack all day.

You will meet people who change you. And somewhere in the middle of that change, you might just meet yourself.

Natalia Danek Vasquez is a member of the Class of 2028.