Facing my fears through darkness (official CHECC newsletter excerpt!)

 

As my time as a student slowly shuts its doors, I should like to share about what I have learned from the community of student cavers and caving in the past five years.

For many years I had grappled with the idea that I was not progressing in my confidence underground as I had previously anticipated. Caving is a skill to be defined and learned, and those who were naturally good at doing hard kinetic skills surpassed those with seemingly integral soft skills. The main consensus for those like me, who were struggling, was to be the same: ‘just go caving more.’

This was a fantastic point to consider as a young caver, and indeed, I ended up cramming some weeks off with a cluster of trips. The darkness became secondary and sleeping became wishful thinking. I had honed down on my SRT skills and became so used to numb hands that I became pleasantly pleased when they were not chapped! It was a life on the road, and I was proud of it. These trips consisted of an array of small caves with a reasonable amount of SRT for my level, which pushed me to a point of feeling exhausted, sometimes packing in two trips a day.

It wasn't always easy!

Even after this push for learning, I still found myself frozen like stone when faced with big drops and began to shake when handling more complex SRT challenges. I am in awe that I did not admit to feeling my large twang of shame at the time, but instead pushed through when I failed on any of these challenges. It became a life goal to somehow prove I wasn’t afraid of what I was blatantly terrified of: heights. Of course, I miserably failed. The more I asked the community on and offline on how to combat this, the more of the same reception would parrot: ‘just cave more’. I would shortly give up on the idea of doing any big caving trips at all, and began restricting myself on doing larger, more demanding trips. I became aware that I was not progressing as a caver should.

But months later, something would change my caving experience forever. I had met Alum Pot.

 First gazing upon -that- view, gave me that feeling of ‘underground rush.’ This only ever achieved when the rock sinks into your eyes and washes through your body as you stand, feeling like the small human that you are in the vastness of the underground universe. It made me feel proud to be a caver. On that day, I had been persuaded by peers at Manchester to make the fine trip from underneath the slab, all the way down to the sump. This followed roughly a 60m length descent with a deviation.

The day before agreeing to go on this trip, I thought countlessly on everything that could go wrong. I pondered on whether I was skilled enough, and how many more years I should have to train until I felt confident enough to take the plunge with bigger trips like this. The anxiety racked my brain through the night, and surely, I woke a few times to recurring nightmares of falling. If you’ve never had crippling anxiety, it can be hard to explain how you are aware of the falseness of your imagination, whilst completely succumbing to its darkest suggestions. The very next day, I was halfway down the rope in Alum, twirling around as one might fall sick on a teacup ride out of control, and I felt the relentless need to forcefully engage the emotion of joy. The peers on this trip were the most wonderful, comforting people, their support and friendliness had eased me into a real sense of calm. After 3 years of caving at that point, it was more confidence I lacked, than skill.

Prussiking back felt like a chore: but I had no idea what was coming. As the blood rushed away from my head and into my muscles, my anxiety had a free-for-all when I reached the top.

And that’s when the most pivotal moment of my caving career began to happen.

After hanging under the greasy slab tentatively, I noticed sharp cracks arounds the bolts in the limestone as I inspected the wall. My breathing became heavy, unregulated and my mind, chaotic. My legs dangling freely below a 60m drop, I ventured into fight or flight mode.

What led to this moment was a 3-year ordeal: I first decided to cave because it subsided my depression and anxiety. Back then, it was hard to walk on the street and do menial tasks, but caving helped me understand what true fear could potentially be. There was a sharp divide between the underground and overground, which seemed to complement each other. The underground let me experience true fear, which led me being fearless overground. The overground made me feel tense, which pushed me back, deep under the earth.

What happened at Alum changed my life. Under that slab, I was so fearful, that I became starkly un-fearful. I felt my thoughts lighten: my brain became a blank slate and all I could feel was the breath pouring in and out of my mouth, becoming slow and controlled. I was no longer ‘Elise’. It was perhaps the most important five minutes of my life, where my whole body was concentrating on one objective: to move out of the situation in a calm and controlled manner, using my beautiful backlog of training. Sheffield University Speleological Society had run SRT into my brain like a hammer. My thoughts became void, and every move I made became pre-calculated, as if an orchestra was playing in my mind. Yet I was conducting the tempo and tune they had been steadily rehearsing in those cold halls of ropes and shining metal gear. A peer was just around the corner talking me through my calculations, and excellently calming me down. Within minutes, I pulled my weight back on top of the greasy slab.

When I had finally left the entrance of the cave, I had dissipated into total exhaustion and I seemed to ‘flood back’ into myself. I had truly won this battle.

A sunny day always helps after a long caving trip!

After years of pondering what had happened at Alum, I became cognizant of the fact that dealing with fear by going caving more might not entail the building of bravery, rather, it is the notion of feeling present with the fear, experiencing fear and making friends with such emotion. Before, I pretended that I was not fearful. I blocked out a strong emotion and frequently became angry underground because I was not understanding of why I should be scared, when I knew I was perfectly safe. I used to swear and shout abuse at myself, much to the surprise of my peers. But now, I had begun to accept fear and tried to experience it to the full when I was in the scariest moments, allowing me to focus on my breath, be at one with the rush, and glide through the motions of SRT. It was easy to become angry at a situation where I felt I had lost all control, but it was far wiser to let myself be at one with the situation presented to me.

After all this time, I believed the volume of caving trips would be equal to how ‘good’ a caver I was, as if there was a certain level to reach that would obtain me respect from my peers. What I ended up finding on this 5-year journey is that my progress was never connected to caves, it was connected to my own personal mentality towards life. It was never about ‘levelling up’ at all.

A few months back, I went caving with my housemates to practice some technical SRT.[1] It felt like a beautiful closure of what I had learned. Of course, I was still scared, but the friends I love were there with me, and fear became a fun exercise to experience, instead of fighting it. I felt comfortable admitting that I didn’t want to do traverses with no SRT, since I still have my limits, but I felt comfortable in telling them I was experiencing fear. When visiting a mine last year, I squeezed through a small and narrow entrance, the walls lined with large spiders. I am terrified of spiders, but as I reached the end of the trip, whilst wriggling on the ground to get them off my suit, it hit me: Fear doesn’t define me as a caver, the way I deal with fear, does.

I'm quite used to tight spaces now! 

It is as if I have gone full circle: I have realised once again that caving is an act of walking straight into your own private hell, with challenges designed to make you uncomfortable. You are walking into the belly of the beast, and walking out again feels like not only an exorcism of your inner demons, but that of a journey of friendship and love, communicated in the team work and respect you have for your peers along the way.

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[1] We are in the same bubble since we lived together, and were then allowed to make excursions underground, unlike in the lockdown I currently write in.