When I was a hare-brained 25-year-old travelling around the world, I decided to climb Alaska’s most northerly mountain range, alone, with winter approaching and with almost no comparable experience.

Alaska: a life-threatening, life-altering getaway for the inexperienced hiker.

I got into trouble thumpingly quickly. Two hours out from an Inuit village the polar wind came thundering up the valley like a great icy bowling ball, the wind-chill factor dropped to about minus 20 and my fingers burned just short of frostbite as I struggled to peg my whip-cracking tent into the snow.

By morning I wanted to abort, but I went on up into that white morass of mountains. It was painful, it was terrifying and it was unwise, but the experience was a perfect instance of the paradoxical payoffs of exposure.

For five days I protected my few cubic feet of fragile human warmth from a cold so extreme it snap-froze the constant drips streaming down from my sinuses. (One morning, to get my muesli into my mouth, I had to keep breaking foot-long stalactites off my nose.) 

The point is that succeeding in that necessity – surviving the exposure to that stunning, lethally freezing landscape – left me with a newly energised sense of life and personal strength.

The payoffs of exposure, however, don’t come only – and perhaps not even mainly – from its physical form. Exposure can be had just about anywhere, anyhow.

You can get it revealing something intimate. You can get it doing something that terrifies you. You can feel it coming on in a relationship. Matter of fact, I’ve got some right now.

I really have. A whole lot. I’ve just had a memoir published – called Exposure, no surprise – which describes how that world odyssey I went on, which was supposed to be (and in many ways was) a wonderful journey of adventure and risk, was also an escape from an unpalatable psychological diagnosis.

I had obsessive compulsive disorder. Though I could stake my life on a Eureka Bike’n’Hike tent in the Arctic, fear had bloomed in other parts of my mind and experience since my late teens.

I’d become terrified of germs; of friends hurting themselves; of going blind; of people dying or falling ill due to my carelessness; and, most traumatically, of fathering a child I would never know about who would have a tragic existence.

The real connection with exposure here is that the therapy of choice for most anxiety-based and phobic disorders is something called ‘exposure therapy’. In this, people expose themselves to what they fear in increasing degrees of intensity for long enough that their fear gradually diminishes. The mind ‘habituates’.

It’s remarkable to think that recovering sufferers of anxiety disorders can expand their experience of life via the same psychological journey rockclimbers and skydivers take. In each case, it’s the exposure to fear, risk and the perception of danger that provides the route to the positive experience and potential growth.

The principle applies to us all. The authors of a massive German study on risk-taking, while noting there was no clear causal link between the willingness to take risks and happiness, nevertheless found ‘a strong positive association’ between the two.

If you think about it, any significant choice – of a partner, a career, a house – contains the risk that if you choose badly you may create a big problem for yourself, miss out on better alternatives, or both. Yet there’s no way to have what you want without running those risks.

Of course, exposure refers to more than risk and fear. It refers also to the laying bare of things. I’m not talking about skinny-dipping, as fine as that can be. I’m thinking more about taking off the body armour or breaking some of those double-glazed societal expectations to feel life on one’s skin again.

One of literature’s best-known exposure-avoiders, J. Alfred Prufrock, refused to ‘dare disturb the universe’ by declaring his love to a woman, and was left to ‘grow old … grow old … / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’

To offer love to another person, especially for life, is of course one of the deepest forms of exposure.

On a balmy yet crazy evening in Zimbabwe, two-thirds of the way round the world, I finally glimpsed that the global adventure of my mid-20s had been a means of escape from not just my OCD but from the woman I still loved.

Daring death in a kayak didn’t scare me half as much as the risk I belatedly faced of offering my life to her.

In life, the biggest risk can be not to take the risk. And avoiding exposure can be the most dangerous exposure of all.

19 comments

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    • Matt says:

      09:37am | 01/10/09

      I’ve done some pretty scary rock/alpine climbing, but nothing compares to the night I scaled five stories of scaffolding in the London rain at 3am (pissed, of course) to get into the flat….
      Not so sure if it left me exhilerated. Or just plain terrified at my stupidity.

    • iansand says:

      09:56am | 01/10/09

      You never know of what you are capable until you go close to or beyond the edge of your capabilities.  And once you find out that knowledge will sustain you for the rest of your life.

    • S says:

      11:13am | 01/10/09

      Great post Joel! You’re a great writer smile
      I say: It’s better to have exposed and lost, than never to have exposed at all!

    • RR says:

      12:25pm | 01/10/09

      Enticing.  Thank you for doing crazy stuff and writing about it so well, so that I may enjoy from the safety of my couch!

    • Charles says:

      12:58pm | 01/10/09

      OK, so I’m queueing to buy the book!

    • Hackpacker says:

      01:21pm | 01/10/09

      Love your use of Prufrock - this was a guy who dared to eat a peach which always struck me as the strange analysis as paralysis nature of the writer. Fear is made even more powerful by imagination so I wonder if writers and other creative types don’t suffer more from crippling fear.
      Great book BTW.

    • pc says:

      01:43pm | 01/10/09

      Ok Joel, I dont like being exposed to unhappy endings so I hope you’re going to tell us the lover you ran away from still loves you. Its a great story so I dont mind if you tell me I have to buy the book but you can be sure I will skip to the last page rather than risk overexposure.

    • Catherine says:

      02:09pm | 01/10/09

      Totally agree. We need exposure to actually learn who we are and to be ourselves in the world. To be human is to be exposed! Poor old Prufrock ended up feeling less than human, like ‘a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’.

      Loved the book!

    • Tom says:

      02:14pm | 01/10/09

      I’ve just read Exposure and it’s a ripper—there’s something compelling about reading about travels compelled by obsessive-compulsion. And there’s a little bit of neurotic Joel in all of us.

    • Andrew Petersen says:

      05:28pm | 01/10/09

      When I step outside of the chronic condition I suffer from I do often get released from my disabling fear.  But sometimes I also fall flat on my face (literally), so I guess there’s a bit of a balance to be struck here!  My condition also means that there’sno way I’m heading for Alaska cos I hate the cold, but I might have a more than usually frank conversation with my lover after reading this!

    • Andres Kabel says:

      05:57pm | 01/10/09

      Joel,
      A fine, reflective piece and one that helped me understand Exposure. Your notion of exposure is fairly close to a concept I use, that of “making meaning.” Unless we state (often with little logical reason) what is meaningful to us, and then act on this by making meaning, in particular by consciously using our hours and seconds in a worthy way, nihilistic depression hits. Actually, no, you’re advocating ‘exposure’ when you DON’T know the way forward. Maybe the two concepts do come together, maybe they arise from very different ways of looking at the world.

    • Ado says:

      06:41pm | 01/10/09

      Hmm think I regret more of what I haven’t done than what I have done! Mind you I never camped on a mountain in Alaska.  Not choosing is choosing eh.
      Reckon confessing to all one’s demons and misadventures in a book would take a bit of courage too.  Congrats Joel - shall look forward to reading your tale obviously delivered with an ample measure wit and self deprecation.

    • MJ says:

      07:16pm | 01/10/09

      I couldn’t put it down - what a great read. I laughed out loud and have been considering choices and risk and exposure ever since. The travel writing was good too.

    • Solid gold creativity says:

      07:38pm | 01/10/09

      “... It’s remarkable to think that recovering sufferers of anxiety disorders can expand their experience of life via the same psychological journey rockclimbers and skydivers take.” 

      Yes, it’s remarkable. Great post.  Can totally relate to your experiences.

      I’ve had a year of terrifying myself by existential means.  I’ve been doing a set of courses about “how to live” and I’ve discovered, amongst many other things, that risk is essential.  If I’m not expanding myself through risk, I’m shrinking.  In the last year I’ve run for election to local council (quite scary, esp when looking up the number of votes), held a public rally (moderately frightening), initiated a local community project in the face of some vocal disagreement (scary), and, just this last weekend, stood on a stage and told an audience about my fear of intimacy (absolutely terrifying).

      And in that year I’ve never felt more alive.

      Thanks again for an inspiring post. Cheers.

    • Michael says:

      02:46am | 02/10/09

      heh people with these disorders can barely get a break from centrelink, how they are supposed to confront their fears in Alaska is beyond me, didn’t inspire me one bit.

    • John Hooper says:

      07:38am | 02/10/09

      Over a thousand Australians died while holidaying abroad last year. Hope that makes you feel more alive.

    • Terry says:

      11:53am | 02/10/09

      Better to die on a holiday doing something outside your comfort zone than die chained to a desk John

    • Robusto says:

      12:45pm | 02/10/09

      Risk taking without preparation and calculation (which may need to be lightening fast) I believe is still stupid and just has the effect of reminding yourself and others what a noong you are! As any rock climber knows the last person you would want to climb with is someone who takes “big risks” if that means someone who is sloppy with gear,  who runs out protection, and gambles on the weather.  On the other hand, the “calculated” risk where you make an assessment of a course of action, figure out the dangers and prepare as well as you can, and then go ahead , even though there is more chance of something going wrong than if you didn’t do it, can be greatly beneficial. Additionally,  that course of action has to be worth taking in itself. If risk were the only factor, one could get the same benefit from reckless jaywalking.
      I have always found in my own life that the decisions and actions that made much difference were scary to contemplate.  Many of us need to be driven to do something meaningful, when our natural instinct is “to stay in our rooms” as Pascal warned (or was it advocated?)
      I enjoyed you piece Joel but I find the thesis you advance on risk, however,  as multi-layered and complex as your good self. For example, the Alaska ordeal , kayaking and other adventures do not appear, on the face of it,  to be exposure therapy for your OCD.  Did your trip also help you overcome the fear of germs, going blind and doomed progeny? I’d be fascinated to hear how .  Is it in your book? (I’ve not be able to find “Exposure”  in a bookshop yet . It seems to be sold out almost everywhere!)

    • SeanT says:

      05:32pm | 02/10/09

      michael ‘people with these disorders can barely get a break from centrelink’ is the kind of stigma i guess an article like this is asking us to reconsider. i have two friends with anxiety disorder and neither of them have anything to do with centrelink. they might not go mountain climbing in alaska but they’d travel no probs. mental illness doesn’t have to be as scary or hold you back as much as that.

 

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