Personal Narrative: Outward Bound

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My life hasn’t been saturated with failures, although there have been a few failures where I knew I had to change things for the better. One specific failure actually made me think throughout the trip I was in during the time of the failure. When I went to Outward Bound in Maine in the summer of 2016, I thought I made one of the most risky decisions of my life.
One of the biggest worries I had on applying for Outward Bound is that, I’ve never gone hiking and canoeing for more than a week, and I personally thought it was going to be a big challenge to do all those strenuous activities for twenty one straight days. When I finally arrived in Maine after a long eight hour drive, I was very worried if I was going to make it to the trip. When I went
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The morning after we finished the first portion of hiking, the instructor informed us that we were going to rock climb. At first I did feel excited because it was one of the activities I really wanted to do during the trip. On the long ride to the location of where we were going to rock climb, I kept thinking how fast I was going to climb and how many times I was going to, I honestly thought I was starting to become overconfident about this activity, but I didn’t even realize that after my failure. When we got there, it didn’t seem like we were near a rock climbing wall, the drive just dropped us off in a field. I was rather confused at first because I didn’t see any hills, it was just a field with a treeline to the woods. The instructors told us all to walk to this wood logging trail, which seemed completely excavated, I thought to myself, “We aren’t going to climb that right?” We just walked through the trail and it was all a long strenuous uphill walk that never seemed to end, for the first time I was actually really tired in the trip. This was getting me slightly worried because this uphill walk was nothing compared to the hike we did around one of the tallest mountains in Maine. This hill was testing me, I kept wanting breaks and I was behind from everyone else. Maybe this hill was foreshadowing me that I was going to have a very disappointing day. Once the trail ended, I felt completely …show more content…
I ran down to a secluded place and thought about my failure for twenty minutes. People asked me if I was okay, but I didn’t answer them. I was disappointed because my fears ruined my experience of rock climbing, I was even about to cry because I felt like I didn’t push myself to overcome a fear I’ve had for most of my life. I realized that I had to change a couple of things, I needed to get rid of my fears because they were affecting my experience of the trip. I also realized that I needed to push myself further because not only did I fail on my goal , the instructors were even concerned if I was okay physically. I was but I had fatigue and I started to feel it that day. After the climbing was over, we all walked back to camp and I was upset, I was homesick, but during the bonfire, many people thought I was really brave for climbing even though I had a fear of heights which made me feel better. It made me realize that failures can reach to new successes.
After that awful day, I actually pushed myself and it led me to become one of the most inspiring people in my group according to my instructors. Now, I’m officially not scared of heights but the important thing is that I don’t want my fears to cause to me fail because failure is something that hurts. I still do think about that day because it would’ve felt great to have reached the top, and that experience won’t probably ever happen which is very disappointing, at least it changed

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