“This question: Why do you do it? You might as well ask ‘Why do I like chocolate?’ or ‘Why do I prefer the color red?’ Why do you like something? Why do you enjoy something? I think perhaps the reason why people like me downplay it is because we know that we’re nothing particularly special. We’re not superhuman. We’re just us. I’m just me. Quite often when I’m talking to other people I can see they’re probing me for answers. They want answers about their own life or their own character and I can’t give that to them. I’m not inside their head. I can’t tell them how they tick. I can only tell them how I tick and that’s not the same. So I wonder if that’s something to do with downplaying it because when you have someone saying, ‘Wow! That’s amazing!’ in your head you’re thinking ‘No, it wasn’t. It was a real struggle.’ I’m very proud of it but it was just a matter of getting your head down and getting on with it. So I think maybe what people recognize as downplaying something is just that… If it’s your reality, it feels very self evident.”
I had a chance to sit down with Felicity Aston, the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica (!) and ask her to explain a pattern I’d noticed from interviewing so many adventurers: Why do they always seem to downplay their epic accomplishments? I suspected the answer was so that they could make their epic achievements relatable to a wider audience around whom they want to build a speaking career. But her response (above) revealed something at play within a lot of us looking to others for answers to our questions, looking for guides to shine a light ahead, or secrets to avoiding the hard thing we must endure. While we do the work, we have to trust ourselves to find the magic that, by documenting, becomes our own unique perspective.
The fact is, life is too complex, and way too fun, to follow someone else’s path. Instead, trust your curiosity to chart your own unique and valuable path. What you find will become your story and it will be yours and nobody else’s.
At just 23, Felicity Aston left the UK to spend three years living and working in the Antarctic as a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey familiarizing herself with the conditions down there. While there, she was part of the first all-female team to complete the Polar challenge, which is a 360-mile endurance race across the Canadian Arctic. And a year later, Felicity led the first British women’s crossing of the Greenland ice-sheet.
Since then she has gone on to lead numerous expeditions including the Kaspersky Lab Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition, the largest and most international women’s expedition ever to ski to the South Pole.
In 2012 she became the first woman in the world to ski across Antarctica alone.
Listen to the interview:
A quick preview:
- What life is like working as a research scientist in Antarctica, and what it feels like to move there.
- Antarctica is twice the size of Australia, to give you a sense of its enormity.
- How her experiences prepared her to complete the ski journey across Antarctica alone.
- What inspired the decision to go for it.
- What the journey itself was like for Felicity, how long it took, and what it’s like to be out in the Antarctic wilderness alone.
- How she managed her fear and emotions, how they helped her, and what she learned about her physical and emotional limits.
- What it felt like to reach the end.
- Why do adventurers downplay their accomplishments?
Explore further:
- http://www.felicityaston.co.uk/
Credits
- Music credit: Intrepid Journey, by Aaron Static
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