Essay: Redefining Bravery

Bravery isn’t what I thought it was. I used to think bravery meant stepping into danger without hesitation and taking the lead when it’s steep and loose. Bravery was volunteering for the hard pitch. I used to think it meant boldness, loud and clear and undeniable. I’ve come to see bravery differently. Quieter. Slower. More complex. And in this conversation with Melissa Arnot Reid, that truth came into full view.

Melissa’s story isn’t one of easy victories or uncomplicated success. Yes, she’s summited Everest six times. Yes, she has climbed it without supplemental oxygen. But what matters more, and what matters in this episode, is how she came to understand herself not through those summits, but through what came after.

Melissa grew up around volatility. As a child, she built psychological armor to survive. That armor helped her endure, but its weight also left scars. Her early life gave her a strange relationship with discomfort. Danger didn’t feel foreign. In fact, it felt familiar.
So when the mountains offered hardship, she didn’t flinch. She was already fluent in pain. But endurance isn’t the same as healing. And pushing forward isn’t the same as knowing why you’re going. That’s the key paradox. Bravery can start as a means of survival, but it must evolve into something more. Something chosen. Something owned.

What emerged in our conversation was a shared definition of bravery, not as fearlessness, but as agency in the presence of fear—the ability to act because you’re afraid, not despite it.

Melissa talked about learning to make space for her truth, even when it was messy. About moving away from a life built on external validation and toward one grounded in self-worth. About the bravery it takes not just to climb Everest, but to speak honestly about what you were hiding when you did.

And this matters, not just to climbers, but to all of us. Because every one of us is navigating risk. Maybe not the risk of avalanches or crevasses, but the risk of being seen. The risk of saying what we truly feel, need, and want. t. The risk of raising our kids differently from the way we were raised. The risk of telling our truth.

There’s a line in Melissa’s book that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “The summit is a moment. The descent is the rest of your life.” We live for these summits. For goals achieved. But real bravery is found after the summit, when the recognition fades, and you’re left with yourself, when you have to figure out how to carry what you’ve learned, and how to unlearn what no longer serves you.

Bravery is not a pose. It’s not an Instagram caption. It’s not simply doing the hard thing. It’s knowing why you’re doing it. It’s stepping into the unknown with clarity and humility, knowing full well that you might be wrong. It’s letting go of the armor that once protected you so you can start living without it.

That’s the kind of bravery we need more of. Not loud. Not heroic. Simply true.

That’s what Voice of the Mountains is here for.

To remind us that the most challenging climbs are not always the wildest. That summits matter, but becoming the kind of person who can walk back down with grace matters more.