When I returned to that break, my body recognized it before my mind did.
The moment I got off the boat, my hands started shaking and my breathing grew short. The sea did not look worse than last time, and the waves were not necessarily bigger, but my body clearly disagreed. My shoulders tightened, my movements slowed, and something seemed to press down on my chest. I had not even started surfing yet. I had not truly faced a single wave. But my body was already replaying that familiar feeling of suffocation.
I knew what it was remembering.
A year earlier, at Rock Island in Siargao, Philippines, I had been dragged under again and again, rolled and scraped around like laundry in a washing machine. The worst part was not the pain. It was the feeling that I was about to run out of air. I would finally break the surface, barely take one breath, and then the next wave would slam down on my head again. That sense of suffocation was the first time fear stopped living at the level of "I know this is dangerous" and entered my body directly.
So when I returned to that same break later, what arrived first was not the wave. It was fear.
I used to think of myself as a very rational person. Most of the time, I am used to analyzing, judging, and breaking things down before deciding what to do. But surfing is different. It translates many things that usually stay in the mind directly into bodily reactions. You can look calm and reasonable on shore, but once you are in the water, facing speed, force, and uncertainty, your body is more honest than you are. You think you are just "thinking carefully," but your hands are shaking, your breathing is off, and your weight is drifting backward. In that moment you understand that fear has never been an abstract idea. It is a whole set of responses carried out by the body.
The body remembers fear too
Of course fear begins with instinct. When you are facing a real force of nature like the ocean, being afraid is normal. A person with no fear is not necessarily braver. They may simply be more reckless. The sea changes. It goes out of control. In an instant it reminds you how small a human being is. Fear exists to keep people alive.
But fear is not only instinct. It is also something learned.
In many East Asian families, education often carries an undertone of intimidation. Adults mean to protect children, so they say things like: do not run around, you will fall; do not climb too high, you will fall down; do not talk back; do not do anything outside the rules. It begins as a way of teaching people to recognize danger. But over time it becomes a broader psychological structure: fear of making mistakes, fear of crossing a line, fear of trying, fear of uncertainty.
When I was twelve, I left my hometown alone to study in the provincial capital. My father once wrote me a letter and quoted a line that roughly meant: the two biggest difficulties a person must overcome in life are fear and laziness. For many years I half took it as a demand. As if, so long as you were determined enough, you were supposed to defeat hesitation, defeat fear, defeat the part of yourself that was not brave enough.
But later I slowly realized that fear is not something a sentence like "do not be afraid" can erase.
It also comes from experience, especially from the way the body remembers old experience. One failure, one close call, one moment of losing control. Any of these can make fear stay not only in the mind but directly in the nervous system. After that near suffocation at Rock Island, what I feared was not just that "the waves are a bit big." I feared the feeling of the chest tightening, the air cutting off, and another wave pressing down immediately after. Fear stopped being a judgment and became a bodily response automatically triggered by a scene.
We do not remember fear with the brain alone. We remember it with the body too.
When fear starts creating danger with its own hands
Fear itself is not the problem. It tells you there is risk here. It keeps you respectful. It keeps you from becoming so arrogant in the ocean that you get hurt. But once it changes from an alarm into the thing in charge, once it takes over your breathing, your balance, your judgment, it is no longer protecting you. It starts creating danger with its own hands.
My understanding of this grew little by little in Siargao.
On the first afternoon of camp, we warmed up in gentle small surf. Everything felt smooth. I even started walking the board unexpectedly. Confidence came quickly, and I thought I could give my coach a little "performance report" the next day.
On the second day, because of the wind direction, the boat captain took us to Rock Island, the place where my nightmare had started. The waves reached three to four meters at their biggest that day.
On backside waves, my turns were not quick enough, and I often got caught by the whitewater before I could make it back to the shoulder. The wave frequency was high, and I was too tense. Ditching the board, duck diving, holding my breath, over and over. Very soon I could not catch my breath at all. Later another coach saw that something was wrong and pushed me out of the impact zone.
After an hour of struggling, my coach signaled for me to wait for the next wave. It was the first time in all the time I had trained with him that I said "No."
But what happened after that was worse. I started paddling toward someone else's boat, trying to get away from the wave zone. My coach was shouting behind me, and I thought he was telling me to keep taking off, so I refused to go back. Only when a kid passing nearby relayed the message did I realize the current was too strong and would carry me toward deep water in the middle. I needed to get back to my coach immediately.
That was the moment I realized that when a person completely loses courage, they can lose rational judgment at the same time. You think you are escaping danger, but you are actually swimming toward a different kind of danger.
After that, the fear truly stayed. Every time I returned to a slightly bigger break, my body would shake as soon as I got in the water. My mind went blank. My arms and legs stiffened. When the coach pushed me into a wave, I would instinctively pull my weight backward. Before anything had even begun, part of me was already trying to escape. And in surfing, that hesitation is exactly what makes things dangerous. The speed of a wave does not allow you to step half a beat back at the crucial moment.
After a streak of failed waves, my coach looked at me and asked, "What happened, Kate?"
I said, "I am too scared. My body freezes and my mind is blank."
Later I asked him whether he had ever been afraid while surfing. He said no. I asked how that was possible. He said something I never forgot:
Because it makes the situation more dangerous. Sometimes the wave does not kill you. Fear turns it into danger.
Sometimes it is not the wave that makes the situation fall apart. It is fear distorting your movement and actually pushing you into danger.
It can only be retrained, slowly, through new experience
This became one of the most important things I came to understand.
When I was younger, hearing "overcome fear and laziness," I thought overcoming meant do not be afraid, be bolder, be more decisive, endure more. Later I realized that real fear cannot be solved by command. It does not leave automatically just because you understand many principles. It can only be retrained, slowly, through new experience.
For me, that retraining had roughly three layers.
The first layer was helping the body recover a sense of safety.
When fear is at its peak, other people telling you to "focus" or "relax" does not help much. The body has already entered a frozen state. There is no extra mental space left for focus. What is actually useful is not persuasion. It is soothing.
The sentence that helped me most during that period was: "I am at Jacking Horse. It is small. I can handle it."
Jacking Horse is a beginner-friendly break where I can easily settle into the rhythm. That sentence was not about pretending the waves were small. It was about borrowing an experience my body had already verified as something I could handle, and using it to pull myself back out of emergency mode first.
The second layer was that only after the body stopped freezing could focus even begin.
My coach once told me: "Relax but not too relaxed." Do not let fear take over the body, but do not go limp either. Your attention should be on the wave, the line, the timing, and the movement. Fear is still there, but instead of staring at "how afraid I am," you bring your attention back to "what do I need to do right now."
Real focus is not the absence of fear. It is refusing to let fear monopolize your attention.
The third layer was that what truly weakened fear in the end was the expansion of my ability boundary.
Later, during training in Wanning, Hainan, my coach did not make me surf nonstop. Instead, he spent a lot of time on fundamentals: paddling, turning around, braking, yielding, how to avoid someone who suddenly appears, where to paddle when a big set comes, how to generate speed faster. On the surface, none of this looked like a lesson about "overcoming fear." But looking back now, it was exactly the most effective part.
Because a lot of fear, in the end, is not only an emotional problem. It is also about the edge of your ability. What you fear may not be the wave itself. What you fear may be not knowing what to do when the situation changes suddenly. Once the fundamentals are trained in, the number of situations you can handle expands, and your body no longer automatically translates every change into catastrophe.
It is not that uncertainty disappears. It is that your ability boundary gets wider.
Not conquering it, but following its flow
I am not naturally brave. Quite the opposite. Growing up under Chinese-style fear-based education, and having an overly active imagination, I often rehearse the worst possible outcome in my head before I try anything uncertain.
And surfing is full of uncertainty. Conditions cannot be predicted. No two waves are exactly the same. In competition, a famous surfer can get knocked out because no good wave comes for thirty minutes. Or the forecast can promise surf, you can fly like a weekend commando to Sanya, rush to the beach at six in the morning, and find water flatter than a lake.
I once tried to fight the wave too, trying to punch through at the most powerful part of the lip. The result was that I got slammed to the bottom and came away with nothing but exhaustion and injuries. Later, a coach in Bali said to me: "Do not fight back. Just follow the flow."
Do not fight the wave. Follow the direction it is moving. It is not about suppression. It is not about conquest. It is about understanding it, moving with it, borrowing its force to complete the action. That is very close to how I later came to think about fear too.
Surfing is a lot like life itself. There are long stretches of waiting, and there are sudden opportunities. Sometimes you paddle desperately. Sometimes all you can do is wait patiently for the next set. Sometimes one wave sends you to the bottom. Sometimes, on a faint sunrise morning, you unexpectedly find yourself surrounded by jumping fish and a sea turtle breaking the surface.
You think you are training surfing. Later you realize you are also training how to stay inside uncertainty, how not to flee the moment fear appears, how to find yourself again when the feeling of losing control arrives.
As I write this, I increasingly feel these realizations are not only about waves. Over the past few years, technology has changed too quickly. Many people genuinely fear being replaced, fear falling behind, fear that the abilities they once relied on could suddenly stop working. That fear is not fake. Change is happening. But fear will not disappear because a principle sounds right, and change will not stop because we refuse it. What we can do may be something similar: first, do not let emotion swallow us whole. Then shift attention from "am I going to be finished" to "what can I do right now." Then, through action, retrain our relationship with fear little by little.
Maybe this is what "overcoming fear" means to me now.
Not eliminating it.
Not shaming it.
And not pretending I was never afraid.
But arriving at a day when, when it appears again, I know how to breathe, how to stand steady, how to bring my attention back to the wave in front of me, and then keep moving forward.