Where I’ll Find Me: The Risk and Decision of Being Vulnerable

Sometimes I go back and listen to episodes of North of Normal after they air.

In the moment, I am paying attention to the guest in front of me. Their words. Their body language. The subtle cues that help me understand what is being shared right then and there.

But when I listen again later, I often notice something completely different.

That happened as I revisited my conversation with Ty Gagne.

Ty is fascinated with risk, decision-making, and bringing order to chaos. We talked about what it takes to make decisions during a crisis without allowing emotions to take over. We both admire people who have demonstrated that ability in rescue situations, especially when the conditions are changing and the consequences are high.

Those are the moments when risk is easy to recognize.

Someone is lost. Someone is hurt. The weather is getting worse. A decision needs to be made, and everyone understands that the outcome is uncertain.

But listening back, I realized Ty had taken another kind of risk by coming on my show.

He told me that he is a private person. He is used to speaking publicly about his books, risk, and the stories he has researched. Sharing personal parts of himself is different. He said he had been trying to become more vulnerable and connect with people by letting them know more about who he is.

I told him that required bravery.

He said he was ready to be brave.

And then he shared things he had never spoken about publicly before.

At one point, Ty told me about responding to the death of a firefighter he had known for most of his life. Ty was a police officer and supervisor at the time. The people at the scene were his friends. He later went with his chief to notify the firefighter’s family, people who had known him since he was a child.

Afterward, the police and fire departments held a debriefing.

When it was Ty’s turn to speak, he broke down in front of the group.

It was the first time he had allowed himself to be broken in front of the people he worked with instead of waiting until he was somewhere else.

Then he wondered whether he had projected weakness.

That part of his story took me somewhere familiar.

In 2023, I responded to a difficult rescue on Mount Moriah with Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue. It was only my second callout, and it was later described as the hardest mission our team responded to that year.

I wrote about the rescue itself in June 2025 in a blog called The Rescue That Taught Me How to Walk Through the Unknown. That story was about the mission, the storm, and the anchor points that helped us move through the difficult terrain.

This story is about what happened after.

A couple of days later, our team held a debriefing.

We sat in a circle and talked about what had happened.

I was surrounded by people who had been on the team for years. People with far more experience than I had. Some of them had appeared in Ty’s books. They were people I admired and respected, and in my mind, they could not possibly have been afraid.

But I had been.

I was truly terrified during that mission, and I was not okay afterward.

I did not understand why it had affected me so deeply. I only knew that it had.

I sat in that circle looking at all of these calm, capable people and believed I was the only person in the room who had fallen apart inside.

Then I said it.

"I am not okay."

It was terrifying to admit that in front of everyone.

I thought they might see me as weak. I thought they might question whether I belonged on the team. I thought I might be revealing something that would change the way they saw me.

But that is not what happened.

Several other people began admitting they had been afraid too.

They had also been uncomfortable with the conditions surrounding the mission. They had also felt uncertainty. They had kept moving and doing what needed to be done, but that did not mean they had felt nothing.

I had been comparing what I felt inside myself to what everyone else looked like on the outside.

It turns out those are not the same thing.

My vulnerability opened a pathway for other people to be vulnerable. It allowed more of us to realize we were not alone.

It also made me realize that I needed help.

The mission had brought unresolved trauma from my personal life to the surface. I did not understand that yet. I only knew that something inside me had become too loud to ignore.

With the help of a therapist, I began to understand my experiences and the way they had shaped how I responded to moments of crisis. Over time, I learned how to better recognize and process my emotions instead of only trying to control them, hide them, or push through them.

That work has helped me understand myself better.

It has also helped me understand other people and new situations.

All of that came from one moment when I chose to tell the truth.

Vulnerability may be one of the hardest risks to evaluate because we cannot remove emotion from the decision.

We are trying to decide whether to reveal our fear, pain, shame, or uncertainty while we are still standing inside it.

From there, silence can look like the rational choice.

If I share this, people will think negatively about me.

If I reveal this information, people will reject me.

If I tell someone how I am really feeling, they may not understand.

So why bother?

We often connect vulnerability with punishment before we ever consider any other possible outcome.

I did not expect that telling the truth would make other people feel safe enough to tell the truth too.

I did not expect it to help me realize I needed support.

I did not expect it to become the beginning of understanding myself in a completely different way.

I can imagine what might have happened if I had stayed quiet.

I might have kept pretending I was fine. I might have continued isolating myself and disconnecting from other people. I might have buried what I was feeling and carried it into every difficult situation that came afterward.

Silence would have protected me from the immediate possibility of being judged.

It would not have protected me from what was happening inside me.

I think about Ty and his courage in sharing things he had never shared publicly before.

There was risk in that decision.

He could not control how people would respond. He could not know whether listeners would understand him or see him differently.

But there were other possible outcomes too.

The possibility of being understood.

The possibility of feeling seen and heard.

The possibility that someone listening would recognize something in his story and feel less alone.

Ty talked about learning to rappel from a boulder when he was young. He described how terrifying it was to lean back, trust the rope, and trust the person holding him.

Then he described what came after the fear.

Euphoria.

I see something similar in my guests after we go off the air. I see it in their faces. There is a feeling that comes from being fully present, telling the truth, and realizing that another person has really heard you.

It is hard to describe, especially to someone who has rarely experienced it.

But when you have felt truly seen and heard, you do not forget it.

I wonder how differently we would make decisions about vulnerability if we connected it to that feeling instead of only connecting it to punishment.

What if we gave equal weight to the possibility of connection?

What if we considered relief, understanding, help, and healing as possible outcomes too?

What truth are you treating as too dangerous to say because you have only considered what it might cost you?

And how might your decision change if you also considered what it could give you?

I thought keeping quiet would protect me.

Looking back, I think that may have been the greater risk.

-Amanda