My friends have always labelled me a brave person. In fact, I’ve been called brave by people who aren’t even my friends. But I could never quite wrap my head around the idea of Caroline, the girl who is brave. It just doesn’t sound like me.
Because I know me. At least, I know the girl I see when I look at myself.
I know the girl who grew up as the eldest of three, with the responsibility of taking care of her younger siblings in her parents’ absence. Responsible, maybe, but brave? No.
I know the girl who was the first in her family to go to college. She moved from a small town to Maseru with a few kitchen utensils and a mattress, moving into a room she had never even laid eyes on before, with an old friend she hadn’t spent time with in years.
A few months after moving to the city, she was living on her own, paying rent, making food for herself and looking out for herself in the unkind streets of Motimposo.
Still, I think, naive, perhaps. Audacious, maybe. But brave? Not really.
I went on to land my first job with nothing but pure potential and a likeable face. Since then, I’ve travelled alone to beautiful and scary places, been the sole provider for my family at one point, left serious relationships that were no longer working despite the risk of immense regret and financial struggle, lost jobs and found new ones.
And after all of that, I still find bravery to be a somewhat foreign concept to me.
I guess the thing is, I was never taught to be brave. I’ve never really known what being brave was supposed to feel like.
When you’re going through life, that’s just what it is, isn’t it? You’re going through life.
At no point have I ever stopped myself before doing something difficult that I felt needed to be done and thought, Well, Caroline, here’s your chance to be brave.
No. More often than not, doing something difficult or stepping outside my comfort zone has felt absolutely terrifying. Sometimes physically painful and sickening, even.
So, for the longest time, I’ve wondered how I could possibly be brave when so many of my experiences have come with such deep fear and all those terrifying little what ifs.
What if I fail?
What if I’m wrong about this?
What if I regret it terribly?
What if this is all there is to life?
Sitting here with this idea today, reflecting on the year that 2026 has been so far, I’m beginning to see things a little differently.
I cannot imagine having done all the things I’ve done this year if I wasn’t, in fact, brave.
From navigating the extremely tedious and complicated process of registering a marriage in two different countries, despite the constant setbacks, to navigating new visa types and their application processes. From moving my entire life to a new country to finding a job as a foreigner, all while still figuring out the everyday things: the life I want to live, the relationships I want to maintain, the skills I want to build and how to secure a good future for myself.
And when I look at it all together, I really don’t think I could have done it if I wasn’t brave.
Which brings me to something I’ve heard countless times: Bravery is not the absence of fear.
But perhaps bravery doesn’t always feel the way we imagine it should.
Perhaps it doesn’t feel like confidence. Perhaps it feels like being terrified and doing the thing anyway. Perhaps it looks like making a decision while knowing there’s a chance it might not work out. Or taking the first step without knowing exactly where the next one will land.
Perhaps you can be scared and brave at the very same time.
I think I’m finally beginning to understand that.
And while I’m still miles away from where I’d like to be, for a moment, I want to acknowledge Caroline for the brave girl she has been. From her early adulthood all the way to the year that is 2026.
For a moment, I want to try seeing her through the eyes of her friends. Through the eyes of strangers who have watched her do things she probably thought nothing of. Through the eyes of her life partner, who gets to see a side of her that she might not always recognise in herself.
For a moment, I want to stop looking at her from the inside, where all the doubts and fears live, and see her from the outside.
And I want to tell her, You did it, girl!
You took that first step even when your legs were trembling.
You made decisions even when you couldn’t be certain how things would turn out.
You walked away from things that were no longer right for you, even when doing so came with the possibility of regret and financial struggle.
You moved your entire life to a new country and started figuring things out all over again.
You even got into the water despite your terrible fear of drowning.
You were scared, but you did it anyway.
And maybe that’s what your friends have been seeing all along. Maybe that’s what strangers have noticed, too. Maybe that’s what the people who love you have known about you, even when you couldn’t quite see it yourself.
They see the things you’ve done. The places you’ve gone. The risks you’ve taken. The life you’ve kept building, even when you had every reason to be afraid.
Meanwhile, you’ve been so busy feeling the fear that you haven’t stopped to notice what you’ve been doing in spite of it.
I’m not suddenly fearless. I still overthink. I still worry about getting things wrong. I still have days when the uncertainty of it all feels like a little too much.
And I’m sure there will be plenty more moments when I’ll have to remind myself of all this.
But for now, I want to let myself sit with a different thought.
Maybe I don’t have to feel brave to acknowledge that I have been.
Maybe bravery has been there all along, quietly showing up in the choices I’ve made, the things I’ve tried and the moments I’ve carried on despite being scared.
Maybe the girl I know from the inside and the brave girl everyone else sees are actually the same person.
Maybe she has always been both.
Scared and brave.
Leave a Reply