“If you want that bull elk rack, you’re gonna have to get it yourself.” uncle Courtney told me on my eighteenth birthday. 

Those antlers were hanging about seven feet off the ground on the scaffolding of his barn, and were my birthday present from him if I could get them off the wall. As scared of climbing as I was, I did it anyway (after all, it was a really nice rack). Of course, I was freaking out in the process, and literally begging my great uncle through gritted teeth to rescue me once I was at eye-level with the antlers. But instead of catering to my fear, he first took the antlers off the wall without my help whatsoever, then calmly guided me back to the safety of the concrete floor. 

When I asked him why he had me go through all that when he could’ve just taken the antlers down himself, he replied, “I just wanted to see if you could climb up there yourself to get them.”

A few years before that, I was on the farm in North Dakota, when my great uncle offered to take me shooting in the back pasture where the remains of a huge cottonwood tree were piled up, providing a perfect backstop for bullets. But to get there, I had to drive his manual-transmission pickup truck to the back pasture (which I really didn’t want to do, but he made me do it anyway). Once there, I noticed that there was a sizable wasp nest buried within the log pile. Before I had a chance to throw myself back into the truck, uncle Courtney took his 9 millimeter out of his holster and unloaded the whole clip into the wasp nest. 

Turns out, my great uncle knew that the wasp nest had been abandoned for some time. Still, it took him awhile to convince me to come back and there were no angry wasps to run from, as I took off sprinting towards the farm when I saw him draw his gun. 

Unfortunately, uncle Courtney hasn’t been able to help cure me of all of my stupid fears. But, he’s certainly given me the encouragement and many of the tools I need to get over my fears without him. Plus, if I want to spend more time with him, I’m gonna have to go wherever he’s at, which forces me to conquer my greatest, most disruptive fear of them all: driving. Especially driving on the interstate.