The Hard Season I'd Choose Again

Image by @bist31 from Unsplash

If you asked most people which moment they'd relive, they'd pick a happy one. A holiday. A celebration. A day that ran on endorphins and needed nothing from them.

Nobody asks to relive the hard ones.

But if I had to choose honestly, mine wouldn't be a celebration at all. It would be a mountain that nearly broke me.

Behind every celebration is a season nobody saw. The piano exam nobody watched you practise for. The event nobody knew you were training towards at 6am while everyone else slept. We only see the 10% above the surface. The other 90% — the discipline, the doubt, the repetition — stays underwater, where no one is looking. That's not a flaw in how we tell stories. It's just how depth works: it doesn't perform.

My 90% was Hallasan.

Hallasan is South Korea's highest peak, a dormant volcano rising 1,947 metres out of the middle of Jeju Island. There are two trails to the summit: Seongpanak and Gwaneumsa. I'd never done a serious hike in my life, so I took the gentler one up, telling myself I could always take the steeper route down if I felt strong. I didn't feel strong. I felt terrified, queuing before sunrise with my passport checked, pretending my nerves were excitement.

The first stretch was easy. That's the trick every hard thing plays on you — it lets you believe it first.

Then came the part nobody warns you about: no shortcuts, no escalators, just steps and slopes and rock that didn't care how motivated you were that morning. Somewhere in the middle, I stopped asking "can I do this" and started asking "why did I think I could." Elderly hikers passed me mid-conversation, unbothered, while I stood still trying to remember how legs work. One offered me her hiking stick. I said no, because apparently even halfway up a volcano, my pride was still fully intact.

I never reached the actual summit. The final stretch was closed for bad weather. And here's the part I don't soften: I was disappointed. Not gracefully accepting, not instantly grateful for the journey — disappointed. It took time to arrive at grateful. The unfiltered version of "I gave it my best" usually starts with "I didn't get what I wanted."

Getting down took as long as getting up, because that's the part nobody plans for. You don't get to skip the descent just because the summit said no. Ten hours later, humbled, sore, and quietly proud, I was back at the base. My legs punished me for a week.

So why would I choose to relive that over a holiday?

Because comfort doesn't make you anything. It just lets you rest as who you already are. The mountain made me someone slightly different by the time I got down than I was at the start. That's not true of most good days. It's rarely true of easy ones.

I'm not saying seek out pain for its own sake — that's a different, worse lesson. I'm saying stop pretending the easy days are the ones that shaped you. They didn't. You just enjoyed them more at the time.

The next year, I went and did it again in Busan. Not because the first one was fun. Because it worked.