Into Thin Air

I love - almost, but not quite more than anything - falling off boulders into thin air onto the hard earth.

If you're worried just know that you are accompanied by me circa early 2021 as well.

In early 2021 I was a wanderer. My head was stuck in a perpetual dream state with daydreams artistically rolling into nightmares like light and dark paint blended so faultlessly that you could see no beginning or end. A journal entry dated that spring reads, "This year I've barely left my home, but I've walked a thousand miles in my soul." I moved to a new city in the midst of covid, struggling to find friends through masked faces, learning that my bones were not created to thrive between skyscrapers and bustling streets. The extroverted energy I used to possess was stripped of me, no longer was the energy to brave the wild (aka - breweries and bars where adults my age liked to gather). I didn't belong here nor there, with no community to call home.

If it weren't for a spontaneous trip to a climbing gym down the street (thanks Lauren), I'm not quite sure what would have pulled me out from the trenches of my mind. After that first trip, I decided on a whim to buy a monthly membership - I did it not because I particularly loved it from that first experience, I did it because I thought it was my best fighting chance at meeting people who preferred the outdoors over indoors, early mornings instead of late nights, and tall mountains instead of tall draft pours.

I went to the climbing gym almost every day.

I didn't talk to anyone for three weeks.

The first person I spoke to pointed out that I was always climbing alone.

Well, this is a failure.

Today I belong here, there, and everywhere and I can thank climbing for that. Climbing has expanded outside of the gym, carried me through 10 states, and through beautiful stages of growth. This hobby has become my lifeblood and at every corner, I am graced by the most wonderful outdoor-loving, mountain climbing, morning birds, and night owls.

Rock climbing has brought me community, a continuously deepening connection with nature, the love of my life (hi Auston), an insatiable hunger to grow stronger, and constantly peeling fingers. However, there is one thing that rock climbing has brought me, that without it, I might still be walking in circles in my soul:

Antifragility

I learned quickly as a climber that there is no climbing without failure. If you are a climber you know this: you fall more than you successfully climb. The more time I have spent training and practicing, the more painful it has been to fail. I've spent weekends for what seems like months on end surrounded by boulders that look like acrylic masterpieces emerging out of the ground, but instead of delight, my face was pulled tight with disappointment and my inner voice could tell me nothing other than "you suck at climbing." Shame boiled in the body that was not as strong, controlled, or fluid as it was conditioned to be. And some days - just like that - my body and my mind would flow so beautifully that the burly sport becomes a delicate ballet.

The lack of consistency drives me mad. I hate the days I give in to my frustration allowing my mind to believe my potential is smaller than it truly is.

In climbing, we reference the term "efficiency" a lot. Efficient climbers know how to utilize their energy output - maximizing energy in some places and minimizing it in others - to keep enough gas in the tank to fully complete a route. I like to think about energy as the transfer from possibility to actuality, with possibility being the keyword here. If my range of possibility is 5x what I believe it to be, my actualized energy only has the potential to be 1/5 of what it could be. What is possible is limited by what we believe in and in too many days preceding today I have allowed myself to believe my possibility meter is rather small.

So I've been running a self-experiment. What would happen if I shifted my perspective? What would happen if I believed I was capable of climbing harder grades than I ever thought possible? Well, I'd like to share the results so far:

At first, I fought frustration tooth and nail, but no matter how much breathwork and grounding I did, frustration came with reliability you can trust like the rise and fall of the sun. So what changed?

• I began to accept frustration as a normal emotional response to failure, but instead of giving in to the emotion, I leaned into it. Once I reached the point of frustration I decided to try a little bit longer - to go a little bit further.

• As a result, I failed more, but I started climbing stronger, I started making moves I didn't think that I could make, I surprised myself as I got closer to approximating the right behavior - and the dopamine hit with each incremental improvement.

• Day by day my possibility meter started shifting farther and farther to the right. While my actuality bar has not moved significantly, my language regarding my potential has changed. In place of "you suck at climbing" my internal voice says "with each failure, you're getting closer, you're capable of so much more than you are in this moment." 

• Failure is becoming less of an inconvenience and more of a necessity. Failure as unactualized potential is much more tolerable than failure as a state of being, in fact, it is even empowering.

The coolest part about this self-experiment is the science that backs it. Where I am experiencing the shift in behavior and the emotions I associate with them is in the power of neuroplasticity. Making errors in what I am trying to achieve sends a signal to my brain that something is wrong allowing my brain to recognize that change needs to occur. The repetition of failure is reshaping my nervous system so it can perform better from a motor perspective (climbing) and to appropriately associate or dissociate certain feelings from the motor behavior. It feels powerful to harness the ability to reshape your brain through specific behavior.

Throughout this experiment, the bad days have come with the good. Even one day this week while I was working on writing this piece, I had a training session that chewed me up and spit me out. Talk about feeling like a contradiction. However, where there isn't consistency, there is the drive to grow. Through the fear and thrill of it all - I love falling off boulders and I love the person that falling off boulders is shaping me to become.

Before I was a resilient climber; now I am an antifragile one. I no longer just withstand shock, volatility, and uncertainty, I grow stronger from it too.

If you believe in the possibility that you are capable of much more than you think you are, what's the worst that could happen?

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my writing each week. This is something I get to look forward to every Friday at 9 am, and I am deeply grateful for that. Talk to you next week.