My foot slipped and my heart dropped to my stomach. I froze, clinging to the side of the wall, my fingers aching. I looked up, Could I reach the next hand hold? It seemed so far away. And then I made my biggest mistake. I looked down.
Instant vertigo washed over me as I imagined the snap of my neck, striking the ground below. It looked like miles to the bottom of the climbing floor gym, days. Adrenaline coursed through my body, and I began to tremble. I couldn’t do this.
“I want to get down now!” I said shakily, calling to the instructor. “Um… NOW.”
I was eight feet off the ground.
“Wow, you’re really good at this!” the instructor said, smiling at her.
He glanced over at me with disdain. “You can leave your harness over there. So other people can climb.”
I’m not a person who loves facing her fears. Sure, I could conquer my greatest fears and climb the wall. Or alternatively, I could stay on the ground where it’s nice and safe and there’s ice cream. They don’t have ice cream on the sides of cliffs.
I don’t know when I became such a scaredy cat, but just the thought of things that thrill other people — sky diving, getting tattoos, skiing fast, speeding in cars — makes me nauseous. Why risk it? I’ve always thought.
Maybe I’ve always been this way. When I was 6 years old, I remember kids on the playground pricking their fingers with a piece of glass to become blood sisters. I ran immediately to tell the teacher. I’d like to think that I saved them from getting some flesh eating pathogen that day. “It was the right thing to do!” I tell myself. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t step one in a long career of being a no fun narc. I was dangerously uncool, unwilling to risk infection to join the club.
Years later, when kids at sleepovers pulled out an R rated VHS, I called my mother. It’s a wonder I wasn’t very popular. But I never wanted to risk getting in trouble, getting hurt, being scared. Not worth it, I always thought.
Normal activities that seem fun and relatively safe to others, have long filled me with terror. The only time I ever went skiing, the lesson ended with the instructor skiing backwards, holding my hands while I sobbed, and telling me that he was definitely going to get me down that mountain. It was… not one of my better vacations.
Which brings me to Chicago, at a climbing gym. Red Bull was having an event to launch new flavors of the drink. Both sugar free, the purple and lime editions were in full force around the gym with people sipping them out of cans, and specialty cocktails being made with them. Food was being served — little tapas style seafood dishes from a local chef.
All around me, people were casually climbing up to the top of climbing walls, breezily laughing, and enjoying themselves. I hated all of them.
All I wanted to do was to admit the defeat I knew from the beginning was inevitable, and return with Julie to the hotel where an SVU marathon awaited. But I couldn’t do that (afraid of offending people), the guest of honor hadn’t even been introduced.
Believe it or not, my freak out on the climbing wall wasn’t the centerpiece of the Red Bull event. Sasha DiGiulian, a world champion climber, was there to show us a climb and answer questions. Sasha’s accomplishments are incredible. Climbing since the age of six years old, she’s won the World Championship for female overall climbing and silvered in the Bouldering World Championship. Plus, she was the first North American woman to do a grade 9a climb.
Sasha is the kind of person whose bravery, drive, and utter fearlessness absolutely inspires me. And also reminds me that I’m a complete chicken.
With the crowd looking on, Sasha began an extremely difficult looking climb with grace and ease. She swung easily from grip to grip, before repelling down, and then she answered questions. Feeling like a failure, I approached the confident, bubbly 24 year old. “How do you… not get scared?” I asked like a small child wondering how grown ups sleep without a night light.
“I do!” she said. So I asked her how she fights through that fear.
“When I get scared, I just fall,” Sasha said. “Because that’s the worst thing that can happen. You won’t get hurt here, you’re well secured. Just fall.”
It was good advice. It’s facing your fears through living out the worst case scenario. And unlike the real world, at a climbing gym, you have a really good safety net.
With Sasha’s advice in mind, I decided to try it again. I went back to the same instructor and put on my harness. I was going to do it this time. And I didn’t look down. I swung up on the wall and told myself to put one foot in front of the other, ignoring the butterflies swimming unpleasantly in my stomach. I breathed through me terror.
In no time at all I was nearing the top, earning smiles from down below.
But my journey wasn’t over. I looked down and that vertigo feeling hit me again.
“Oh my God,” I thought. “I have to get down from here. What if he drops me? What if my harness is faulty? What if I’m one of those freak accidents in that show 1000 Ways To Die? I’ll probably not only fall to the ground but somehow a toilet will explode at the same time showering me with feces. I’m pregnant, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!”
“Okay!” The instructor called from the million miles below me. “You have to lean back now. Just let go!”
So I did. I closed my eyes and jumped back. As I was gently lowered to the ground my fear dissipated and I was left with a small feeling of accomplishment. I could do it after all, I’d just needed to let go. Opening myself up to the possibility of falling had helped me to reach new heights.
