Climbing (Laboriously) Onward

Tonight, I went rock climbing for the first time. Indoor of course, since it has been alternately raining and snowing all day and my nose begins to run almost instantaneously when I step outside. This should have been nothing but a fun experience. It is something I have long begged my climber friends to do with me, but everyone seemed reluctant to be responsible for a beginner. Yet today, I got so nervous waiting to go that I had to force myself to sit down and breathe evenly. Now that I am back, with sore forearms and shaky fingers, I feel deeply disappointed. I want to understand this before and after effect better, because despite these strange reactions, I very badly want to go again.

I felt nervous. I felt nervous because it has been several months (maybe longer?) since I tried something genuinely new. In so many ways, Portland has returned me to my comfort zone and made me anxious and unsettled about the prospect of putting myself out there and really experiencing the world. I hate this reality, but I don't really know how to prevent it from happening. The goal of living here for a minimum of two years has forced me to cultivate and appreciate routine, and the increased freedom it can provide. But I am afraid (and nervous!) that by learning to appreciate routine, I am losing some of my fearlessness. Around this time last year, when I was still sweating in the austral summer and aimlessly idle in Buenos Aires, I wrote a short piece called "Ten Things That Make Me a Good Person". Number ten, the final and most important on my list, speaks to my sense of my own fearlessness. I include an excerpt below:

10- I am not afraid to die, only of not living. Very early, I tried to kill myself. This experience made me understand that death is so very easy to obtain, and life so very difficult to replace. I take risks, I challenge myself, push myself, put myself in impossible situations. I give my heart away quickly, completely. I commit myself to things with complete intensity. I push through the heartbreak and the pain and the disappointment and the fear because I recognize, deep down, that it is the only way for me to live without regret whenever death comes for me.

When I read this again today, I felt a profound sense of frustration within myself. In the comfort, security, and routine of life in Portland, have I lost the number one thing that made me proud of myself? Is this life right for me, if I feel I might be actively eroding the things which make me strong?

For the past several months, as the certainty of coming change grows within me, I have focused my meditation on the release of all attachments. One by one, I focus on the things I love and I try to express gratitude for them with every element of my being. Then, I release my attachment and come to the understanding that I may not have these things, or people, in life tomorrow. I may even lose them today. But it's ok. The important thing is that I had them, and I became a better person as a result of my interaction with them, no matter how brief. Yet I find myself questioning all this tonight, because it is clear that I AM attached to some elements of my life that make me feel comfortable, and doing things that are new make me feel distinctly uncomfortable.

I was also nervous because of the possibility of astonishing success. I think this must appear silly but I still harbor, within my deepest vanity, the hope that I will someday discover something for which I have a profound natural talent. Perhaps I have already found that thing, but that suggestion makes me sad. I so often feel so ordinary, so dull and graceless when I interact with others, because there is nothing that I am clearly good at. I don’t have any ready skills to showcase. I feel that new people must see me as a terrible bore.

More importantly, I lack the general experience of being a talented person, as I feel that most things I have mastered in life have been intense labors of love and required a lot of fucking difficult work. Aside from writing perhaps, nothing ever comes easily to me and so I crave the experience of feeling an instant connection with a new skill. Every time I try something new, especially a physical skill such as a new instrument or new sport, I allow this little seed of hope to run away with my imagination, and I envision myself as a savant. Inevitably, this makes me nervous because of course it is nearly impossible that I am a savant in anything, let alone something I discover so late in my life. So I put an entirely unattainable expectation on myself before I even begin. For this reason, I am rarely joyful after I try something new for the first time. Later, I may experience incredible elation and appreciation, but this is usually the result of seeing my hard work pay off, never for the pure joy of the experience.

On that note, let’s talk about disappointment. Obviously, I feel unreasonably disappointed that I am not, in fact, a climbing savant. It did not come naturally to me, in the end. I enjoyed the exercise, but it was difficult for me to envision the route correctly or to express any sort of grace or flow in my movements. I got tired. My body was sore in all the predictable places. On my last route, I fell and tired again- four or five times. My hands slipped and my fingers lost all their strength. I was, in short: a perfectly average beginner. Just once, I want to feel mastery right from the start! Just once, I want talent to be within my grasp! I don't want to be ordinary all the time!

I am also disappointed because I got frustrated with myself while still on the wall. As I have so often done in the past, I actively made the task harder for myself by flooding my mind with negative thoughts, instead of positive. I am an awful self-coach. I can offer sincere encouragement to my students every single day, but I am totally incapable of being kind and forgiving of myself. And of course, I know all my vulnerable points better than anyone, so I really know how to cut myself down. This must change! I want to commit to learning to support myself better in the future. Perhaps I can begin in a neutral place, by simply shutting out all commentary and focusing only on the present moment. Literally, in this case, the wall in front of me.

Finally, I am disappointed because I did not feel excited. Of course I wanted to be, but my heart was not truly glad. For a little while now, I feel that I have been becoming more emotionally detached. This is something I have actively been trying to cultivate: emotional detachment in an effort to avoid emotional entrapment. I am tired of getting caught up in the emotional drama of those around me, and feeling myself get swept away in the current of their emotional reactions. I want to break the cycle by learning to remain balanced at all times.

Yet lately what I have experienced is a feeling of coldness, or hollowness. I miss feeling the intensity of my emotions, and I am growing bored or feeling trapped by the levelness of equanimity. The world seems dull and lifeless, devoid of joy as well as sorrow. This is the biggest question of my life right now: Is there a way to avoid being swept away by the emotionality of others, yet still feel my own emotions fully?

All of the work I have done over the past three to four months seems like it is feeding my “old soul” exclusively, to the detriment of my “young soul”. That is, by cultivating emotional detachment, I feel I have lost the beautiful, intense playfulness that once characterized me and allowed me to experience the world in a very childlike way. I have not felt like a child in a long time now, and I miss this second side of my identity- the b side of my soul.

Tonight, I am grateful for the experience of climbing. I did not fall in love, and I did not discover my hidden talent, but as usual I think that it helped me understand myself just a little better. And as usual, now that I can see my weaknesses more clearly, I can begin the hard work of becoming better- as a climber and a person. Thanks to Colin, Jared, and Mike for finally opening up this world to me. You guys are all amazing!

Comfort

This one is for you. Yes, you Patrick. Let there be no misunderstanding this time. I haven't forgotten about you, my long-lost companion. I saw an old friend last weekend. He used to throw these little tantrums about not being able to be with me, and insist that we couldn't hang out for awhile. He's over it now. Given time, you will be too, I'm sure. This is you throwing a little tantrum about something you can't have. But soon enough, you'll forget why you even wanted me. Nonetheless, I miss you in my life and I wish once again that love and sex and attraction could butt out of my relationships and let me just be with the people I care about most.

Here's how I've been feeling lately: defeated. I've gotten so run down by life that I recently lost the ability to see the joy and sweetness in my existence. Last week, I had a total breakdown. I cried, I crawled under my covers, I hid from the world. While under my sea of green bedsheets, I made a startling revelation. I thought: this is the point I would normally call Patrick. This was hard for me to accept. But it helped me understand something important: I'm still holding on to you for reasons I don't fully accept. As much as you frustrate and irritate me when you call me in an emotional tailspin, I also still rely on you to lift my spirits from time to time. You are my emotional bedrock. While I may have built up a solid foundation of self-confidence- even peace and happiness- in other areas of my life, I still come to you for comfort.

Is this fair? Is this healthy? Well, I know that it allowed me to appear very well-adjusted and level in my current love affair. It allowed me to divorce my emotions from my interactions with him, because whenever I felt a bit crazed, or sad, or scared, or at all vulnerable, I simply called you. This wasn't fair to anyone involved, including me. You got all the broken-down parts of me, he got all the strong, secure parts, and I got a weird, divided psyche and a total lack of self-possession. I know that it undoubtedly created a road-block for my own self-awareness. I know that it prevented me from really cultivating any kind of self-comforting techniques. So, no I suppose my continued attachment to you was not fair or healthy.

I also think it was unfair because it obviously created a feeling of closeness, of love and compassion, between us that went beyond the usual bonds of friendship. It's clear that I still feel most comfortable with you above all others in the world, and I AM scared to let go. I AM scared to reveal my vulnerabilities to another, even my close friends. For this, I'm sorry. Both because you were right in calling me out on my fear, and because I see that I was leading you on, in a way that wasn't healthy for either of us.

The truth is that I really don't want a conventional-type relationship anymore, but letting go of the comfort I found with you, in our traditional relationship, has been incredibly difficult for me. In this new space, this new version of love, that I have been crafting since our split, there is definitely less room for vulnerability and weakness. There is less space to find comfort in a lover. There is less tolerance for moments of self-pity. I am forcing myself to become more self-sufficient, more capable of supporting myself in times of weakness, more adept at managing the darkness within me alone. But this is not an easy path, and I can't help but miss the moments when I turned to you and felt the burden of my pain lighten a little. No one has ever made me feel more loved, more peaceful and safe, in my whole life. But I recognize now that by relying so heavily on you to provide a safe haven for my battered self, a reprieve from my pain, I actually handicapped myself. Losing you meant losing my haven, and I suspect you feel something similar. Perhaps this is the main reason that our bond has lingered well past the expiration of our relationship: we are both feeling the absence of comfort in our lives more acutely than we should. If we were truly healthy, we would have maintained that comfort within ourselves.

That is what I am striving toward now: self-love, self-awareness, and now self-comfort. What a journey I have undertaken! How many holes I realize need filling. How many cracks in my foundation of self that our relationship (and others) held up precariously for a time. But I am not scared of commitment. In fact, I am more committed to this journey of self discovery than I feel I have ever been to any relationship in my life. It is just that love has taken a different form in my life now, and I'm still trying to adjust my understanding to these new contours. And I am still tethered, here and there, to those holds that gave me peace and comfort before. From this point on, I will work ardently to release this form of attachment to you, so that we can both climb free toward an independent, joyful life.

I look forward to talking to you again.