A 5.13 Life
I found myself in Zion National Park this winter. How do you leap from the east coast all the way to the left? Well, you drive there. Ok, actually—first, you quit your job with no savings or plan and dive head first. I am making good life decisions, yeah?
Back in the fall, my Chevy broke down one last time (RIP) but I decided to hitchhike my way to West Virginia and then down to Tennessee to climb. It was outside of Soddy Daisy where I paid in cash for a used Honda CRV and drove back up to New York. The next step was to start building out the back of it because that seems like a reasonable next step, right? Nannying in Brooklyn would give me access to things like a kitchen, shower, and laundry.
Things escalated quickly and I quit my job earlier than I’d initially planned. So, here I was in late December, driving through the middle of Nebraska heading to—somewhere. Anywhere. I shuffle around in my glove compartment to find my registration. I, instead, unfold a slightly wrinkled napkin.
Scribbled in my messy handwriting, I wrote: "Yeah, sometimes we have to take our plans and scrap them and just start from the beginning, wherever that may be. Lose that control. That was what moving to Brooklyn was for me, five years ago. Climbing was my new chapter and Brooklyn helped me get there but I don’t want to fall into that trap again. You know, doing things because they make me feel safe. It’s important to have a plan—or at least, a general outline of a plan—with the flexibility and understanding that those plans could very well change in an instant.”
I didn’t have a plan, though. Crap?
Ok, ok, starting over. The most important part is that I’m allowed to feel whatever I’m feeling in these moments of uncertainty—that it’s ok to fall apart. And, on occasion, I do fall apart. I think we all spend so much time trying to convince ourselves that we need to be strong, when we really just need to be ourselves. I’m realizing that there is no single person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them, but we aren’t supposed to be able to instantly have all of the answers; that’s not how we’re made.
I don’t climb 5.13. I haven’t even touched a 5.13, but like so many of us, I so desperately want a 5.13 life. Maybe, on this road trip, I will touch one 5.13. The love of challenge is what triggers my insecurities as much as it feeds my soul. Ah, juxtaposition.
Anybody can have a 5.13 life, though. I didn’t have to sell and donate all of my earthly possessions to pursue that. A 5.13 life is being afraid and going ahead with it anyway because even if you’re scared and even though it hurts—you’re growing. You’re changing. You’re evolving. I'm both terrified and excited to see what kind of person I become on the other side of this. And she might not be a 5.13 climber, but I hope she’s a good person. I hope that she has a good moral compass, is a little less scattered and has things a little more figured out, and is a nice person to be around, in general. And, whatever she becomes, I hope that she remembers that a 5.13 life is not about making money. It’s about making art. It’s about getting off route and finding your way back.
I’ve always thought that the nice thing about being in your twenties is that you can be amorphous and that there are no set limitations on how many times you can change your plans. But fuck, you're really out there.
Rob Robinson once told me to keep going for it: “You can always desk it later in life.”
I go back and forth about my decisions, as we all do. But if I keep second-guessing myself, I feel like I'm living two different lives and I really hate that feeling. In life, you don’t always get to play the “what if” game, and sometimes you have to take the free-fall. In trad climbing, you're the primary piece of protection…and everything else is redundancy in the system. You are the primary piece.