Strong, Powerful, Sexy

One day, while I was looking up…

I walked into a rock gym for my first climbing lesson. I walked in to a place I knew no one, alone. I took a solo lesson best shared with a partner. I was shy, nervous, and scared. I looked at my feet because it’s my thing. I answered quietly when my instructor asked questions, unsure of what I was doing, not fully understanding the things he was saying. I felt stupid. That stupid you feel the first time you do anything, when you think this is awful, you will never get it, it will never makes sense and you will always feel this stupid so you are never doing this again.

Then the instructor tied me to a rope and told me to climb the wall. It was the hardest climb ever, the wall was a million feet high, the things (*rocks*) I was to use to get up there were the smallest things I had ever seen, and the only help I had to get me from the bottom to the top was ME.

I was about to fail miserably. There was no way I was strong enough, brave enough, courageous enough, or smart enough to find my way to the top of that climb. Ten minutes later, I was reaching that last hold and turning to look down at the ground merely 35 feet below. I did it. I had no idea.

That first time was scary. Not because I was climbing ever farther from the solid earth I had grown to love so dearly but because I was forced to put absolute trust in one thing: ME. At that time in my life, I wasn’t sure if I was worth it. Would I just be a horrible disappointment? I had to trust me and it was hard. The instructor did an amazing (terrifying) thing then; he handed me a blindfold. I had been climbing for a total of 70 minutes of my life and now I was supposed to do it blindfolded? It was trust by fire. Without judgments about the shapes, texture, and sizes of the hand and foot-holds or my ability to use them properly, I had only to feel, trust, and move. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you aren’t telling yourself why you can’t accomplish it before you even try.

That was over 4 years ago.

Before I walked into that gym I doubted my strength, my courage, my beauty. Climbing has taught me about being a woman. A strong, powerful, sexy, beautiful woman.

The Journey is the Reward

The journey is the reward. That’s a Taoist proverb right there.

When I was in middle school, my best friend asked me if I knew that I was always looking at my feet and that I never made eye contact with people. I didn’t know but I guess I had never grown out of that phase where, as a child, you think if you can’t see them then they can’t see you. About 10 years later, I started my first job and as I was walking toward the building, staring dutifully at the ground, a colleague walked by and said, “Good morning.” That was when I realized, something was going to have to change. No one ever got anywhere in life meekly staring at her feet (or ignoring salutations from her co-workers).

It started very slowly, this looking up and seeing the world in which I lived thing.

Some days I still hope you can’t see me when I’m staring at my feet.

 Some days I look up and bask in my life and embrace my journey.

That's me and I got there the good old-fashioned way, climbing straight up.