anecdote

When things started to happen in my family, I got close to many of my relatives I had known since I was little, and seen a lot of, but never gotten to know as a full adult. One of those was my aunt Lillian. She lived close to me when I was growing up, so I saw her almost every weekend, but I didn't know her very well. She was a little bit intimidating to me, and I don't know that kids were her style.

This year, I have grown to admire her so much. She's a CEO, an incredible business woman, and a world-class athlete. (One of the top climbers in the world.) She is energetic, and so positive, and silly, and cheerful too. I love this picture of her because it shows how she is so very slight, but amazingly strong, and I like how hard her shoulders are in it.

Over winter, she invited me to go climbing in one of the gyms she owns. Josh, Travis, and my brother (who were all up for Christmas with my folks) took her up on it as well. Since she and my uncle owned climbing gyms for years, I grew up climbing, but I hadn't done it probably since before college.

We had a good time. The walls are 40 foot up, and they are dizzying and terrifying and exhilarating. They make different paths of varying difficulty, and you can sort of choose your own adventure. The hardest one I did had a kind of overhang lip that I had to brute force slam my leg up over my chest, and then try to haul my weight up over myself while hanging on by a thigh. My knee was black for a week after, because I just used it to leverage my whole body up over the precipice, all skinned fingertips, strawberry burns, and chalkdust. My aunt and uncle told me I got the award for...well, not the prettiest, but the most relentless climb, since I fell down and off and slammed into the wall a handful of times before I scaled it. .

Midway through, I asked my aunt to climb something on the highest level difficulty, so we could see how it was done. She went to the highest rated wall. The handholds we were using were hand-shaped; the ones on her wall were slivers. The path was almost entirely flat.

You think you've looked at someone doing something--and I'd been watching a gym full of climbers climb all day--but there was no compare. What she did wasn't climbing as I knew it. It was all dancing and it was all spiders. There was none of my clumsy hard work, my sweating and dragging. She sort of swayed sideways up the wall, tip-toes just brushing a flat piece of wall, ignoring the holds, momentum carrying her. Her movements didn't look human. I remember watching her and thinking I want to remember this for the rest of my life. I didn't know her any longer. It was that alien, and that beautiful.

I don't know why I'm thinking about that--and her--tonight. I guess this year I have been aware of the limits of my own ability: the dull, tired, stupid places in myself, the death of my confidence, this abrupt arrival at a belief that I am worthless and unwanted. I have been disconnected with all the alien and beautiful. But I'm trying. I'm slamming my scarred-up knees against the wall. I'm climbing like a clumsy, tall girl.