Stay With It

I’ve spent all winter training to come out strong for Titan, this year. I got close last year but I just couldn’t pull it off. I’m gunning for it this season – I’ve just had a hangboard PB and I’m psyched. I take a rest day then project a short and brutal 13d, pulling on crimps over and over again. All the moves have gone except one; this will be my training route until Lion’s Head season starts. I wake up the next day feeling like I didn't do enough so I go to the gym and at the end of my session my finger twangs and then blows up. FML. It’s April 2019.


I start doing yoga. For the first couple of months I feel restless and impatient as I try to follow 10 minute YouTube videos. I know I’m getting older and I know this’ll be good for me and by extension, my climbing. 

My husband laughs and makes fun of the names of poses while he plays video games, headphones cocked to one side of his head, never taking his eyes off the screen. 

There’s no place for me to practice other than the living room so I do my best to ignore how self-conscious I feel. In fact, for the first time in a long long while, I hear what he sounds like casually making fun of me. Cutting me down, what does he get out of it?


In my periphery, something comes barreling towards me but I look away. It's too much and then we're in lockdown and there’s no where to hide.

 

I apologized for getting better at climbing, for wanting to improve myself and actually doing it, by letting people dump their shit on me. I fawned and coddled and understood and made excuses and looked away believing this makes me a good "minority", a good part of the community, a good climbing partner, good friend, daughter, sister, wife. One way standards I'm cornered into. 

I knit them things and cheer for them and listen and support and I stay grateful and sorry I'm me and I'm disgusted with myself while it’s happening because I can't make myself stop. I’m too much anyway, who does she think she is? always making a big deal out of nothing, suck it up Sabrina, what do you know? What the fuck do you know, you stupid piece of shit? It's just a joke, relax. Shit happens. Caaalm down, get over it. Pay attention to ME. 

Different faces run past my vision, a dime a dozen. And me standing in the middle like an idiot, pretending what’s happening isn’t happening because what does it mean about me if it is? Trying to placate people who don't give a fuck about me beyond how much smoke I'm blowing up their asses.


I start to see patterns spanning my entire life, 40 years to this point, telescoping smaller and smaller until all that’s left is a grid work of puppet strings that've been pulling me along. Like Pavlov’s dog, a derision bell rings and I salivate, my cue to prove what a loyal, obligated, desperate to please damaged, dependent, no big deal person I am. I can't unsee it, now. 


Quietly and parallel to all of this I’d been feeding strings to a different person in a different reality. I start looking that way. Where high school me shakes calling the police on dad. Spend hours and hours in the cold shop at college, sawing glass pieces on the wet saw, grinding and polishing and epoxying and building something only I can see. Do pullups and cave problems and take screaming falls. Owning my life and what I get out of it. I start to live here in fits and starts, two steps forward, three steps back. Stay with it.

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