A Light through the Cracks: A Climber's Story

by Beth Rodden

My anxiety kept me wide awake, and my wakefulness in turn meant I had nothing but space and time for the anxiety to spin itself tighter in my body.

I wondered if people could tell we’d changed: if we walked differently or stood slightly less straight, if

we’d absorbed so much fear and terror that we now emitted it.

But this hard thing didn’t make me feel stronger, and I had no language to tell Tommy or anyone else how very fragile I felt. I couldn’t show him this darkness, could not tell him that I was still braced, every second, for the next threat.

There were so many variables, so many tiny choices that aligned—or misaligned—to put us in the wrong place at the worst possible time.

trauma is both rational and irrational. It is the body’s response to danger, a deeply rooted instinct to protect itself. But it can manifest in unhelpful, unreasonable, and deeply unpleasant ways.

You don’t need to be good all the time. Or maybe being good can mean being honest with yourself instead of following the rules. It’s okay to be messy. It’s okay that this hurts. You’ll survive this, and Tommy will survive this, just as you’ve survived everything else.

Anger was easier than sadness: anger was fuel, powering me up the wall, while sadness and shame just weighed me down.

I began to be less afraid of my own thoughts. And as my thoughts became less frightening to me, less shameful, that meant I could loosen my rigid control over them. I could be kinder to myself. I could be myself. I could begin to trust that if I showed the thoughts and feelings I had always hidden away, the people I cared about would still stay.

I was learning that life wasn’t an equation to be solved, that it wasn’t a matter of controlling all the pieces—my body, my eating, my training, my social circle, my marriage—and putting them in the correct places to achieve the desired result. I had treated myself like a robot for so long, thinking my discipline made me better than regular people. I finally understood that pursuing “greatness” didn’t fill me the way a “normal” life did. If I wanted to have a big life, I needed to live a smaller one.

Now I understand that it’s okay to have to figure things out—that the figuring out is the point, in the end. That constantly fighting to keep the freight train of your life on a specific, rigid track means missing all those little derailments—the heartbreaks and surprises and delights and aches that make up the human experience.