A Light through the Cracks: A Climber's Story

by Beth Rodden

Memories are fallible, but this is, to the best of my ability, a work of nonfiction. Some names of individuals have been changed.

My thoughts flapped like the

loose end of a film in an old-fashioned movie projector, the front reel spinning empty.

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.

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.

Coded into its syntax was a declaration that what we were doing, how we were living our lives, was better than how everybody else was living theirs. We existed more fully. We saw more clearly. We breathed better air and smelled better smells. All those poor stupid people sitting in cubicles with air-conditioning and fluorescent lights—they couldn’t possibly understand. And even if they did understand, they couldn’t hack it. They weren’t tough enough to live out of their cars and sleep hanging off walls hundreds of feet in the air.

Therapy felt like swimming through hot lava.

We shouldn’t have come. But I needed not to break down. I needed not to call attention to the fact that I was a child. I needed not to scream, not to draw anyone’s eyes to me. I was desperate to disappear.

The constant self-criticism in my head was barely muted even in the moment that my career reached its pinnacle.

I realized I didn’t need or want the more superficial or insincere praise as much anymore, the fleeting attention. None of that had helped me in my hardest times. External praise was a Band-Aid, easily ripped away. I still have an ego, but I’m trying to value being settled from within. To realize that building my own resilience feels good and nourishing, whereas the outside noise was only a tenuous prop holding me up. Maybe that comes easily for some people, but for me it is a hard thing to hold on to.

But I had surprised myself so much, in the past decade. 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.

At some point, I imagined therapy as a task I could complete, like another dream climb checked off my list: mission accomplished. I was surprised to realize that I would need to keep going back—that I would want to keep going back, from time to time, to work through something, one of those sticking points in my mind.