less skin, more clarity

Saturday and Monday have transformed how I perceive and respond to my passion. Saturday's trip outdoors, despite its lack of actual climbing on my part (I was relegated to the ranks of belayer on account of the number of first-timers that needed belaying), only served to heighten my desire to see and do more. I mean, there was the "off-roading" in the Civic, which was awesome...but that's another story. I'm talking about the way things come into focus, the way I can spend six hours just in the vicinity of the granite, a rope in my hands, and be utterly content. And Monday...Monday's crack climbing session tore up my hands, as usual, but I was nearly overwhelmed by the total sense of my own motivation as a source for perseverance. It was just me and the wall, dancing and conversing. I'm in my element there, shoving my bleeding hands into a concrete fissure, squeezing and pulling. I feel strong and present when I'm doing that, and in those moments I am doing something I choose and I want to succeed at. I like that feeling.

forced to sit still for a moment

In the end, climbing is what I love, my own expression of joy. Everything else is just noise. -Steph Davis, High Infatuation

I have never loved any activity the way I love climbing. It's what I dream about, what I think about when I'm doing other things, it's what I talk about, it's what I want to be doing. I can't articulate properly the palpable camaraderie that exists when I spend time with friends who are as infatuated as I am.
Thus, upon the recent flaring up of shoulder pain on account of the fact that I'm pulling too much plastic too often and getting strong too fast...I'm having a hard time. I get angry because the one thing I want to do--my escape, my balance, where I process and express--is painful and difficult. Instead of feeling capable and strong, I feel weak and frustrated.

Though climbing can be hell on a love relationship, it offers an unparalleled sense of community. [...] being a driven person is hard. Being in love with that person can be even harder. -Steph Davis, High Infatuation

I've not been healthily single in some years. And I can't help but think that my hunger for movement did not build our relationship. How do I reconcile my emotional needs with those of someone who wants nothing to do with the very thing that is most therapeutic for me emotionally?
And so here I am, a week out of the split, frustrated over a shoulder injury and fighting to move and to process all that's going on in my head but not wanting to wreck my body.
My tendency to fixate can be my greatest asset and conversely my hugest obstacle. I can focus and I can fight, but I struggle so much with stepping back to see bigger. I'm immediate, I'm driven. I need resolution and expectation.

Right now, in this moment, I am content. I am not anxious or angry. I want to seize the quiet surging of motivation in my chest and ration it across my days so that I can keep breathing, just like this.

on growing up and gaining perspective

I'm not sure what I want to do. I'm nearly twenty-three (okay, eight months to go) and I'm a graduate student and I have a place to live and a community to be part of and I want to see the world. I want to know that it's okay to desire not to settle into what I perceive to be the expectations projected onto me.
I want to know that I can keep dreaming big in the way that everyone encourages you to when you're seven. When you're brimming with potential--you can be anything you want. I want to know that it's okay to believe that now.
I want to go on big adventures and learn about this place we inhabit. I want to share meals with new friends and to have the opportunity to visit old ones.
I feel like I'm running out of time, like I have to choose. I know I can be happy with what I've chosen, with where I've chosen, and that I can make this work. Rationally, I know that. I also know that I am STILL brimming with potential, that I am only twenty-two with no real responsibilities and all the time in the world to discover my world.

Is it possible to reconcile reality with the what-ifs and big dreams?

on restlessness and rainy days

So I was really good about updating for a while there, and then a monthlong hiatus. To my credit, with this juggling of multiple jobs and school, I don't spend as much time musing in the way that my soul needs. Daniel put it quite well: I have a restless heart. I am more exhausted by waiting than I am by going and doing. And in doing a lot of waiting, I force my spirit into a sort of restricted, choke-y state where I feel less passionately and I am susceptible to frustration and lethargy. I just function better when I'm thinking and moving and exploring. And I nearly crashed my car when I caught a glimpse of the Sierras this afternoon when the cloud cover cleared up.

I'm aching to get up to Yosemite again soon, but family takes priority since I haven't been home since before New Year's. I'll have to make do for now.

I'm reading a lot, which is good. Nothing like the breathless frenzy of literary devouring that happened over break, but still a steady diet of recreational reading, sometimes at the expense of required reading or sleep.

Oh yeah. Sleep. I should do that.

too many changes

I didn't expect to be so upset when my dad told me it was time to put Josh down. I knew it would be coming. But for some reason when he said it was going to happen this week, I had to really try to hold it together the rest of the conversation. He's 14, which means we've had him since I was my sister's age exactly. I probably met him nearly 14 years ago this week. That also means that I am acutely cognizant of all memories of him, because at eight you pretty much keep those memories intact--they don't get muddled and distorted as much as the earlier ones.

He's such a sweet boy, with the kindest eyes. He's mellow, but he's always been kind of like an old man--a little bit fiery and not afraid to let you know. He was the one who woke Dad when the house next door caught fire when I was in the fifth grade, and he used to sleep next to Meghan's bassinet and check on her if she stirred. He's always looked a little funny, like a character from a Dr. Seuss book. He knows who he likes.

At the risk of sounding trite and overly elegiac, I'll leave it at that.

And Dad said they're planning to put in an offer on a fixer-upper ranchette on the outskirts of town. I'm so far from all of this. I'm probably more okay with the idea of them moving now that I'm really truly "out of the house" and have been for some time now. They threatened to move about six or eight years ago and I wanted nothing to do with it. Now I'm a little more detached and so it seems less threatening to my own perception of "home". Home is here, where I live now. "Home" is with my family, wherever they choose to be.

the trees appear aflame in the hour of sundown

Today someone asked if I was considering foregoing the snow trip next weekend because of the money or because I was stressed over it. And I realized that it was both. I stress when I have no money, but I was also anxious over the prospect of losing precious alone time, something I've come to covet and savor and guard especially over the last few months. I need it. I've always known that, but having experienced it, having come to love quiet evenings at home with tea and a book or even just organizing around the house...I hesitate to make plans and I'm becoming less apt to accept them.

I'm eating better and I'm feeling so much more balanced. I'm excited about what the next few weeks hold. Now if I could just figure out how to get past this issue with my body thinking I have the time to sleep ten hours a day, I'd be golden.

traces of ambition

I need goals. Repeatedly I am reminded of this, especially lately. It's sometimes hard for me to set them, because I am so impulsively obsessive that I have a hard time existing outside my immediate reality. Also, I am so sensitive to what's going on with other people--what they think and what they feel--that I often have trouble discerning what exactly it is that I need and want.

So, in the spirit of my burgeoning adulthood and the implied lack of direction I have, I suppose I ought to set some goals.

1) I will finish cleaning my room out this month
2) I will make more friends that climb trad and will teach me, and find some way to offer my gratitude
3) I will climb 5.11 and boulder V5 by the end of the year
4) I will earn As in my graduate school classes
5) I will put some money away so I can start saving more, and I will take over more of my own expenses
6) I will write more songs
7) I will climb El Cap by my 30th birthday
8) I will teach my sister how to love music the way I do
9) I will spend more time with my brother
10) I will learn a new language
11) I will figure out how to tell my parents I'm a vegetarian, despite the fact I'm pretty sure they're worried I'm a hippie as it is
12) I will run a 5K

I've enjoyed lately the sensation of settling into my personality and my life. I can't say this has always been the case, but the worst of it is over and now I feel like I'm becoming who I want to be. And the person I want to be needs moments of intense solitude in as much quantity and intensity as the moments of entire engagement with others that I love so dearly. She needs lots of sleep and she's awkward in the way that keeps her grounded--usually. She dreams of new places and adventures and new people with whom to connect. She appreciates the unknown and is comfortable with uncertainty.