The fastest way to get better

What’s the fastest way to get better as a climber? Is it developing strength? It is refining your technique? Is it getting a really hot boyfriend?

No.

It is the churning awareness of your regular, repeated failures.

It is being worn down to an emotional nubbin in front of dozens of strangers.

It is the quaking revelation you actually have no idea how to climb how they climb.

It is lying in your sleeping bag each night feeling the wretchedness and tears that come with this Truth.

It is questioning whether you belong at this cliff at all, and finding no satisfying answer from your partner, your lover, or instagram, their answers in fact bringing you more tears and more uncertainty…coming to understand, some time in the middle of the night when it’s both your dreams and the goddamn full moon keeping you up, that only you decide if you belong at the base of those climbs, let alone digging your dirty claws in on their treacherous faces.

It is a walk through the flames of your beloved sense of self on fire.

And after months, if you’re lucky, and dedicated enough to feeling miserable, and years if you resist it, an opening slowly starts spreading.  Painfully slowly the opening fills with feelings you’ve never had before.  One is invincibility, the other is patience.  You didn’t know you’d be rewarded this way.  But here it is.  Slowness and peace. Room in your brain to learn through your eyes, bring awareness to details, change the pathways your feet follow up the wall, relax when you once would have pumped out and just taken, slow down when you used to get frantic.

Yes now you have earned access to Strength and Technique🗝️