My husband and I arrived about twenty minutes early at the Field House where our lessons were to take place. This, of course, gave me plenty of time to sit and look up at the dizzying heights I had paid good money to climb on - for no other purpose than to go back down again. Honestly, I couldn't figure out what people found in it. It seemed about as pointless as people spending money on those mechanical binoculars at look out points, that never seem to work correctly anyways.
It is kind of sad that just sitting in a cafe chair about twenty feet away made me dizzy with vertigo. It also got me angry. I am a fairly intelligent person. I am a logical person. Yet just looking at a wall made my breathing go shallow and my heart race. When the class started I told the instructor that I doubted that I could get more than three feet up... but in my mind I told myself that I was going to make it up at least ten.
The instructor (Christie? Christine? I was too busy having a mild panic attack to really get her name) showed us how to get into our harnesses She taught us how to make a figure eight knot - which my Eagle Scout husband was able to pick up on depressingly easily. Then she asked if I was ready to climb.
I shouted "NO!" and ran away to my car, leaving everyone behind me.
Just kidding. That's just the immediate thought that popped into my head while I was being hooked up to the rope. In reality, I nodded and made some kind of trite joke about possibly needing the fire department to save me from myself. I began climbing, and paused, and breathed. And moved another hand, another foot, another hand, another foot. I stared at the wall, about three inches from my face. I breathed in the slightly stale, musty odor of prefabricated psudo-rock that they make indoor rock climbing walls out of. I had the time to wonder what they exactly made it out of. Within a few movements, I could feel that I was off the ground. Not "feel" like one feels a warm breeze, or notices that the temperature has dropped. This is the feeling that one gets when walking in the woods just after dusk. You may know that the path you're on is safe, but your subconscious basically says, "Yeah, I don't care what you think... I believe that there may be something out there. And that something might have teeth."
I started to repeat my mantra; remember the one I talked about earlier? The one where I told myself that what I'm feeling was nothing more than a surge of endorphin running through my brain, and that this was a learned response? Yeah. I repeated it. A lot. And after a while, I didn't feel the need to remind myself the words. I just breathed through the panic and fear. And it was okay. Not great, but okay. The fear wasn't going to kill me. Falling wasn't going to kill me. The fear might stop me from going to the top, but it wasn't going to stop me from trying.
How high did I make it that first day? Well, I made it more than the three feet that I told the instructor. I made it more than the ten feet I told myself that I was going to make it to. At the end of my third climb, on my first day, I made it about fifteen feet off the ground. Fifteen feet might not be a lot to most people, but to someone who had never been on a step ladder before, those fifteen feet might as well have been Mount Everest to my fear-addled mind.
And Mount Everest felt good (or at least, my little tiny itty-bitty first step in climbing did).
WTG Leena!!
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