You Can Never Climb High Enough to Escape Your Feelings

In January this year, my Nanna died. Please don’t tell me you’re sorry, or offer your condolences. I’ll only brush them away, lie to you and tell you that I’m fine – she’d had dementia for years, so really we lost her a long time ago. In a way that’s true, but in actual fact that doesn’t make it any better at all. It just means that we lost her twice. Once when her personality disappeared; her brain eroded and her mind chipped away a day at a time until all that was left was nursery rhymes and old poetry. Then again when her physical body gave up. A tiny, bird-like hand, all paper skin and fragile bones, in my calloused, sweaty one. A woman I barely recognised as my lovely Nanna enveloped in stiff NHS sheets and tubes. Nanna who taught me how to sew, who was always the second person I rang after my mum when I had news. And then she was gone.

It never matters how prepared you are for it, how much you expect it, grief will always get you. For a couple of weeks, I had the audacity to think I’d escaped it. Of course I was sad. I missed her deeply, and the person she had once been. I was there for my Mum when she needed it. I said and did everything I was supposed to do, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel like I was grieving. There was relief, certainly. Relief that her pain was over, and so was the pain we felt watching her suffer. Hot on the heels of relief came guilt, guilt that I could ever be so heartless as to feel relief about someone I loved dying. But still, no grief.

Then, one night I was at the climbing gym. I’ve never enjoyed climbing indoors, at least not since I discovered the triumphs and struggles of real rock. I don’t really have a choice in the winter though, when I only have to think about going outside for my fingers to turn white, and it’s dark before I finish work. So I wasn’t in the best mood, but I wasn’t grieving. Pysche was low, but I ran up a few lead routes with my partner. I tied in for a red 6c, one I’d done before quite easily, so I was expecting to cruise up to the top. About two thirds of the way up I got my hands the wrong way round on a pair of neighbouring crimps, and unable to correct it, I fell off.

My partner shouted up something encouraging, but I shook my head. I didn’t want to pull back onto the wall and finish the route, I wanted to be back on the ground and I wanted to be back on the ground now. My usual reaction to falling off a route can vary from shoulder-shrugging nonchalance to pretty annoyed, but this reaction felt massively out of proportion. There was a tide rising inside of me, a wave of emotion, and I needed both feet flat on the floor before the dam broke. The figure-8 knot tying me into the wall felt like it was made of steel and my fingers fumbled while I quietly hyperventilated and tried not to call attention to myself. At last, I was able to pull the rope out of my harness.

I made it all the way outside before the emotional tsunami hit. Emotional tsunami sounds dramatic but honestly that’s the only way I can describe it. I crumpled to the ground and just wailed. It was like my body had stored up the tears I hadn’t cried over the previous weeks and was intent on forcing them all out of my eyes (and nose) as quickly as possible.

Triggered by a stupid 6c lead route.

What was wrong with me?

Grief, of course.

Something as simple as falling off a climb had opened the floodgates. My overdue grief had finally arrived, and it had arrived tightly enmeshed in my climbing.

Exercise and physical activity has always been my escape. As a teenager, I ran until my knees literally gave way to deal with the confusion and dramas of puberty. I pole danced obsessively through my 20s to manage the stress of university and a demanding career. In my 30s, that mantle has been taken up by climbing. When you pull on to the rock, the entire rest of the world just melts away. The only thing that matters is the climb, all your other anxieties seem temporarily meaningless. I find solace in the movement, exhilaration in the adrenalin dumps, and opportunities for peaceful meditation during the long hours on belays.

If I could have just climbed through my grief, perhaps I would have dealt with it better. Or more likely I would have been able to escape it until it felt less all-encompassing. Unfortunately, around the same time my Nanna died, I was also dealing with two pretty limiting injuries. I’d recently developed capsulitis in my right hand, leaving my middle finger swollen, painful, and unable to pull on anything. I also had a nasty case of tendonitis in my left Achilles, meaning I couldn’t even hike, couldn’t even lose myself in the tranquillity of the mountains. Suddenly, all my coping mechanisms were closed to me. I had no way to escape my feelings. I just had to, well, feel them. And they were horrible. I was fragile, irritable, overly sensitive. I struggled to concentrate and to find joy in things I usually enjoyed. The twinned relief and guilt that had initially seemed logical became overwhelming. And god, I was just constantly, relentlessly, weight-on-my-chest sad. In short, I was a mess.

A huge part of climbing is mental. Regardless of physical ability, poor headgame can mean the difference between successful, fun day climbing and being terrified, clinging to the wall, fumbling gear and just generally having a terrible time. Over time, my injuries healed. I tentatively began to climb again, but I found that my headgame had taken a nosedive. I was getting nervous on routes that should have been well within my comfort zone. I was afraid to get on routes I would have previously jumped at. I was holding myself back because I was scared. Not scared of the routes themselves, but terrified of aggravating my injuries, or developing new injuries that would once again leave me unable to climb and more importantly, unable to escape my own head.

I can happily report that through a combination of grief counselling and time, I’m now feeling much better. What’s that saying? Grief never gets any smaller, but you can grow around it. I feel like I am managing to do that. My headgame too, is on the up. Thanks to perseverance and an excellent training session with Emma Twyford I’ve managed to feel a lot less scared, push my trad grade to onsight E4, and have a fantastic summer season. But there still seems to be a tight knitting of my emotions and my climbing. Perhaps because it’s such a huge part of my life, or because much of the enjoyment I draw from life is centred around it, or maybe because that night on the red 6c tangled rock and emotion all up together. I’m not sure.

Back in my pole dancing days, coaches often said that it’s normal to get emotional during intense stretching sessions because many people “store their emotions in their hips”. I can’t speak to the scientific accuracy of that, but if it is true, I must now store mine in my fingers. I’ve always struggled to talk about things while I’m in the thick of them. I usually bottle things up till enough time has passed that they become an anecdote, relayed without pain. Now though, I’ve noticed that if I’m up to my old tricks and bottling up extreme feelings, deeply upset about something but struggling to talk about it or trying to avoid it, the adrenalin dump of falling off a route can open the sluice gates and make it all come flooding out. Don’t worry, it’s not all the time – if you go out with me I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown every time I have a foot slip, or a power out. If I had a pound for every time it had happened since the red 6c, I’d only have £2, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened twice, right?

Don’t get me wrong – climbing is still my escape from the the mundanity and stress of daily life, but I’m realising I can’t keep using it as a tool to plaster over and ignore the things that are deeply upsetting me. I’m having to learn to deal with my emotions before I tie in to the rope. Remind myself that it’s okay to grieve, to be sad, and to work through that with my feet on the ground. I’m learning that no matter how high I climb, I will never climb high enough to escape my own head. But hey, maybe it’s not so bad in here after all.