Chasing Joy

A couple of months after Red Supergiant, I found myself at the doctor’s surgery. I was told that a nasty virus had taken over my body. The doctor, also with a background in Chinese medicine, asked if he could check my Qi point on my toe. Using an instrument that offered a metronome-type sound when reading reference points on your body, he came to my Qi point and, rather shocked, he remarked "Oh dear… you’ve got nothing left in you do you? It shouldn't sound like a flat line."

Blinded by my vision for Oman and expectations of the trip as a defining moment in my climbing journey, I responded, "I'll be ok to get on the plane on Tuesday though if I rest up this weekend?"

My doctor solemnly looked at me with what I felt was a hint of anger, "You have to take this seriously. I'm really sorry, but you might be better this time next year."

I defended my question for a moment before breaking down in tears.

Viruses usually come and go in a few weeks, you feel a little tired and you eventually get over it. For me, this wasn’t the case. I had ‘complications’ to say the least. I sense that I owe this in part to running my adrenal system into the ground for years beforehand. I had gotten a job shovelling horse poo that paid $2.50/hour when I was 11 years old and I haven't stopped since, competing in sports throughout my childhood and teen years, recovering from horse riding accidents, fracturing vertebrate along the way, working multiple jobs while studying full time, climbing trips, mountaineering trips, long distance this that, working here there… it never ended and I had never actually stopped.

We are conditioned to believe this is an achievement but I beg you not to buy it. What I needed was to be conditioned to respect my body and not feel guilt when I honoured it with rest and restoration. I hold hope that we begin to encourage one another to believe that achievements and output are not the defining characteristics of ourselves and others, as climbers or otherwise, but rather we learn to place value on the things that remain invisible - stillness of mind, deep and profound human connection, building communities that seek to do things differently, connectedness with nature, self compassion, balance in all things. These are just some of the life giving, often unseen, elements.

Weeks later, when I had expected to be on the side of Jebel Misht with close friend Az, I instead found myself in hospital, finding it difficult to breathe, in severe pain, skin yellow, incapable of staying awake for more than an hour or two at a time. Eventually they sent me home with steroids to ease some of the inflammation in my body and I seemed to improve slightly. Though, for many months I could not function - they simply labelled this "post-viral fatigue". I lost my ability to think and concentrate. Reading was extremely difficult for my brain and at times staring at a wall was no hard task, it was simply all my body could cope with. Light and noise was excruciatingly painful, I often had to retreat to darkness. Often times, I found it difficult to converse as it was challenging to connect words to my mouth or produce thought. My voice turned monotone as it became too exhausting to express emotively. My physical capacity was heavily impacted, and I would sleep for up to 16 hours a day, and the most mundane of activities became overwhelming difficult. I would regularly take cold showers as my body felt as if it were permanently burning. While these showers would blast cold water, I had to sit in my shower to bathe as standing felt increasingly impossible, and washing my hair was such a significant exercise that I would save it for my 'good days' and need rest after doing so.

I felt my illness stripped me of the physical ability to interact with the world despite deep desires, a strong drive and many plans to return to the arenas I once thrived in. At the same time 'feeling exhausted' wasn't remarkable enough for a lot of people to understand the reality I lived day-to-day. It was difficult for people to ‘see’ a system ceasing to function inside a young woman in her early 20s. Those intimate moments of blasting cold water on my burning body as I sat down in the shower to wash my hair were not visible to the world around me. For a long time, I wished I had been in a car accident. I didn’t want to end my life or hurt myself nor was I experiencing depression - I only wished that my illness could be made visible. I thought that somehow if my disabling experience was visible, it would legitimise it.

Throughout the year following becoming ill, I would have moments of feeling awake and well, and I would race out to the mountains and use up any juice in the system. I would go out to Cosmic County, find myself busting to aid climb up Dog Face, drive down to Point Perpendicular, or rush out to Narrowneck. But this always came at a high physical cost. At times I would pass out or fall asleep in the bush, and would spend weeks recovering, often bound to bed between short days at work until the next sporadic good day. The glorious day aiding up Dog Face Wall took me about six weeks to recover from. Admittedly, it is a memory I laugh at and treasure to this day. The day was an adventure in many ways, with hikers calling the police, police rescue team visiting and then spectating, falls and micro cams ripping down to the belay.

Though, spending six weeks bed-bound begged the question of whether I was repeating the cycles that may have contributed to the state I found myself in. Was I adapting or resisting? Was I simply reinforcing unhealthy values that would prevent recovery, whatever that meant or may look like?

It was a year post-illness that I found myself back in Wadi Rum in Jordan visiting my Bedouin brother, Atallah and accompanying some dear friends up routes as I desperately clung to my vision of recovery. Although this was a gentle and cautious trip, soon after my return, and for various unrelated reasons, I relapsed. This time, worse. For many months I had barely any days of feeling conscious, and I spent most of the summer only able to make it downstairs late in the morning to make some coffee and feed the chooks. I would lie out in the yard and drift in and out of sleep. I began reading poetry as books were no longer within my capabilities. This relapse had spurred me to move out of Sydney and to the Blue Mountains almost overnight. It had been a familiar second home since I was a teenager and knowing the debilitating nature of the illness before me and unknowing as to how long the relapse would last, I only knew that I could not bear to stare at the same ceiling in my Sydney apartment, the hullabaloo of the highway hum ringing in my ears. The noise alone drove me insane and the inability to access nature from where I was - no sea, no bush, no trails in sight - left me feeling suffocated, not just by the city pollution.

2018 marked the first year of my recovery and was characterised by these “pushes” and “pulls”. It seemed a race toward an idea of recovery and the sense that I had to fight to be well, that I had to earn my way back to health and fitness, and that I had to push myself to see improvement. It took me a long time to realise this isn’t always the answer. 

It had been around 18 months of illness when I distinctly remember one last "push" toward recovery that came at the end of the summer of 2019. I had been in the mountains a few months and I was experiencing a few good days here and there. I decided to take myself for a run to test out my capacity. I ran from Scenic World to the Three Sisters and dropped down 998 stairs, to Leura forest via Dardanelles Pass, continuing along Federal Pass for a while before climbing the near-1000 steps back to the plateau. It was around a 10km loop. Given this was a regular run in a previous time, I thought it was reasonable. It was hard to reconcile what my mind believed I was capable of and what my body was telling me it was capable of. This time I found myself walking most of the way home and seemingly drifting in and out of lucidness. It was alarming to wake on my back porch some hours later, the sky suddenly night, the temperature much cooler and still dressed in my running gear. I was unable remember falling asleep or passing out. It took me about two months to regain the ability to freely walk the 20-minute bush loop by my house.

We can exist in communities and environments that put value on mental strength, that if you are strong in mind, you can achieve anything. Seemingly, I understood that to mean that as an athlete of any level, mental grit was bound to reward me in physical performance. This had proven true much of my life and so it came as a confronting curb to not be rewarded for my continual physical perseverance as I believed it to be the answer for my recovery.

The run to Leura Forest was the last time I recall carrying a strong "push yourself" mentality. I had hoped that by consistently pushing my physical capacities, I would eventually return to climbing and foster my physical recovery. I feel a young Mark Twight would read this as the point at which I gave up, the point which separates the mountaineer from the alpinist. Ironically, over the years I’ve come to accept that alpinism isn't for me. That doesn't make alpinism wrong and that acceptance doesn't make me ordinary. In the same sense, I can't say I ever gave up or I became weaker the moment I decided to no longer “push myself”, I simply woke up to my body's call - it told me, ”No more, not yet”. And it had taken me 18 months to respond simply with “okay”. 

I am deeply grateful that in this period of saying “okay” to my body’s call that I had a circle of brave, persistent and loving people around me who reminded me that our bonds ran deeper than the physical expressions we may once have shared. This was community, this was communion, this in itself was a joy - to learn what it meant to be human to human again and to begin seeing new possibilities. They were willing to sit in the silence, witness the mess, weather the storm and learn with me what it meant to explore and find joy in a new season.

Over the years, I had forged a sense of self in the depths of these mountains, in the cold canyons and in the wilds of the Wolgan. Part of it was a sense of being grounded in the rhythms of nature, but it was also inextricably linked to the physical ability to scale rocky landscapes and traverse skylines. Unknowingly I had focused on the mountains as a playground, and forgotten how to experience it as a sanctuary of stillness and silence. 

When I moved to the Mountains at the eclipse of my relapse, I knew deep down that moving to the Mountains would also ask me to confront the memories of the past that no longer felt a reality: the dreams and friendships I felt slipping away that often centered on physicality, on moving through a landscape in a way that was no longer within reach. I intensely grieved for many months, I grieved my loss of physical abilities for the second time within a year and I grieved the memories of climbing, running, hiking, and moving that lay in such a sacred place. I grieved a loss of identity that summer. I was coming to realise that while I was still in the same body, I was shedding a skin. While the mountains remained unchanged, my physical capabilities had and my expectations needed to shift, willingly or unwillingly. 

If you had chosen to accompany me on even the smallest of walks, you would have found me tracing the patterns of the sandstone, tears rolling down my face, or sitting on a bench crying until there were nothing left to shed. I would often lie on the valley floor (if I could make it) and weep. I seemed to emerge lighter after each visit, feeling cleansed. The trees have a way of wrapping their arms around you, and I have come to appreciate the term shinrin-yoku. This is a Japanese word that translates to ‘forest-bath’ which is a practice of immersing one’s senses in the forest atmosphere. It was during this season of re-birthing and forest-bathing that my senses felt suddenly heightened and I began to soak in a new relationship with the land on which I was a guest. I would notice the sound of the wind, the sun on my skin, the smell of the grass, and I realised I had the patience to watch clouds drift past as I lay beneath them. I had a deep appreciation that I was living out my illness in the quiet of the mountains, I was gladly sharing my tears with the forest floor and I found myself laughing and crying and talking to the trees. It was an odd contrast. Maybe I lost my mind, but whatever was happening I began to feel the joy I once found on the wall - only it was a new joy  triggered by the smallest of ordinary occurrences.

I reflect now in the ways that I understood climbing to be a curious exploration of sorts, a way to explore limits, express myself, be playful but also an avenue through which to explore inward. Yet I have come to understand it as something much more and much less - its movement, its human connection and a gift to those who are able to receive it. The essence then, of climbing, does not have to be confined to physical expression. Perhaps the same seeds that spur us to walk onward and climb upward, can manifest in many ways. I have come to realise that when I sit in silence in the forest, alone or in the company of monks, I can encounter a sense of connectedness and peace, something I once felt atop of Joy. Carving lino under a desk lamp in the middle of the night has induced much the same concentration and all-consuming flow state that only the most engaging of rock climbs have enabled me to feel. A slow evening walk along Narrowneck Plateau, looking out to Dog Face Wall illuminated under the waning dusk light, brings much the same contentment and reflection as a quiet solitary moment on the wall as you wait patiently for your partner. 

In truth, I couldn’t have been told this nor believed it early on - that other activities, even the most mundane, still and ordinary, could bring about the same human experiences that climbing, running and walking have offered me. Early in my recovery, I was either bombarded with a shallow positivity from others - ‘It’s all in your mindset’, ‘You’ll get back’, ‘you won’t lose that much muscle’, or the more common, ‘It’ll pass’ to the invalidating, ‘have you tried anti-depressants’. I didn’t like any of these even if well intentioned. Instead, if I could offer an alternative to myself of years ago and to those currently ‘not able’, it is something much more simple. 

Your soul will sing again. 

Perhaps your soul will sing a new song, perhaps not in the time frame you had hoped, perhaps not in ways you can imagine, but the essence of what you love will return to you again, on or off the wall. You will come into a way of being that makes you feel alive. I deeply hope that we can follow the long wandering rocky routes again but may we remain thankful for the quiet, for rest, for friendship and may we listen and respect the needs of our bodies in the meantime. There’s no hurry.