8

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF SELF-LOATHING / A PEAK

THERE’S A MOMENT IN THE ROCK CLIMBING MOVIE Free Solo where Alex Honnold and his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, hit a rough spot in their relationship. McCandless doesn’t understand why Honnold feels the need to risk his life by free soloing El Capitan—that is, scaling a 3,000-foot-high granite monolith in Yosemite National Park without any ropes or safety gear. She can’t quite comprehend why it’s so important to him. To the filmmakers, later, Honnold explains that he and McCandless are very different people. “For Sanni,” he says, “the point of life is happiness. To be with people that make you feel fulfilled and to have a good time.” For Honnold, the point of life is performance. “Nothing good happens in the world,” he says, “by being happy and cozy.”

In another part of Free Solo, it becomes clear that Honnold grew up with parents who weren’t very affectionate. His mother hasn’t been impressed by anything he’s achieved. “My mom’s favourite sayings are ‘presque ne compte pas,’ almost doesn’t count, or ‘good enough isn’t,’” he says, followed a moment later by a sentence fragment: “The bottomless pit of self-loathing.” It seems like he’s internalized the need to seek perfection, the moment when he’s won, when there is nothing better. He’s dedicated years of his life to reaching this moment; there is a film crew, composed of his friends, committed to putting it to tape. Alex thinks that if he dies while he’s climbing, everyone will be sad for a time, and then they’ll get over it. But onscreen, in the movie, his friends struggle with the idea of him falling. They grapple with the idea that they could be training a camera on him, then witness their friend plunging through the frame, and that the pressure of people watching will encourage him to try before he’s ready. They read his actions for the underlying meaning; when, in the fall of 2016, Honnold halts his first free solo attempt of El Cap—“Um, I think I’m bailing,” he says, over the radio—Free Solo co-director Jimmy Chin is buoyed by the fact that Honnold feels he can abandon an attempt when he’s not ready for it, even with people watching, even with cameras on him.

I WATCH CLIMBING MOVIES for the same reason I read about religions: I want to understand how people believe what they believe, and why they do what they do. I try to understand, in part, because I will never understand—understanding can’t really come from study, unless study provokes an epiphany. But I keep watching anyway.

Honnold regularly completes routes without ropes, harness, or protective gear. He’s climbed a lot of routes this way: Astroman and the Rostrum in Yosemite; Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park in Utah; El Sendero Luminoso in El Potrero Chico, Mexico. Free Solo documents the months and years leading up to his final, successful attempt on El Capitan. The cliff looms over a calm, bird-filled meadow bisected by the Merced River in Yosemite. Will, Sinclair, and I went to Yosemite last Christmas and stayed in a lodge with Will’s family. We stood in that same meadow, marvelling at El Cap, which draws you upwards the same way a small part of your body, when you’re standing on a bridge, or over a crevasse or waterfall, draws you down. Fear, revulsion, pull.

I USED TO THINK THAT I WOULD, for some short period of time, like to be the best at something. Even as I thought that there usually wasn’t someone who was the best at something, but rather there was probably a field of very good people. It’s possible I co-won a math contest at my high school once, and it’s also possible that I only ever came in second—I have a memory of standing on crutches in front of my high school’s sign, out by the main road, with one or two other kids. Of appearing in our local paper for doing well on the annual math contest, just after I’d gotten knee surgery. I didn’t save the clipping, and no one else in my family did, either. I gave all my school certificates and medals to a grandparent who is now very old and no longer speaks to me because I don’t speak to my mother. I gave them away because my grandparents were able to feel an uncomplicated pride at the time, and I wanted to feel it vicariously through them.

The same part of me who would like to be the best, who also says I never will be, can rationalize why this doesn’t matter: even if I was the best in my school, I wasn’t the best in the district, or the region. And I should not be thinking about high school, about a subject I didn’t pursue past high school, in order to find an estimation of myself that is good enough to live with. What I have in common with Alex Honnold is not any sort of specified skill set, or even dedication. It’s the bottomless pit of self-loathing. Can I blame my own parents for infecting me with a drive towards achievement? My father is nothing but a sunbeam of praise (I don’t trust it, but that’s not his fault), and his core values, as a semireformed anarchic hippie who cares more for cheese and music festivals and good beer than for almost anything else, are almost diametrically opposed to achievement. Although my mother didn’t seem to care either way about much else, she did always want me to lose weight and be pretty. And I do remember experiencing, in elementary school, the satisfaction of receiving a high grade—it felt like some small corner of worth that no one could take away from me. But the feeling receded almost as soon as I felt it, because I could always do better. Bottomless pit!

WHEN WILL AND I MOVED TO NEW YORK—I was going to stay for as long as a Canadian can stay on vacation, Will for nine months—I found an old single-speed Dutch city cruiser bike on Craigslist. It was reasonably priced because it needed a new wheel and brake pads. I took the train out to Long Island, gave a middle-aged man a fistful of cash, and brought the bike back to Brooklyn, where we were staying that month. I had the wheel replaced, swapped out the brake pads, and tried to ride the bike. It was heavy and required a fully upright riding position. I thought its built-for-slowness would encourage me to coast peacefully around Brooklyn, taking things in rather than focusing on reaching a destination. In Vancouver, on my road bikes, moderately hunched over the handlebars, I rode until my breath came in little puffs and my thighs burned and sweat collected on my forehead. The cruiser was supposed to turn me into a different, more chill person.

Except that I couldn’t stand being so upright and going so slow—I hated the bike almost immediately. I sold it to a tall young woman who was in New York from Amsterdam. I watched her test ride it, sliding on and off the bike easily, like they were old friends, and then I took her money, maybe less than I’d originally given the man on Long Island, and watched her ride off. Later that week, I bought a rigid-frame nineties mountain bike at a shop on the Lower East Side. The guy who owned the shop had volunteered at a co-op where I’d worked as a mechanic. He gave me a break on the price after I walked him through the fixes I would need to do to bring the bike back as close as it could get to its initial state of nineties perfection. It was the type of bike another mechanic would like but the general population of the city would not. I could ride it hard, until my breath came in little puffs and my thighs burned and sweat collected on my forehead.

IF THE IDEA IS THAT YOU DIE EITHER WAY, and the question that follows concerns how you would like to live your life—contentedly or in search of one moment of perfection, slowly and happily or mostly miserable but sometimes the best—I can’t imagine consciously choosing to be miserable most of the time. I especially can’t imagine being someone who doesn’t believe in life after death and living a life that is more oriented towards posterity than the days and weeks and months I’m lucky enough to be here. I can’t imagine it, even though I am often living it without thinking. If I wasn’t afraid of death, or of the pain that would have come in old age if I’d kept pushing my body, would my value system shift? If I felt like I could be the best at any one thing, even for a short period of time, would I try for it even if I knew it wouldn’t bring me what I really wanted—stable self-worth, an enduring feeling of contentedness?

AFTER I LEFT NEW YORK FOR MONTREAL, I walked fifty minutes from Côte-des-Neiges, around Mount Royal, to work overnights downtown. As the fall and winter progressed, it got colder, and the cold tickled the outer edges of my thighs, which had gotten slightly frostbitten once before, in Guelph, Ontario, also from walking to work. The feeling was like pinpricks, like the pain of sensation returning after windburn. I did it because I didn’t have money for the bus, and because the cold and the exercise set the perspective for my workday, reminding me that life existed more dramatically outside of the oppressive warmth and Christmas carols and paper cuts of the bookstore. And because I could, because I should. Because if I took the bus instead of walking, when I could reasonably walk, who would I be?

Later, when I was earning enough, and living cheaply enough, I could make the choice to sometimes take transit. And then I got pregnant. Instead of pushing myself physically, I redirected my energies into pushing myself to work as much as I could. My urge to work, which had always been strong, driven by anxiety, got worse in pregnancy. I received a grant and was accepted to a month-long residency, but I still found myself unable to say no to freelance contracts—I couldn’t yet picture what life with a baby would even be like. Freelance cheques often took a long time to come, and financially it felt a little like running to the next bus stop after missing the bus, only to miss it once more. The only calculation that made sense was to work so that I was making, on paper, more than I’d need to live—so that if an outlet took six months, or two years, to pay me, I could still cover my rent. Another version of the bottomless pit: even after I was able to save some money, I ran the numbers in my head over and over, calculating how many bad months it would take until I’d be out on the street. What if things became too complicated for me to make enough money through working? What would we do then?

At the beginning of the pregnancy, when I was biking alone, I still felt like a wound-up top set loose every time I got into the saddle, frustrated by the way the lights and traffic of the city forced me to slow down. Eventually, though, my belly grew. My belly grew and I could feel the fetus kicking, and I switched bikes from my favourite, fastest bike to my more relaxed touring bike. My sit bones widened; I bought a new saddle. By the time I was visibly pregnant, I didn’t mind going slow. In fact, going slow felt, for the first time, like the exact right thing to do. I called the rides enceint(e) et lent(e). Will and I would set a destination and go there at a crawl, getting passed by middle-aged men in spandex on carbon frames, by couriers, by newlyweds on hybrids, by hipsters on ill-advised fixies. As I pedalled, more slowly than I ever had before, I thought being pregnant had permanently changed me, re-established my existence to be in a place where I could enjoy slowness.

And it had changed me, but only temporarily. Only because my body was housing another body, and the care I wanted to give to that other body briefly superseded my most basic compulsions, quieting, for a while, even the bottomless pit. While I was pregnant, I enjoyed going slow and noticing more of the world around me. But after Sinclair arrived and my body healed and she was strong, I became, again, the type of person who likes to go fast but wants to go slow. The days again felt like they were peeling off, faster and faster, one by one by one.

BEFORE MY CHILDHOOD BROKE ME, I was the type of kid for whom fifteen minutes could feel like twenty-four hours. I daydreamed constantly, and I’d mapped an entire imaginary world onto my elementary school playground, complete with imaginary friends because I didn’t have many in real life. After Sinclair was born and my neuroses returned—looking to become a better parent—I wondered who I would be if I hadn’t had to extinguish that part of myself, and what I could do to bring part of it back.

Ironically, the same park where Alex Honnold achieved the pinnacle of his climbing career provided me with a potential way forward: I’d brought no laptop with me to Yosemite for Christmas with Will’s family, and cell reception was weak and patchy. I’d scheduled no work. We had nothing to do but wander and hike and ensure that Sinclair, newly turned one, stayed fed.

My brain calmed down. My entire nervous system calmed down. (I think people call this a vacation.)

Back in Powell River, a few months later, we started the first seeds inside for our new vegetable garden. The seeds required water, sunlight, warmth, and time. They grew slowly, then in spurts. We dug out garden beds and planted the seedlings outside. The peppers inched along; the tomatoes shot up like weeds. At a thrift shop, we bought Sinclair, who was now walking, a small yellow watering can so that she could contribute. The garden, like Sinclair, became an external living thing I could care for and watch grow. It was resistant to impatience. I could putter around in it, weeding and watering and snapping off aging leaves, soaking up the sun and going back into the house smelling like dirt and fresh air. It became Sinclair’s favourite place to hang out.

I think, as I get older, I’ve started to loathe myself less. The life I’ve made with Will, for Sinclair, is more secure than the life that I had when I was younger. I don’t need to strive as much, or worry as much. I can slow down by going outside; I can learn to care for myself by caring for Sinclair, by caring for my plants, by resisting the pull of a peak when I know that all it will do is underscore how far into the pit I could fall.