A History of Scars

When you’re experiencing catastrophe in real time, without the benefit of built-in time for reflection, you’re often too busy scrambling to fulfill a core responsibility of a nonfiction writer: generating meaning.

The work of an essayist requires facing up to past trauma, finding meaning in what would’ve best been sidestepped, unearthing bits of hope. Nonfiction forces you to inhabit your own pain, instead of co-opting someone else’s. That’s what makes it hard.

One of my most promising students knows the story he wants to tell—he just doesn’t share it with us. His language is beautiful, but we’re never clear on what’s happening.

I share this tendency, in writing and elsewhere—to focus on everything but the most important part. Grief, numbness, and anger do strange, distorting things to a person. So, too, do denial and lack of control over one’s circumstances.

* * *

My academic training is in fiction, but the form has never fit me comfortably. It’s like a typical women’s top, cut to different proportions than my own. Climbers are often built like gymnasts—torsos broader at the shoulders, narrower at the hips. This lack of fit doesn’t mean our bodies are wrong. It means designers’ conceptions of female shape and form are faulty, or too limited to universally apply.

Fiction, as it’s taught, demands simplification. In short stories, for example, we’re taught a central conflict is meant to emerge. My life experience runs contrary to this idea of one focal point—the prism through which all else is understood. It’s this pat quality I reject.

Rather than a prism, I see a wheel. Rotations controlled by forces beyond us dictate extremes. I’ve been buried by chaos, filth, everything undeservedly rotten, all at once, or conversely, been heaped with equally undeserved blessings. A fallacy of youth seems to be that we generate our own luck.

Defining conflict by one dimension alone, or assigning blame in human interactions and human-made systems—such undertakings are rarely neatly or fairly done. Isolating one variable as a prime driver is fraught with imprecision. This is why economists are accused of dealing in abstractions when they identify exogenous, or acting, forces.

Fiction techniques taught feel restrictive. As with any other product, packed neatly for sale, they’re designed with certain dimensions in mind. They don’t allow reality, as I know it, to be captured.

I’m complicit in the system, of course. As a teacher I parrot similarly flawed advice—and learn as much as I do as a student in doing so. Disillusionment and reconciliation seem part of maturing as a writer—accepting the measures by which gatekeepers define “good writing,” resigning oneself to less radical change than what one once desired. Perhaps women’s tops designs don’t need to be thrown out entirely. Perhaps they need only to be tailored.

The more exciting aspect of maturing as a writer is disavowing rules entirely. Rachel Cusk in Outline, Catherine Lacey in Nobody Is Ever Missing, Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, many others—writers I admire break form. Rather than define a good container as one with cylindrical curves or four equal planes on which to rest, they seek the best container for the content. Perhaps oil is suited best by dark glass, to delay rancidity. Perhaps alcohol is best suited to wooden barrels in which it can breathe. Perhaps food scraps are meant to live with maggots in dark bins, until they decompose into something earthy and organic and vital again.

* * *

The great surprise of writing has been how much companionship matters. After nights spent alone with my laptop’s white glow, it’s the resurfacing that revitalizes.

I graduated from my undergrad a year early. I’ll be lucky if I finish my MFA months late. If I do, it will be because others extended faith, gifted unexpected compassion. Sometimes we rely on the kind words and encouragement of others to persevere. Not wanting to disappoint those who’ve extended faith can be a surprisingly excellent motivator. I’ve experienced such extremes, in the best an MFA has to offer, and the damage it can inflict.

* * *

Shortly after I first started climbing, a sponsored climber stopped by the gym where I worked. He brought videos of himself bouldering, brought cans of free Red Bull in a giant Red Bull–shaped cooler.

After his screening, my boss volunteered me to try a dyno problem in front of everyone else, or a move in which the vertical distance between holds is so great that you have to launch your body upward in the air and catch the next. The sponsored climber was meant to help me learn and send this particular problem. He gave vague advice about getting my feet on to start, stood behind me, and watched.

The problem was set on an overhanging prow, so that throwing your body upward also meant throwing backward into negative space. To grab the next hold, you had to aim a few inches above it, so that you could essentially fall and latch on to the jug. I’d tried the move a few times on my own without success—I’d fallen just a few centimeters short.

On my first attempt under his watch, I committed. I threw my body upward and landed the dyno with a satisfying thump.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, surprised. By this he meant, I think, that he ha

dn’t touched my back to support the move. He hadn’t physically assisted me, and his beta, or advice, had been nonspecific.

This moment has since become familiar to me: one in which success or failure lies with the energy of those surrounding you, rather than in your own mental, physical, and technical abilities or limitations.

He had helped me, simply by giving me a reason to fully commit. I knew him then as a sponsored climber. It was later that I saw him as a regular person, separate from his media persona, someone trying to make a living by selling a certain kind of dream.

Even at that work event, rather than selling adrenaline and success, the stories he told were of the takes we didn’t see—when he tried to repeat what he’d already successfully sent, was too tired, and paid the price in broken bones. The sends don’t come without associated costs.

* * *

In Kentucky I climbed once with a newer climber, someone who was physically stronger and better conditioned, but who didn’t have the confidence of experience.

“It’s like watching you climb a route in the gym,” he said as a compliment, as he watched me warm up on a route.

When it was his turn, I could see hesitation manifest itself in his body. Doubts translate to moving downward rather than upward, to pausing when you should be throwing faster. We yelled, “C’mon!” in these crucial moments, and he kept pushing. He reached the anchors successfully, without falling or asking his belayer to take his weight.

When climbing’s hard, it feels very hard. You watch people moving and you can’t imagine their elegance, their power. And then when conditions have aligned, you’re the one floating up rock, remarking at just how easy it is. At how it feels like we’re meant to do this, made for it.