After he lowered he acknowledged that we lent him belief, that he’d surprised himself by sending. I remember him talking about the “good energy, the people,” how everything had felt right.
I’ve been both the one benefiting from good vibes and the cheerleader helping others send. It just depends on relative experience and the moment.
Climbing and writing aren’t dissimilar in that the value in both is inherently noncommercial, nonmonetary. In both we do what we need to get by on the expertise we’ve accumulated, through pain and effort and mistakes. In both it’s the act itself that matters—the hours spent working, for the sake of the motion itself.
Sometimes the best beta to get is from someone of similar height and build. Sometimes the only way to persevere is by looking for guidance from those who’ve already traversed the same paths, who’ve already battled through crux sequences and found their way to safety.
Both activities are asynchronous to modern society. For all but the rare few, acts like climbing and writing become the medicine that allow us to function, rather than the meat and potatoes on which we subsist. Only the lucky and gifted can sustain themselves on such acts.
The best mentors are the ones who don’t need anything—who opt in, regardless. They lend belief when none is in sight, when self-generation of such confidence is difficult to near impossible.
It’s clear when mentorship stems from pure motivations. Rather than trying to stake claims to their own greatness through association, these mentors provoke genuine gratitude without demanding such in return. They’re givers.
* * *
In certain climbing areas, technical ones like Jackson Falls, where sections are blank of holds, moves can feel impossible, until you shift your way of thinking slightly. Once you reconsider your body position, the placement of your feet, what sort of a move you’re going for, what you consider a hold, suddenly the move can feel effortless.
Essayists have mainly the material of our own lives to work with. Piecing together shredded narratives can feel like an act of desperation. As we examine our own faults and mistakes, it feels akin to drowning in the pressure to convert carbon to diamonds.
In working an essay I feel the moves out as I would a climb. Hips in, or hips out? Body square to the wall, or body crouched down low? It’s the maneuvering that feels good—becoming aware of parts of your body you didn’t know existed, or alternatively, parts of your mind and thinking.
You can only climb or write hard when you’ve put fear and panic at the consequences of failing aside. As you focus instead on discovering what’s required to succeed—the small gains rather than the big throws—solutions start emerging.
A typical climbing routine outdoors might be two days on, one day off; two days on, two days off. After a few weeks, climbing can cross from a joyous activity to a monotonous one. Physical and mental exhaustion accumulate. After a few weeks, those rest days can become the real highlight. Writing days are equally grueling. It’s the disruption of time away that allows for progress, both in physical exercise, where super-compensation dictates that we become worse before we return stronger, and in writing, where our desires to communicate hop-step beyond our technical skills.
Support from others helps, but writing is fundamentally a solitary task—one both publicly performed and privately practiced. Away from performance and deadline pressure, what re-invigorates is that rediscovery of pleasure for its own sake. No one can take away the hard-earned wisdom of training on one’s own, of pushing past doubt. There’s no substitute for that feeling. The reward is in finding new pathways, as we expand our visions of possibility.
Just as in climbing, when the foundation isn’t strong, the essay isn’t going to work. It’s obvious when you’re flailing, when you’re hoping hope will be enough. It rarely is. Similarly when you’ve set up correctly, when you’re going to land the move, you know it.
When soaring, both feel the same. There’s the moment, after having accumulated enough technique, after letting go of self-consciousness—when the motion becomes instinct. When no one else’s voice matters. When the motion becomes a way of returning to quietness, to oneself.
6 DEPARTURE
The emotion I most strongly associate with my father is anger. And yet when I accompanied him to the local Social Security office in Colorado, what I saw instead was vulnerability. I’d agreed to help him apply for spousal benefits during a brief visit home, years after I’d filed for my mother’s benefits, when I was twenty-four or twenty-five. Because my mother received Social Security disability payments due to early-onset Alzheimer’s, my father was eligible to receive monthly payments of one-half her benefit amount.
I’d finally convinced him that he should apply for spousal benefits when he mentioned casually that wheat bread was too expensive to buy, and so he had been buying white bread instead.
“I don’t like it, but I can’t afford wheat,” he told me, as we stood in our kitchen, lined with yellow linoleum. “It’s two dollars more per loaf.” He shook his head.
I preferred only returning to my childhood home when my father was elsewhere, in Korea. On a rare occasion when I visited with a friend, my friend told me my father and I avoided each other whenever we were both within the house, something I hadn’t noticed on my own. It was true, though; we followed elliptical paths, attempting to prevent collisions.
Despite our differences, in that moment of discussing bread, I was struck by sadness. Poverty was so entrenched as part of my father’s identity. As a family, we could have afforded wheat bread, but he didn’t feel he could. He didn’t regard my mother’s financial resources as shared, especially given her condition. And he himself had accumulated very little in the form of life savings. So he chose to continue downsizing his quality of life, rather than ask for help.
We drove over to our appointment in our family’s maroon Honda Civic. Our car was so old and broken that I had tied red ribbon around the windshield wiper lever and secured it with Scotch tape to the steering wheel, to keep it pulled up in its place. Driving required a gentle touch. He insisted on driving.
When hitting bumps in the road, occasionally the lever would jigger loose, and the wiper blades would fly furiously across the windshield until the driver repositioned the lever gently into its notch. Accelerating required physical effort, too, in pushing the resistant pedal down slowly, slowly toward the mat.
Visiting from New York City, where all government offices that I had entered were broken-down, grim affairs, I thought the small office presented the brightest possible picture of local government at work. The square, squat building was efficient, clean, filled with sun, and spacious. There were even happy, smiling employees, to boot.
After checking in with the security guard, we were quickly ushered into the cubicle-lined back-office area. The woman conducting our interview was white, with long brown hair, and of average height. She looked so innocent and fresh. I imagined her to be a newlywed, someone who was passionate about helping others. I remember few other details about her, except that at certain moments throughout the interview, I felt her respond to my father with suspicion.
I had dug up my parents’ marriage certificate from the ugly brown cabinet in their bedroom where they kept such things. I had armed myself with a manila folder containing his Social Security card, passports, my mother’s tax return, disability application, and other such documents. Even with those forms, the woman kept asking for things we didn’t have.
“Can I see a copy of your birth certificate?” she asked.
My father explained that he did not have one, for complicated reasons relating to the Korean War, lack of record keeping in South Korea, and his parents’ short-term relocation to China.
This, I could see, confused her. As did the idea that his income statements were written in Korean, because he had lived there for the majority of each year until retirement, and needed to be translated to English. Each question became more taxing, because of the details of his nontr