When to Push Yourself and When to Quit

I have not always been an adventurous person. When I was a kid, my family kind of decided to stop travelling because of my lack of free-spirited-ness. In my mind, driving to a new place just limited me to my portable GameBoy instead of my graphically superior GameCube. Travelling just meant that I would sleep worse in some hotel pull-out bed. Most of all it just meant going to a mall in a different city with the same stores as Sacramento. From every angle, life felt more inconvenient while travelling, and the whole lifestyle didn’t make sense to me.
This mindset suddenly changed once I moved to college and met people who weren’t my parents. Unlike my childhood, I moved to Santa Barbara to get out of the house. Almost overnight, staying home to play video games felt more constricting than comforting. This sudden change can be almost entirely attributed to my Swedish foreign exchange student housemate, Simon. A month after moving in together, he convinced me to sleep on a hammock by the ocean bluffs on a whim. This sounds like nothing, but the excitement of my tiny adventure kept me unable to sleep with a smile on my face.
A month after that, he’d found a solid gang of other adventurous foreign exchange students. Without really knowing them, I decided to join them on their Halloween weekend camping in Big Sur. Not understanding what I was getting into, I asked for an itinerary: which campsite did we reserve? where are we going hiking? what are we going to do all weekend? I was met with a resounding, we haven’t, we don’t know, and whatever we feel like doing.
The idea of being dedicated to spontaneity completely blew my mind. Our weekend entirely consisted of looking at a place in the horizon, driving there, and then following our every whim while on the way there. We often stopped on the side of the road to climb a random hill and explore the surrounding redwoods. When we just didn’t feel like it anymore, we’d descend back to the car, back towards the next adventure. Halloween in Big Sur was the first time I discerned that what my family had been doing wasn’t really travelling. We weren’t going on an adventure, just getting a change of scenery every once and awhile.
Since camping in Big Sur, I’ve been a lot more of an open minded person. Travel was one thing that I’d always hated, but with the right people and circumstances, I’ve now come to crave weekend getaways to some forest that I’ve never heard of before.
Which is exactly what I did last weekend. But for the first time in the two years since my trip with Simon, I’ve began to doubt my adventurousness. Me and 7 of my housemates (5 of which I don’t know very well) went on a combination climbing and mountain climbing trip to Holcomb Valley, California. As much as I dislike the hashtagable phrase, camping in an evergreen forest is absolutely my happy place. Mountain climbing, on the other hand, is something I’ve had limited experience in. Back when Simon was at UCSB, I occasionally joined him in his climbing excursions at the school gym’s rockwall.
There’s a few reasons why I only joined him occasionally, namely my absolute fear of heights. I love rollercoasters, where I’m locked into a complicated machine that would challenge Houdini’s skills as an escape artist. But it’s not rocket science to hurt myself while rock climbing, and I simply don’t trust myself. I know I have the physical capabilities to propel myself up a rock face, but I am psychologically unequipped for the responsibility of my life literally hanging by a thread.
Going into the trip, my positive attitude but negative experiences combined into a cautiously optimistic concoction of expectations. Coming out of it, I think I did just okay. Not well enough to deserve a letter grade, but at least a participation trophy. Within an hour of arriving at the campsite, I was strapped in and was expected to climb a rock-face. I tried my best, but absolute fear took over about 15 feet off the ground and I demanded to be returned to the safety of the ground.
This is when I really began to doubt my adventurousness. I’d driven 5 hours over Labor day weekend for the express purpose of learning how to rock climb; was I really going to just give up after an exact 30 seconds of trying? On the other hand, I felt that I’d given up for a good reason. My adrenaline rush wasn’t one where I saw the potential in rock climbing. It was more of the sort where every ounce of my internal wiring was prepared for imminent death. The sun set quickly after my failed attempt, so we all returned to the camp for a night of casual beers and boxed macaroni dinners.
I woke up the next day with a renewed sense of confidence. I had the singular vision of completing my first climb on my first attempt. No excuses, no quitting. Just finding the next hand hold and never ever looking down. My friends specifically chose an amateur level climbing route to boost my confidence, which I wholly appreciated. Just like the day before, my body knew it could climb the amateur route, but my brain was fighting against me the whole time. My brain made my body go into a panic; my legs shook and my teeth chattered like Scooby Doo. The only thing that kept my brain from short circuiting from fear was to keep making forward — or rather upward — progress. I raced up the rock, focussing on the moment to moment challenge and not the increasingly distant ground below.
Within about 1 minute (or so I’m told, it was all kind of a blur to me), I made it up all 70 feet to the top of the rock. When I got down, the trip’s organizer, Sole, asked me, “did you have fun?” and I said, “I don’t know, I was mostly just trying not to die.” “And you didn’t die, so it sounds like you had a good time to me.” Later, I was asking Celine what she liked about rock climbing. Now Celine is not an expert climber, but she’s dedicated enough that she owns all of her own gear, so I trusted her opinion to be comparable to the average climber’s. I asked if her nervousness pushes her to succeed, or if she’s just scared shitless every time she’s strapped in at the crag. Her answer did not install confidence in my ability to continue my rock climbing career. Sometimes she’s invigorated by the challenge, but often she simply thinks she’s going to die. No matter what she’s feeling on the rock, she says that when she gets down, she always appreciates life a little bit more . She’s just happy to be alive.
My confidence evaporated with that answer. She’s saying that it doesn’t get better. I’m not ever going to be comfortable enough to explore the fascinating world of climbing. I won’t be able to push my body in creative ways, because my mind will always get in the way. If I want to be a climber, I’ll just have to accept that my deeply ingrained psychological resistance to heights will always be present. I want to be a climber, but I don’t know how often I’ll be able to mentally commit myself to shivering Scooby Doo levels of fear. No part of that fear was fun. My bullheaded adventurousness and fascination with climbing directly butt up against hating every single second of being off the ground.
So for the first time in my two years of my newly adventurous life, I’ve been questioning my limits. Since the climbing trip, I’ve been turning the question over in my mind, like a nervous poker player turns a chip in their hand, “How do I know if I need to push myself out of my comfort zone, or if climbing really just isn’t for me.” I hate being a quitter, but it’s hard to know if I’m ejecting from the situation at the first sign of conflict, or if I should trust my gut and know that sometimes things just don’t work out. That I don’t have to push myself to continue, even though I’m in love with the idea of what it could be.
I thought I learned this lesson with my previous relationship, where I legitimately decided it wasn’t for me, but I’m once again unsure of myself. Maybe in a relationship, just like rock climbing, sometimes you’re just scared shitless and that doesn’t mean you should give up. Because when you reach your goal and look back at all of the challenges you just overcame, you’re just glad to be alive.
