Onward

You guys, 2019 was SO HARD. The first part of it (Jan/Feb/early March) was hard because of work. I was pretty much working at maximum capacity, which was a tough thing to sustain. The second part of it (late March/April/May) was hard because my anxiety was out of control. It did not make any sense to be so worried that the provost would overturn the tenure recommendation from my department and my college. It made even less sense to fret that the president would reject the provost's recommendation. But fret I did. It was weirdly isolating to be so anxious about something so irrational, and also weirdly exhausting. 

Summer was a little better. I started seeing a counselor, to whom I could say, "Whoa, this anxiety is totally out of control and it's kind of eating my life." I submitted my first NIH grant, but instead of giving myself permission to call it good after that, I spent a lot of the summer feeling too burned out to write and also incapable of saying, "Huh, it would be totally fine if I didn't write anything right now.

And then came The Troubles, which remain unresolved, and another hard thing which I will tell you about at some point but not right now. Anyway: not sorry to see the last of 2019.

On the first day of 2020 I smote the disorder in the downstairs bathroom. It was a nightmare in there. It's a tiny space, and so things just kept getting shoved into the available storage until it was all overflowing and disorganized. I emptied out every inch of storage space, and cleaned the smeared and speckled shelves, and threw away the things we don't need, and put the things we do need into sensible places alongside other similar things.

I've been going in there all day long to admire the fruit of my labors.

This evening I went climbing with Pete and Joe, and they assigned me to climb a 60-foot 5.10 route for Weakness Wednesday. I had tried this route a couple of times before, and bailed in the middle. I was not sanguine about my odds of finishing this route, you guys. My impression the last time I tried it was that it's a bunch of stuff near the edge of my abilities, all strung together, for 60 vertical feet. But the boys said, "You can do it, Mom!" 

Pete wants me to cut to the chase here, to say "And so I did it!" Which is true, but also incomplete. It leaves out the times that I bit back the inner voice saying "can't do it don't wanna let me down NOW," and kept climbing. It leaves out the times that I bellowed STUCK down from an increasing number of feet above Joe's head, and then figured out the way forward even though it seemed improbable. 

I was going to be pleased if I got a little further than my last attempt. It's at the edge of what I can do, or that's how I remembered it. But it appears that the edge of what I can do has shifted from where it used to be. Even though I needed takes* to rest and shake it out, I kept climbing instead of giving up. And do you know, if you keep climbing for long enough, eventually you get to the top.

*Takes = supported rests, where you sit in your rope sling while your belayer keeps you from plummeting to your death below.

So maybe that's a good theme to consider for 2020: order, persistence, and a reasonable degree of courage. I feel like that combo can get a person through a lot of things.