so this is christmas

Last year I climbed a mountain on Christmas Day.

It's one of my favorite hidden backcountry wanders in Colorado. When I tell anyone about it, I say, I'm taking you to the top of the world. I packed the car the night before and crept out well before dawn, snowshoes and pb&js, carols on the car stereo and coffee in Evergreen. I was parked at the rundown mine shaft by 6:30 and heading up the trail just as the sun started to rise. The first two miles are pretty flat but then it pitches upwards and the final push is about a quarter-mile which, depending on how deep the snow is, can take an hour or more. It's a slog. As the saying goes, they take pictures of mountain climbers at the top, not along the way, because who wants to remember the rest of it? The relentless climb, the searing burn in your lungs as the air thins, heart pounding wild and primitive while you trudge upwards, thick and slow. No one takes pictures of that, no one wants to remember the suffering once it's over. We just want to remember the view from the motherfucking top.

It's easy to see that I was trying to outrun my pain. To dull the unbearable agony that arrived when my heart was so suddenly and viciously wrenched from my body, with no warning, no anesthesia, and no relief in sight. Climbing the goddamned mountain wasn't enough, later that afternoon I hopped on my gravel bike and rode the sun down into the night, dirt roads and sunny skies deepening into dusk, anything to distract myself from trying to figure out how I was going to survive, or if I even wanted to try. I came home from that ride frozen solid, my face tracked with tears I wasn't even aware were falling, gratefully, gracelessly, numb. I had hot tea for dinner and then sat on my squashy grey couch for hours, writing, pouring my heart out in vain, into an echoing and empty void. I wondered, then, what life would look like this next Christmas, and I remember every word, every delicate detail of my vision that I'd be tucked remote away from the outrageous world, fifteen miles from a gallon of milk, the questions I asked, the shattering joy I imagined thrumming contentedly across the obviously-by-now-it-would-be-healed expanse of my heart. I guess I'm thankful, somewhere somehow, that I had no idea how much traumatic darkness was still ahead, because I think I would have - quite simply - just given up. Walked straight out of my life. Thrown myself against the fence.

Before I was ever pregnant, I recall watching one of those tiny internet kerfuffles unfold, where a post irritates one person and then there's a few rowdy days of digging backwards through subtweets trying to figure out what the hell everyone is sniping about. Some random influencer person shared her pregnancy at maybe three and a half weeks, and the popcorn-chewing audience went rabid with eye-rolling and finger-shaking. Eventually rational thought turned up with something like, everyone needs to shut the fuck up, we all have the right to share whatever we want, whenever we decide that we want to share it.

It stayed with me through my own early months as I tried to decide how and who to share it with, quickly realizing that everyone I saw in person was going to get an earful because of my monumental inability to keep my own fucking mouth shut. But deciding to "officially" share with the chaotic world of the internet was something I wrestled with for a while. Eventually I did what felt right for me, and in the review mirror I remain content with the decisions I made in those moments. Because it feels like the same part of my soul that believes so fiercely that we should tell people that we love them, while they can still hear us, because you never know when the last thing you say is actually going to be the last thing you ever say.

But life evolves, life is a constantly-changing blur, life has ants in her pants and life does not sit still. For a very long time, I have been firm in my belief that there is incredible power in sharing your story, even moreso when it's done live from the battlefield, not years later with a genteel smile and a ridiculous haircut, sated by the abundance of your fairytale. I've always walked a very careful line with this blog, feeling absolutely unrestrained in vomiting up the hair-raising details of my own existence but also wanting to protect the lives that overlap with mine. I would never assume that just because someone else has wandered into my village, it means that I have the right to share their story too. That was easier in the days of ironman, more difficult in the furious adult landscape of relationships and pregnancies and an endless barrage of life-changing earth-shattering nuclear bombs that uncontrollably, unexpectedly crater your entire existence. I was over in Utah late this summer, and I went trail running with a friend of mine that I trained with in DC while she was preparing for her first ironman and I was snorting at the absurd idea of tackling my own. These days we both prefer to climb mountains, me on two wheels and her for some nutty reason on two legs. We did the life dump that you do when you haven't seen someone in a long time, and I shared with her the untamed truths I've deliberately chosen not to share with an internet that never forgets. I remember exactly which rocks I was trying not to eat shit over when she glanced over her shoulder at me and said, dude. That is a lot. And my flip answer - no shit, that's why it's not on instagram - is just how I'm trying to cover up all these deep little splinters in my heart, the ones that I still feel every moment of every day, the merciless ache for the Christmas I dreamed about a year ago and the tremendous chasm that exists between that vision and this reality, the wounds that sometimes feel like they are just never gonna heal, no matter how hard I try, no matter how gentle and patient I am with myself and no matter how many laps I swim, not for the rest of my life.

So this is Christmas. I've struggled through a lot of darkness this year. I've also gotten a few second chances. And I don't know much, but I know that if or when we are lucky enough to get a second chance in life, the most thunderously dumb thing we can do is to blow it in exactly the same way we blew it the first time. Just like ironman, for fuck's sake, at least be creative enough to blow it in a way that is brand new. I also know that it is only through exploring the darkest parts of ourselves that we unearth how courageous and powerful we really are. Like the coffee cups say, courage is not the absence of fear, and strength is not the absence of weakness. It's the trenchant losses, the grievous heartbreak, the struggle to find our way through the jaw-dropping gaffes and ferocious failures that produce our courage and strength. Simply the bravest thing we can do is to hold up the mirror and not look away. And this is where I think that the mountain climbers might be wrong. Remembering the battle is what enables us to be resilient enough to try again, to live again, to rip out our hearts and whip them fearlessly at the sky again, but maybe differently this time, and hopefully better than before. 

Life. Christmas. Second chances. New beginnings, no matter how unwelcome. I realized a few months ago that somewhere along the way, I had quit living. I was only going through the motions, letting the universe ricochet me bonelessly, helplessly, across the night. And the brightest light that shines through the last few years is my heightened awareness of how much love there is in my life, if and when I'm able to see it. I'm grateful for every single person that has bent over backwards to make sure I know that no matter how many mistakes I've made, no matter what vicious turns and astonishingly ironic twists this road may take, I will never walk it alone. When the night has come, and the land is dark, and the moon is the only light we'll see. There were a lot of moments, this year, when that was the only thing I had to hang onto. The only reason I survived.

There's a savage cruelty in choosing to walk away, in deciding to keep living, in not giving up, a harrowing magnificence to the scars that we bear. It's changed me, it's changed how I share the story of my life. I believe in being open about falling apart, because it's what will keep you together. What keeps all of us together. But over the last few months, I've realized that there is a different but equally powerful richness in sharing my tale with only those who deserve to hear it, who have earned it by showing up and fighting for me through all those moments where I could no longer fight for myself. It's my life, evolving, it's the simple decision to move through this next chapter in a more private amphitheatre, although one where the doors of my heart remain thrown open wide, always welcoming in all whom I cherish, all who are worthy. I know that I'm lucky, this arena is packed full. And for everyone else? I'm trying to worry less about everyone else, to stop uselessly chasing after the people and relationships who are never going to love me with the same spirit and fire as the genuine and intense love that I give so freely into the world, and for those times when I am weak, I've put sharks in the moat.

So this is Christmas. The next year of my life will bring - or maybe just continue - an ongoing and quite disorderly cascade of new beginnings. I'm not going to bother to try and imagine how my joy might be shaped the next time I decorate for the holidays, although from this first time solo-parenting a live tree, I will hopefully learn that watering it is critical to avoid turning it into a sad Charlie Brown broomstick after a week and a half (everyone flinches in terror at the thought of me solo-parenting a live newborn). Both literally and figuratively, I am a thousand miles away from the mountain I climbed last year, and the woman that climbed it. I'm covered in scars. I'm still coexisting with my grief, which is rude and uncivilized and chokes me up all the time with no warning, thick and startling in my throat. But I'm also clawing my way back. I'm moving forward; I am so fortunate to be so loved, so grateful for the ten thousand angels who lit my pathway, until day finally, finally broke in the east. And the most elegant way that I can try to express my vast gratitude for it is to say the same thing to each and every person who has walked by my side and fed me chocolate and included me in their Friday night family dinners and gotten on a plane and sent me flowers and dinosaurs and bubble bath and peach sparkling water, the friends who drove hundreds of miles and hid potato chips in my house for emergencies (one of my love languages is definitely snacks) and oh-so-gently rubbed my back when I pulled over on the bike halfway up the mountain in the middle of July to sob brokenly into the ditch. The same thing I can finally, tentatively, say when I hold up the mirror and dare to face myself, to look directly at everything I've lived through, all that I've been able to survive. Thank you. For not giving up. On me.