I’m employed at the amazing organization Girls Rock Math, which lets me work remote most of the time at a job that truly makes a difference in the lives of many, many young girls (check us out here). While I’m extremely privileged to be able to follow this path at all, I still do work part time to support myself. After a lifetime of following the status quo, I did finally work up the courage to leave city life behind. Doing so meant taking my comfort zone, that easy place full of familiar, safe things, and shoving it into a corner of Eric’s basement with the rest of my non-essential belongings where the sun never shines. I knew that finding a way to climb full time would bring me happiness, adventure, freedom, and life that I was otherwise missing out on, but it took me a very long time to work up to it. I don’t want 70% of my days to be spent pining after the other 30% no matter what grading scale you use that’s a fail. Those ones actually meant something, but if only two out of seven days a week were ones I cared about, that leaves the other five as simply filler. All of them that is, except for the ones that I spent outside on weekends. I had a good life, but if I look back on it, all of the days pretty much blur together. That was my life for a very long time working full time and filling the non-working hours with gym climbing or movies, board games, video games, whatever. That security and predictability offer stability, and for those of us that are as terrified of the unknown as me, it’s easy to think that that’s good enough. Probably not great, but probably not terrible either. I like routines and fall into them easily, and they bring me comfort because when there are no new variables to add some spice to any given day, you know things are usually going to work out okay. I like being comfortable, as most people do. It’s a dream I’ve been working up the courage to follow for pretty much my entire life. I end up writing a lot about the path that has lead me to traveling and climbing as much as I do these days, because it has been one of the scariest and most challenging (and thus rewarding) things I’ve ever done. While I think I’m pretty safe from that reality in a physical sense, there is an emotional quicksand that poses a very real danger in my life, and that is the sinkhole that is falling too deep into My Comfort Zone. I think it’s the idea that the harder you fight, the quicker you go down that makes it so scary. Now, the odds of that happening to even the outdoorsiest of people are still negligible, but I think everyone who has ever watched Artax the horse traumatically die in The Neverending Story can relate to the fear of the futile struggle of being stuck in quicksand. My cousin Emily and I pretending to be stuck in the sand in Port Lavaca, Texas as kids In fact, just the other day I read about someone having to get rescued from some quicksand in Zion National Park, and it freaked me the fuck out. There’s a great line by comedian John Mulaney that goes: “Growing up, I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.” It always makes me laugh because the statement is weirdly accurate I did worry about quicksand as a kid.
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