Gripping the ropes

Regarding introspection, yesterday was richer for not one but two life lessons. The second being – I am shitload afraid of heights.

Not just, ooo, heights are nasty, I better not test them. No. Really. I really don't like them. On a cellular level. When have you even seen me climb a chair?

An adorable new friend of mine and a tiny and clever friend of hers took me climbing yestereve. I haven't climbed since my first sister-in-law made me and even then I was a lot younger, thinner and actually had muscles other than in my wrist and tongue. But that's okay, because I don't really find it all that difficult to climb per se. Sure, you'd need to be missing a limb to fail that simplest 'orange' route and for all intents and purposes, there is a popular opinion I could climb that one if I really tried. But 15 or 20 feet in the air, so to say, I always, always tensed up. I became, always in the same spot – it's possible because my body believes that is the last safe heights that I would still survive if falling from or something – incredibly aware of how large the room around me was, how terribly high I was and how the tops of people’s heads looked like. (And as you can read in the previous post, I am a faces kind of a girl.) My knees stiffened and my fingers wouldn’t let go. I hugged the wall. I bit into it. And wouldn’t let go. When I had to detach and allow my … dunno what the word is, the person who keeps you on the line… to lower me, I let out such a little bitch sound, people looked at me and laughed. Well, it was actually quite funny and quite a lot of fun. You know what was even more fun? Being on the ground and watching others do this. Three times tried and am looking forward to doing it again… But before I rush into anything against my better judgment (my big butt’s better judgment), the first thing we’ll deal with is my terribly intuitive fear of climbing higher when I am already frightfully high. Getting above the voice in my heart telling me: “I really don’t want to be here. Put me down.”

The realization that this is a matter of a fact came, for the second time yesterday, when I got an unstoppable need to photograph. People climbing, people, their hands, the ropes, the lot. I really wanted to take photos. I really needed to crawl into the camera. Again.

We need to settle this, my camera and I. I’m the boss, Marki. You just happen to be better at seeming calm in difficult situations I keep putting us in.