I Love Failure. I Hate Failure.

Failure is a complicated thing. It goes part and parcel with climbing at all levels. For some, failure is the great motivator, taunting one last move, one more pull with everything you got. Then another. Then another, thrashing desperately in an eternal struggle against gravity until, somehow, you’ve topped out, one impossible stick at a time. For others, failure is a teacher, imparting anything from the miniscule and route-specific to the more grandiose, those larger wisdoms that extend beyond sport.

But for all its good, failure can also be a trap, a treadmill that gives the appearance of motion when in fact you are stuck in place—or even worse—moving backward. Avoiding failure has been one of the biggest themes simmering just below the surface of my entire life. Climbing helped me break free from its grasp, only then to succumb to its trappings. But even in these swings of progress and capitulation there are hard-learned lessons and a chance to wrestle with some deeper truths, and hopefully, to heal.

Growing up, I had one foot out the door in just about everything I did. I set my sights somewhere above the middle, confident enough that I could be pretty good at whatever I attempted but too scared to ever really dream much bigger than that. I could hit with pinpoint accuracy just above expectations, giving the appearance of accomplishment but never running the risk of trying and failing, of disappointing the people around me. Academics, sports, didn’t matter. If As and Bs were good enough, how about I do you one better and give you more As than Bs? I would make All-Star teams in baseball, on the second team. I’d play AAU basketball for a few garbage-time minutes. Still, not too shabby for a kid with the footspeed that fableists could write entire morality tales around. 

This level-setting wasn’t done consciously. It was, I thought, simply my lot in life, to be medium decent. (You could even say I was a bit arrogant about how well I thought I understood my abilities.) To me there was no throughline, these were all isolated events with no real underlying cause to speak of. Had it not been revealed to me—in perhaps the most humiliating way possible, during a fight with my psych-major college girlfriend (and now wife)—I may have gone my entire life never seeing it.

It was summer break after our freshman year, back home in Dallas. As we sat in a park in some northern suburb discussing the finer points of whether or not I was being emotionally distant (I was), she explained to me that I keep everyone and everything at arm’s length because I’m afraid that if I let anyone get too close, they may abandon me, just like my father had. 19 years of my life and I had never made the connection; it was as revelatory as it was excruciatingly obvious, though I wouldn’t admit it to her lest I express some modicum of vulnerability even in that moment. (Luckily she doesn’t read my writing so she’ll never know.)

I don’t remember much of what came after, save for a snarky comment or two on my part as some sort of face-saving defense mechanism. I was somewhere lost in the middle distance as THE grand theme of my life came crashing into focus: Trying meant risking failure, which meant disappointment, and ultimately abandonment. So to guard against it I had to become bulletproof, free of any vulnerabilities. And trying, to truly strive, was to express an earnest desire for something, as well as an admission that I didn’t possess it, both flaws that could be weaponized against me. Thus, to not be the author of my own demise, I simply didn’t try. Then, if I did fail, no big deal because actually I didn’t care anyway. One foot out the door. It’s cool if you leave because I was too.

I had been lovingly force-fed the red pill (or the blue, whichever isn’t the racist incel one) and I could now see the Matrix, the Rosetta Stone for understanding this festering hurt discovered and decoded in the early chapters of an intro to psychology textbook. I have daddy issues?! Well that’s fucking embarrassing. 

This origin story is, of course, not unique. People have to deal with far worse than having to grow up with only one loving parent. But it’s messy business, life, and we are shaped—often subconsciously—by people and events we don’t think hold any sway over us. For me, it was a deep fear of abandonment that expressed itself as an avoidance of vulnerability, of failure and disappointment, at all costs. Living in the safety at the fat part of the bell curve. Even after finally seeing it, though, this burden I bore unwittingly around my neck all this time, it wasn’t so easy to shake off.

Then I found climbing. At first, there was no real profundity to it. Climbing was just a fun new challenge, a creative way to exercise beyond lifting and dropping heavy things. As the obsession grew, though, I found something deeper. Maybe it was the rider on the pale horse that was my 40s slowly coming into view just over the horizon, or maybe it was simply a function of climbing itself—it was, after all, the people trying the hardest (and failing most) who seemed to be having the most fun—but I felt the urge to finally see how good I could actually be at something, to truly commit and find out what this flesh was capable of while I still had some remnant of a physical prime. And so after years of climbing, working to get better but really mostly for the fun of it, I found a singular focus: to find my limit. I became always-projecting guy.

Antithetical to pretty much my entire life before then, projecting spoke to me. It still does. At its core, working a project is a long string of failures, done in service of finding some theoretical max. In projecting, I was actively rejecting old habits, allowing myself to dream a little bigger and for the first time, pushing myself up to and beyond the point of failure. Failure was no longer capital-F-Failure, but a necessary part of something greater. The pendulum had swung the other way. I was in love with failing.

This kicked off a boom in my climbing. I was putting down grades I would have never in a million years imagined I was capable of. (Training a lot will do that for you I guess.) I was addicted to the process. The sessions struggling to make all the moves, to linking them, to working and re-working and re-working the foot placements and the chalk spots and the micro-shakes, all of it. The longer a route took to put down the better. Like a rare wine or single malt scotch, my sends had to age before they could be uncorked, measured (and revered) in total number of burns like age statements on bottles collectors fawn over. 20 sessions. A fine vintage. The value was not in the send, which often felt perfunctory, but in the trials leading up to it.

Over time, though, that relationship with failure began to change. It no longer came with full conviction but from a lack of commitment. Yes, I was willing to hop on “hard” routes and fall from them, but I was just going through the motions, guarding myself. In crept a familiar feeling when trying hard, of laying bare some secret truth, like expressing your deepest feelings to someone without any clue if they reciprocated. Exposed, in all your imperfections, to be judged, and rejected.

So I’d take the safer route. Make a half-assed throw to the next hold—with no intention of sticking it—so that my belayer believed I tried. Untie, call it a high-gravity day, and move on. Nothing wagered, nothing lost.

Failure had become a symbol lacking a referent, like a word repeated over and over until it has lost all meaning. This Great Teacher, this mile marker along the road to my best self, had become divorced from everything that made it useful. It was a simulacrum of progress—both physically and emotionally—that had, like so many things before it, ceded to a deep-seated and deeply illogical fear. 

I’d like that the denouement of all of this was that once realizing I had fallen into old habits, the light switch flipped back on and I was at once full of unrelenting try-hard and my climbing was all the better for it. That’s not the truth though, or at least the whole truth anyway. I still punt. A lot. The subconscious fears made manifest in intrusive whispers are still there. Am I not good enough? Who will I disappoint? But now I can hear them a little bit better for what they really are and tell them to fuck off all the same and just yard, cacophonous and unbeautiful, unencumbered. Each time, it reinforces an obvious-but-not-yet-subconsciously-understood truth: success or failure, no one disappears.

Writing this is itself an exercise in bringing those lessons from climbing into real life. It’s a conscious, albeit scary act of vulnerability (and one that I frequently considered messaging my editor to say that I simply couldn’t do). Would anyone even want to read this convoluted psychobabble? Am I outsizing my precious snowflake problems in a world full of actual consequence? What will people think when they see me at the crag or in the gym? I haven’t the slightest. Writing is always scary, doubly so when it’s personal. But here I am, writing about being vulnerable and climbing and how climbing helped me be more comfortable being vulnerable. It’s a step. (And I do love a good project.) Who knows, maybe one day, far down the road, I’ll show my wife this article and confess that she was right all along. Probably not though. Sometimes it’s okay to let yourself punt.

Also Read:

• I broke my neck. Then I broke my relationship.
• My Big Plans For Sending 5.14
• The Key to Power Training? Take it Off the Wall (Part 2)

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