Later on, IRL

For most of my life, I’ve felt a connection with mountains. I grew up in Omaha Nebraska, a city girl in the midwestern flatlands. Wonderful people, boring scenery. I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder what it was like to actually stand out in the world, surrounded by mountains. The hills, ALIVE! After reading so many stories that took place in the mountains the world over, and seeing movies, I imagined myself being there, taking in the experiences the characters were having, as if they were my own. The idea of that beauty- the vast expanse, the sky, the sun- those majestic views! It was breathtaking. In my mind’s eye, being able to see for miles, the peaks and valleys with millions of trees lining the hillsides, bordered by snow at higher altitudes- – it made me feel so small in the grand view of it all, and comforted me in a way that I did not realize or understand. I only knew the thought of it – just the thought – made me feel at peace.

In Nebraska in the 1960’s and 70’s my perspective of California was that IT was the land of hopes and dreams, and my dream was to live there someday. Imagine, I thought, sunshine all year ’round, tanning, the beautiful life without worries, Hollywood stars, and of course, happy people going surfing in the morning and skiing in the evening! We heard all about that, and it seemed so exotic and alluring. I was never very athletic and had no desire to either surf or ski, but living in California made it all the more possible to my young mind. I’d be able to if I wanted to. If only I were there. Never mind that I had zero confidence in myself.

I believed in my heart that I had neither the ability to get there, or learn how to do any kind of physical outdoor adventuring! On the other hand, I was sure that just being there would make me happier. Escaping the reality of my childhood overshadowed everything. But California- – the land of my dreams, was as far away as I could let myself imagine. I never went so far as to really think about what living there could involve. All I knew about it was from what I saw on TV, and that was captivating. I guessed I could figure it all out once I got there, all the while petrified that if by some fluke, the dream did come true, I’d be forced to get off the couch and into the great outdoors.

Eventually I joined the Marine Corps, which landed me, once I was discharged, in California. Soon I settled into a restless life with the same lack of confidence that I had grown up with. I married, had a child, a career in technology. My day to day life went on the same as it might have anywhere. I worked hard, tried to be a good person, and do the right thing – no matter what. I wasn’t particularly happy and certainly not fulfilled. I didn’t really know what happiness meant to me, other than being safe from all the harm I experienced as a child. When you work so hard to just maintain your safety, it’s hard to have any passion in life.

I loved to travel but at first couldn’t afford it. Also it seemed no matter how many miles I traveled, my emotional baggage always came with me. The rage that lay just beneath the surface of my consciousness was a lifelong ally, always there to righteously back up any other feeling that arose. My lack of confidence felt innate, and the inability to advocate for myself, or to champion for my cause (whatever cause that was), was completely out of reach to me. I was miserable and I didn’t know why.

Becoming a mom changed my view. Of course it did. I found out when I became a mom what love is — what it really means to love. In an instant, I realized that I love my son so much, I couldn’t imagine putting him through any pain. It was soon after his birth that I learned that I’d been carrying the baggage of pain from my childhood around with me for a long time. I was confused and angry a lot, and was faced with the fact that I wasn’t coping well with motherhood. I got into therapy, thinking I was doing it for him. I found someone who would challenge me. Robert told me I had to heal for myself first and foremost. He didn’t let me sit there and whine about how unhappy I was. He dared me to look at difficult issues from my childhood that I had buried deep down inside me. He showed me how to face the feelings I had been avoiding in life – that my parents were damaged, that they didn’t know how to be loving, good people, that they took that out on me. That it wasn’t my fault. I worked hard to confront those feelings and by working through them, the pain subsided. I was more open to love, and I blossomed. I would ‘get it’, then I would ‘for-get it’ and through the practice of looking at myself, I really learned to get it and keep it. What was “it”? It was loving myself, the way I deserved to be loved by parents who could not.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a hard worker. I worked hard to be a good mother, I worked hard in my career, and I worked hard in therapy. I learned how to become a good mother, how to look at myself, warts and all, and how to evaluate my behavior, change it and learn more. It made me feel better. As I grew emotionally, I realized that my husband and I were growing apart. While he urged me to get the help I needed, he wasn’t interested in hearing about the process, acknowledging my need to talk about it, or participating in a general conversation about my feelings. In fact, I could sense a shift in him. I felt him closing himself off from me. Okay, I thought, I can do it alone, but I want to do other stuff in life, WITH HIM. I wanted to enjoy some of my new-found happiness. Freeing myself from the past meant I had room in my heart for new experiences. This included travel and seeing the world – we made a good living and could finally afford it! But somehow whenever I broached the subject, he had unlimited reasons as to why he couldn’t take time off. I knew he had accrued as many vacation hours as his employer allowed, and was actually losing vacation time because he didn’t use any of those vacation hours. It chipped away at my confidence to think he was more interested in his work than the other areas of his life, like his marriage. I worked hard -ALONE- on the relationship issues in therapy. It took nine long years for me to learn that he was frightened of the changes he was seeing in me. He was unable to let go of the way things were. I could see he was so afraid. I tried to convince him to go on short vacations, long weekends, any form of road trip, explaining my dreams of seeing the beauty and majesty of the outdoors around California. I made a list of places I wanted to see:

1. Monterey Bay
2. San Diego
3. Yosemite National Park
4. California Coastal Redwoods
5. Sonoma Coast
6. Big Sur
7. Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park

His argument against going anywhere on the list became a singular one: he’d seen those places before, as a child, having grown up in California, and wasn’t interested in seeing them again. I couldn’t understand, took it personally, and was wounded. It stunned me that he would actually be ‘done’ with the natural world. I felt there had to be more to it. I suggested places he hadn’t been and proposed new travels for us to enjoy together. We went on one long weekend and the hotel bar was as far ‘away from it all’ as we got.

As time went on and our son grew older I stayed as involved in his life as I could, to avoid the reality of the rest of the situation and how unhappy I was in my marriage. I traveled some on my own, going to cities across the country to visit family and friends. When faced with actually putting myself out into the natural world on those occasions, only then did I come to understand that I was terrified. I was overweight, out of shape and didn’t feel comfortable in my body. Again I heard the footsteps of my confidence running away from me in the back of my mind. Those same thoughts from long ago:

“You couldn’t do that anyway”

”You’re too fat”

“You’ve never been very coordinated”

”Everyone will laugh at you”

At 53, after years of working on my marriage alone, a new view came brightly into focus: I get this one life. If I die this unhappy I will only have myself to blame. You have to take responsibility for your own happiness.

I had worked on my mental and emotional health for years and learned a lot about the way I sabotaged myself. The recurring theme for a long, long time was that I didn’t want to hurt my husband. I would do anything except that. I had always put his feelings before mine. I had tried to work on our relationship without hurting him. I was faced with this as a paradox: If I only get one life and I was so unhappy, then the only thing I could do to fix it was to start putting my wants, needs, feelings, desires first. I painted myself into a logical corner over and over again in my mind- I can’t hurt him, but I’m hurting myself by staying with him. Eventually, I realized I had no other choice: I told my husband I was leaving. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. He was distraught, and I felt guilty. I wanted to take his hurt away, but I realized he was only concerned about what others would say. Not about how I felt, or what I had been going through. I knew that if I was going to do right by myself, I had to resist the urge to comfort his pain.

And so, over a period of some months I moved from California to Washington, going on a journey inward to heal my heart and outward to find my body the healing it needed. While I had done a lot of work on myself, I had not attended to my physical health. That physical part was waiting in the wings, and I was terrified of how it would go, what it would take. Proper nutrition, exercise, making new friends, building a community – daunting. All I could do was take one step at a time, and try. I hired a personal trainer, Chris, and told him my story. We began working together during my first week living in Seattle. I wasn’t used to even feeling my body move. When he coached me on doing a push up and told me to straighten my back or tuck my pelvis, I didn’t have the mind-body connection to know how to do those things. I had to learn how to experience the movements, taking small, incremental steps toward connecting my mind and body.

I began eating more healthily, and, living across the street from a Whole Foods grocery store, helped me realize that I could subsist off their salad bar. I had a car, but I began walking everywhere, as much as I could. Walking became a new form of therapy. Just moving forward helped soothe me and helped me see how my body could respond when called upon to perform. Eventually I began hiking too. I started small, but over time, I went to the mountains near my home frequently. I walked through the quiet forest, just short walks at first but eventually further. I looked up hikes and faced myself down about the fear that I couldn’t do them. I TRIED. I learned through repetition that just because I had told myself I couldn’t do something, didn’t mean I couldn’t TRY. I could LEARN.

One day, I realized that Chris believed in me more than I did. He told me I could do things, and dared me to show him. Hard physical things like pull ups and push ups and throwing a heavy ball, and climbing flight after flight of stairs. I kept working with him, and my view of myself changed. I went hiking at Mt Rainier, in the Cascades and Olympic National Parks. I saw myself moving through this new life like a whole new person. I would catch a glance of myself in a reflection as I walked through downtown Seattle, and not recognize myself.

A few months into this process, I went to a conference in Dublin, Ireland with a coworker, Jamie, from London. He told me that his beloved stepfather had recently passed away from an aggressive form of cancer. In the devastation that followed, he made plans to quit his job and dedicate his life to cancer research. From my perspective, I could see that he’d do it if he set his mind to it. Funny how I could see that mindset in other people, but not in myself! Jamie told me his plan was to do hard physical challenges and get people to donate to the cause. I was impressed with his passion. My respect for him grew as he went on…He said he was going to run the London Marathon with a group of people he was getting together. Then he was going to do a bike ride to the south of England, get on a ferry boat across to France and then ride into Paris after the crossing. A third challenge would be climbing Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa. His organization would be called ‘Tri-Life’ – to highlight the 3 difficult challenges he wanted to do over the course of the coming year. Jamie was looking for volunteers to do the events with him. He had friends who were going to make a movie about it, run ads, lots of press and hype, all to garner donations to Cancer Research UK. I was mesmerized by the idea of actually going on such an adventure but couldn’t see participating in any of them. This was a young man’s dream, I was an overweight divorcee in my 50’s. I knew that I physically didn’t have it in me. I believed in my head and my heart that this was something way beyond my capabilities. I didn’t sleep that night, lying in bed imagining what a REAL athlete, doing something like that would go through. The next day we talked some more, and I told Jamie I didn’t see myself getting on board with any of the activities. He assured me he didn’t want to pressure me into doing any of them. That there were many other ways to help administratively, or raising awareness and money, things like that. I told him I’d mull it over, hearing that voice over my shoulder saying “yes, you can do some admin tasks, sitting on your fat ass while the team goes off on adventures”. He gave me the dates of each activity and at the end of the week, I came home to Seattle. A few days later I saw Chris and told him about it all. He told me I could do a marathon if I trained for it. Or a long bike ride, if I trained for it. Then, he said, “But Gaylin, you’re already hiking. Mt Kilimanjaro is just hiking for longer periods than you’re doing now, several days in a row. I’ve gotten many clients up that mountain. You can do it.”

The Mt Kilimanjaro trip was just shy of a year away. Chris’ attitude was that I could do it. He saw how I struggled to do a good push up, to climb stairs, or do pull ups. He believed in me more than I did. He knew I would do anything I set my mind to. We came up with a plan. I called Jamie in London a few days later to tell him I was in. To this day, he remembers that call as a miracle. I don’t remember the call, but I do remember a shift in my life. At first, my view was that I couldn’t let him down, and I couldn’t disappoint Chris, either. I had to work hard, and I did. The hardest part was my view of who I was. I continued to grow, learn and laugh. I did hard things like a half-marathon, many difficult hikes; I climbed the stairs up to the top of the Space Needle. Slowly, over time, I changed my inner view from

“You couldn’t do that anyway” to “You can do anything you put your mind to”

from ”You’re too fat” to “I love how my body responds to the work I’m doing”

from “You’ve never been very coordinated” to “Look how agile you’ve become”

from ”Everyone will laugh at you” to “I don’t care what other people think”

Those thoughts came from Chris’ and Jamie’s encouragement, and soon, I was no longer worried about letting them down. I was worried about letting myself down. That was all the motivation I needed. I wasn’t going to let that happen. My view of myself had changed. I was taking the responsibility I needed to show myself I was capable of whatever I believed I could do. I viewed myself with compassion and loving kindness, knowing I had the grit and the spirit to accomplish anything. I could see myself in this majestic view, a different person. Someone who had persevered and could continue to strive to do difficult things…

But, Where Do I Begin?

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Now that I was committed to doing the climb, I had no idea where to begin. Chris became my guide on the journey. I didn’t know what to do or how to do it, but Chris committed to working with me as much as I wanted, to make sure I could get up that mountain. I did strength conditioning with him three times a week. On the days I wasn’t in the gym with him, I would get on the treadmill, the stair mill or the stationary bike. I put books in a backpack, strapped it on and began walking the public stairways that help pedestrians navigate the hills of Seattle.

I bought a couple of books on climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, which served to scare me into thinking I had probably made a mistake in signing up for this adventure. There was so much I hadn’t thought of when I made the decision, and the books provided just enough information for me to get curious about details. Things like animals and health care and getting there and a million other things. Chris just kept me working so I’d be physically ready, and when I spoke to Jamie, he assured me that going with a good sized group like he was planning, there would be plenty of organization to keep us all safe and sound on the mountain. I tried to push the questions out of my mind, and focused on what I could do. My part was to keep working on strengthening myself, every day before and after work. I ate an almost vegetarian diet, except when I really craved meat- and then I tried to eat lean. Nothing too extreme, but sensible. I knew my relationship with food was unhealthy but couldn’t quite figure out how to fix it. I decided that if I made it through making good food choices just for TODAY, that was enough. I would worry about tomorrow when it came. In the gym, the more I worked, the more I found I could do, which was a reward in itself.

One day, as Chris prepared me for a particular exercise, he told me to ‘take an athletic stance’. I burst out laughing, and told him I’d need to be an athlete to do that. His face grew serious. “You are an athlete”, he said. I explained that I had hit a tennis ball a few times, and played a little softball in the back yard once or twice, but I was no athlete and never had been. In fact, I had always loathed sports of any kind. My perceived lack of ability to do anything physical had taught me over the years that I was incapable. But he asked me ‘what about the Marine Corps? Surely you had to do physical fitness tests back then, right?’ This got me to thinking – yes, in fact the USMC PFT that I had to pass annually required that we run a mile and a half in under 15 minutes, do 20+ sit ups in a minute, and 15 seconds of bent arm hang. I had been able to do that once upon a time. Did that make me an athlete? “No”, he said “You are training with me – you are an athlete”. That was exciting – I’d never thought of myself as an athlete before. But if I was going to be climbing a mountain, that was a pretty athletic endeavor. I felt something shift inside.

In March of 2013, two events changed everything. Almost 6 months to the day before I was to leave for Africa, the lease expired on my apartment, which resulted in a notice that my rent would be doubled for the upcoming year. The same week I got laid off from my job. To be clear, I didn’t like the job. I had never liked a job. I never knew ‘liking’ a job was even a thing. I had to work to get paid and support myself, that was all. I had grown up in the tech world and was good at managing operating systems and always seemed to find a way to move up. I had been working for Ticketmaster for more than 5 years and was managing their credit card security audits because I understood the security required around the networks and servers. When a whole new crew was brought in to manage IT Security without I questioned if they wanted to know how things worked. They didn’t. I thought that was odd, but when my brand new Sr VP said he was coming to Seattle ‘for a conversation’ I could read the writing on the wall. They weren’t interested – and didn’t know a thing about Ticketmaster’s home grown systems. It was a rebuilding from the ground up. I received a small severance package and created a spreadsheet. Housing in Seattle wasn’t difficult to come by in 2013. I realized by crunching the numbers that I could live on my savings and the severance for up to a year! The realization was such a relief. I found a cheaper apartment and moved. I looked for work, but mostly I worked out. I had 6 months before leaving, enough money to pay my rent for the near future, and a full summer coming to the Pacific Northwest. I decided to trust that I’d eventually find work once I returned from Africa, and concentrate on the climb. I got up every morning and went for a walk. Then to the gym, for weight training with Chris or cardio on my own. On the way home I either climbed some stairs or went kayaking in Lake Union.

Day by day I felt healthier and happier. It’s funny what the mind does – as I got stronger and more capable, I found there were many unknowns in the whole climb plan. I purchased a couple books and began reading about all the variables that one might encounter. Jamie filled in as many answers to my questions as humanly possible. I knew as long as I went into the situation with a positive attitude and a strong body, I would succeed. But one lingering thought kept me up at night. “I don’t know how long I can walk every day”. When I mentioned this to Chris, he suggested testing myself. Instead of working up to something, I tend to dive into the deep end of pools feet first, so I registered to run the Seattle Rock n Roll Half Marathon.

With a live band at every mile marker, Chris advised me to alternating walking a mile, then running a mile, knowing I’d have a clear line of demarcation for each mile. I had walked a half marathon once before, in Pasadena in 2009 when I was very heavy and not in good shape at all. So I thought the worst case scenario here would be that I’d walk more than run.

I had no idea what to expect, but the day turned out to be gorgeous and the route took us through areas of Seattle I wasn’t yet familiar with. The route had us starting from the Space Needle and winding through the city headed south, with a long stretch down Rainier Ave. It turned out to be a clear, sunny and not-too-warm day, so there were glorious views of Mt. Rainier during that entire stretch of the course. It had never occurred to me that Rainier Ave would provide such a view! I came to realize the endorphins were really kicking in -smart race planning. Soon we made a loop and ended up on the freeway, headed north to check out the Great Wheel, the ferries and cruise ships as we overlooked Puget Sound, then the final stretch took us through the SR-99 tunnel and back out to the Seattle Center.

The good news was that I finished – which was my goal. I needed to show myself that I wouldn’t stop. I learned that for me the challenge was much more of a mental one than a physical one. Back then, I had never paid attention to timing, so I had no idea how fast I could walk or run. So I wasn’t exactly thrilled by my time –

Many people can walk a 15-16 minute mile.