Hello readers at all altitudes,

Thanks for hopping over to this new platform with me and thank you to my former Professor and friend Suse and my mother for telling me that substack is rife with Nazis and that this is a better platform! Not much else will change with the newsletter, I will still write it when I feel like it and that's about it.

Last week, I traveled to St. Lucia, an island in the East Caribbean. I was there mainly to go diving and to jolt my system with enough sun to make it through the rest of the winter. While I was there I did two things: I sank into the water repeatedly, and I summited Mt. Pimard. I went low and I went high, how rife with metaphor.

A sinking feeling in your stomach, sink or swim, sunk to new depths. Each of these idioms involving the action of sinking have pretty negative connotations. But the feeling of sinking at the start of the dive, the way it is precipitated by your slow exhale, the relief of knowing you have enough weight to be negatively buoyant, the first few breaths of air underwater as gravity slowly releases its hold on you is quite magnificent. Sinking also means being held, and being surrounded, it is a precursor to being immersed. What would happen if we let ourselves sink more often? If we did things with totality? If we immersed ourselves in a project, or a feeling, knowing that when we needed to, when we were low on air, we would be able to resurface? Take a deep breath, and think of something you'd like to sink into. More needs to be done in defense of sinking!

Now summiting on the other hand, how triumphant! To be on top, to vanquish, to succeed. Well, most of my time scrambling up Mt. Pimard that was the furthest thing from what it felt like. I did not feel very vanquish-like, I felt sweaty, and red-in-the-face, and out of breath, and like my heart was going to beat out of my chest, and like this might have been the way that I died because it drizzled a little bit and the rocks could have gotten slippery and then...

About an hour and a half into the hike, I found myself sitting on a rock, panting, trying to figure out the metrics to make a decision about turning around or continuing to climb. The hike had been hard, steep, there were sections where I needed to use ropes in order to scale rock faces. I have stories about myself, about being a bad hiker, about not being adventurous enough or fit enough or well trained/equipped enough to hike. These are stories that have followed me for decades at this point. So there I was sitting with all these stories wondering how much farther it was to the summit. That's the thing about summits, you don't actually know how far you are from them until you round the last curve of the path. Sometimes things are really hard, things aren't clicking, and you're like well I can endure this for two more weeks but I don't think I could do two months, then two weeks pass and you're like...I guess two more couldn't hurt. I struggle with that cycle often because sometimes I think I'm too resilient for my own good. Like, yeah I can push through whatever, but as Max likes to remind me, just because you can, doesn't mean you have to. So I'm still sitting there, on a sharp rock, thinking all of this while trying to figure out if I'm going to make it to the top or not.

Ultimately, the "I can do hard things" feeling wins again, but this time only after I convince myself that it would have been just as "successful" of a hike if I had decided to turn around. I set myself a timer for 10 minutes, and I decided that if I didn't see the summit in 10 minutes I would turn around. Seven minutes in I turned the timer off because I wanted to fucking make it. Stubborn.

I made it to the top. As soon as I got to the top I started laugh-crying. I was alone the entire time on the mountain. I felt really proud of myself, but I like to think that maybe I would have felt just as proud of myself if I had turned around. How important are the summits really? How do we know if we're close to them? If we're just ten minutes away?

I think I'm more personally inclined towards sinking, but I'd summit at least one more time in my life.

To all your peaks and valleys, to the depths and the heights, love you,

Me