When they tell you to shrink, tell em to shove it and go climb some rocks
The tale of one body and two types of growh. Adapted from a talk I did for one of REI’s Women’s Speaker Series events
I want to tell you the story of a body. It’s told through the lens of my body but maybe this story will resonate a little with the story of yours.
This story is about one body and two different kinds of growths it experienced.
Let me begin with the first kind of growth. That from being a kid to being a woman.
As a baby and toddler, even as a young child my body was mostly loved. It was cradled and fed and cuddled and smothered with kisses. The affection came from my eager and happy parents but also from relatives and strangers, too… cause look at that bowl cut.
And then something happened…I entered the awkward phases.
My body not only grew taller but also stranger. As many other women, I grew odd curves. My butt and my hips expanded. My chest went from flat to somewhat bumpy. And not just that. I grew chubby, too.
It was around that time, that the love my body had received as a kid suddenly changed. There was negative attention. And thus, this doting and unconditional affection that I had experienced as a very small kid slowly but surely turned into a kind of conditional love.
This chubby state was the beginning of me learning that love was no longer a given. In many ways, this was the beginning of my body becoming a barometer for how much love the world had for me. Indirectly the world had started to tell me that to be loved I needed to be small.
This manifests itself on so many levels:
First, It’s physical.
I was told to be skinny, to be thinner, thinner and thinner, until, oops, for one short time in my life I was too thin. That golden middle of being just enough or just right seemed so elusive, like a myth I believed in and was cursed to chase for the rest of my life through diets, mind-numbingly boring cardio, and calorie counting.
And since I never seemed to have enough willpower to starve my bulges off, I was taught to hide them. I was taught to fold my arms and cross my legs like origami so I would take up less space. I was asked to wear dark clothes so I could hide my stomach, to turn sideways to make my arms smaller, to hold my phone up into the sky so my faces could look thinner.
To be woman-like, it seemed, meant to be small. If I wanted to be desired the world told me I had to shrink.
And not only did I have to shrink physically. Somehow this idea of needing to be small so I could be loved and wanted… it seeped into how I behaved as well. I was told not to speak up too much, and so I didn’t for a long time. I was trained to compulsively apologize.
“I’m sorry I bumped into you.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted.”
“I’m sorry I accomplished something and felt excited and shared it.”
I learned to be in constant conflict with myself — to be at war with my own body, and to make myself and my own needs disappear. I learned not to get too large, basically, in many real and metaphorical ways.
But this is where the second story comes in, the second kind of growth. This is how my body and, by extension, I myself grew through climbing.
I began to climb a few months after a major breakup. My ex was someone who felt inadequate about himself and to make up for his insecurity he felt the need to put me down, too. I had been taught for so much of my life to make myself smaller for others, and so, I obliged.
On some level, this relationship was perhaps the greatest manifestation of this internalized need to shrink.
Imagine being boxed up for someone else’s sake for four years. When I came out of that box I found climbing. And climbing was a way for me to learn to let my body take up space again.
This is where the second kind of growth comes in.
There was this physical expansion that happened when I first started to climb.
There’s the intense pumping of your forearms, that eventually, as you keep climbing, turns your lower forearms into these round, toned, big shapes.
Through climbing my shoulders expanded, too. I have literally burst out of the seams of some of my shirts since I started to climb, like a bizarro Asian version of a she-hulk.
My hands grew calluses and, after long climbing sessions, swell up, making them look like little puffed up, hardened sausages that occasionally features some not-so-appetizing scabs.
Now, I walk up straight — my shoulders broad; my thighs and calves bulging.
It’s as if climbing allowed my hunched up, shrunken self to unfurl, like a plant leaning towards the sun.
And it’s not just that. Every movement you make in climbing is big, especially when you’re small, like me and have to jump for every other move. There are climbs that require you to basically do the splits between two corners of the wall. Sometimes you have to leap for a hold — you aim with your arms, wiggle your butt before you pop with your legs, catapulting your body into the air to hopefully catch a handle and hang on.
And so climbing became this activity that allowed me to expand. It’s a sport that required me to to reach and jump and push….
But above all, it’s a sport that allowed me to stop waging a war against my body. You literally need your body to not fall off the rock and land on your face. It’s a partnership, not an antagonistic back and forth.
That’s essentially why I climb. I don’t climb for numbers, I’ve never climbed to check off projects and tell people what grades I climb.
Mostly, it’s my therapy of choice.
