Summit or Bust or Something In Between

This is the first installment in a five-part series on my experience hiking Mt. Whitney this summer.

I hate to fail. I hate knowing I have to fail even more.

I tell my students to embrace their failures. To wear them with pride. I celebrate their failures with them so they can really appreciate their successes later. I suggest new and novel uses for their rejection letters (though the digital age has made this less poetic. It's difficult to wallpaper your room with emails that say you suck.)

I do this because it's so much easier to see their silver linings. When I fail, it's just gray clouds and cussing under my breath.

I think the worst part of embracing failure is that hugging something means you have to get close to it again, increasing the likelihood that you will repeat your failure, and often at the exact same thing. 

But this is the writer's life. Rejection. Disinterest. Self-loathing. Repeat. I think this may be why so many authors who manage to get over turn into unmitigated egotists; like they're balancing the cosmic scales for the years they spent questioning every aspect of themselves and their decision to tell stories. Some karmic comeuppance.

In this case, the failure in question was not an artistic one. Rather, it was physical. Three years ago, I set out to hike to the summit of Mt. Whitney and Mt. Whitney set out to hurt my feelings. She won. (Rather than rehash, let’s just focus on the present, shall we?)  

Not coincidentally, it was around the same time I started trying to sell my first novel. And as life seems to go, I've had as much trouble making that happen as I had trying to climb the mountain.

To be clear, these two sets of failure are not in any way the same. With Whitney, I can identify what went wrong. I can address almost all of those elements (change my approach, eat better, train harder, try to avoid altitude sickness, though it, like the honey badger, does what it wants).

Getting a book published or an agent to understand what you're trying to say...that's a different matter. There are so many elements that go into someday seeing my book in print that I can't control, some of which I don't really want to.

And yet, returning to Whitney three years later and reaching the summit with my friends Gus and Jeremy made one thing clear: while the pain of achieving makes the achievement worth it, it still hurts.

To reach the summit, we started hiking at 2:50 am and finished at 6:30 pm. In that time, we were hiking for 15 hours, climbing to the highest point in the lower 48. At several points on the way up, it felt like I might not make it. As close as half a mile from the top, I had to choose not to stop, turn around, and head back down. But I chose to go on, not because I'm all that heroic, but because I did not want to carry one more failure down the mountain.

And this is why I keep writing. Keep submitting. Keep accepting that rejection merely means I need to move on to the next possibility. The next story. The next potential summit.

I spent just less than thirty minutes at the top of Mt. Whitney - enough time to take in the view, snap some pictures, and settle a personal debt of gratitude, and drink a can of Dr. Pepper.

Three Misfit Marmots, one ridiculous view.

Photo by Gus Svendsen, moment by the Dr.

And then, I walked back down the mountain, one painful step at a time. Seems about right to the writer in me.