My “moment” lasted twenty years. That’s how long I’ve been wanting to tell this story.
I had already soloed 23 of the tallest mountains in Colorado and was heading up number 24. Humboldt Peak was arguably one of the easiest 14ers in the entire Rocky Mountain range and I was anticipating a clean victory. The trail was clear, the weather sublime, and I had undertaken an arduous journey across half the state to get here. There was no way I was going to return home without photographs of the summit.
Right in the middle of the switchbacks, not even halfway up, an overwhelming and frightening exhaustion came over me. It was a bizarre feeling, as if someone had flipped a switch and my muscles suddenly could no longer access any energy. I collapsed on the side of the trail and tried not to cry, then forlornly shuffled back down the way I had come. It was 1998.
At first, I thought I was sick. I got sick a lot. My immune system had never been stellar. I had labored my entire life under the excoriating pressure of an abusive, perfectionist family whose psychological profile was a petting zoo of personality disorders. I was running a personal gardening and landscape design business single-handedly for testy high-end clients six days a week and lifting weights heavy almost every evening. I was eating a health food/SAD diet mix, reasoning that I was young and insanely active and those two factors would render me Teflon by default. I was dating a sociopath. So, no stress in my life, whatsoever.
I didn’t figure it out until much later but my own personality disorder was disassociative. I was able to ignore enormous amounts of pain and an avalanche of warning signs despite my world crumbling around me. This worked with my friends because I got a lot of social cred for appearing mentally tough and alarmingly strong for a woman, but the combo destroyed my body from within like an exotic cancer. Examples: At one point I was popping 16 Advil a day to stave off back pain from a herniated disk so I could still build rock walls in gardens; I endured a failed lumbar puncture and worked through several days of agony before staggering into the ER; I somersaulted over the handlebars of my mountain bike onto pavement and tolerated the crazy-making symptoms of post concussion syndrome without treatment. Shit like that.
Through it all, I started noticing what Peter Attia noticed in his TED talk: apropos nothing, my athletic performance was diminishing and I was gaining weight around my abdomen. I tried Atkins but, little did I know at the time, it had too much protein in it for me so I switched to standard health food. I got more tired, more sick, and heavier. I cut out red meat, then chicken. I became pescatarian. More tired, more sick, heavier. I went vegetarian, then vegan, then raw vegan. I slammed back vitamins, sought alternative healers and naturopaths, I watched my skin go grey and my muscle tone disintegrate beneath concrete layers of fat. I tried to keep hiking and lifting weights but it was useless.
More tired. More sick. Heavier. I blamed myself for it all.
By 2015, I was unable to work, could barely shuffle half a mile on a flat trail, and was depressed beyond measure. My joints were swollen and painful, skin tags were enveloping my neck like a knobby scarf, and I slept 12 hours a day only to wake up groggy as a frat boy on a Sunday morning. Everyone I turned to for help took my appearance in with a glance and asked in a condescending tone, “Have you thought about diet and exercise?” I wanted to punch them in the throat, particularly the doctors.
But lately, I had begun to listen to the whispers of intuition telling me, “Adrenal fatigue, codependency, neurogenesis.” I researched the fuck out of each one and gradually got my feet under me. The resulting awareness allowed me to notice the other whispers, “Whatever you focus on, grows. Stop calling your mother. Sugar nauseates you now.” When I watched Peter Attia cry on YouTube that day, something inside clicked. I binge-watched 47 videos on the keto diet in one weekend and felt something I hadn’t in years: hope.
Mine isn’t the keto success story you hear about in blogs and forum posts. I didn’t immediately drop a ton of weight and emerge transformed. In fact, it seems like every measurable victory has been won after a long, arduous, fucking battle of trial, error, and frustrating little adjustments. I don’t know if this is just my own delightfully deranged metabolism or that old, ingrained message of “Suffer! Suffer! Suffer! And then they’ll clap!” rearing its ugly head again. Probably both. Teasing apart the Gordian Knot of my life has been a mountain climb from birth. Luckily, I’m a fucking badass mountain climber.
I’m thinking…it would be really something to return to Humboldt Peak and summit the mother.
so pissed off you and your family suffered like this. Thank goodness you know the way now.