Dropping My Ax While Climbing a Mountain Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me

In high school, I was awkward and gangly and did theater. But also, I was fast. The harder I worked, the faster I ran, and that speed empowered me to trust in my abilities and, my wildest dreams.

Everything changed when I became a scholarship runner in a toxic and abusive collegiate program. By graduation, my femur had cracked multiple times from overtraining, and instead of confidence, I carried a deeply embedded fear of failure.

In the years after college, my life looked successful. I graduated from an elite law school, worked at a Wall Street firm, wore Jimmy Choos, and ran marathons. But the truth was, I was playing it safe, chasing things that mattered little to me and burying the imaginative girl who wrote, directed, and starred in plays, the teenager alighted by the sound of her feet on dirt, and the woman who was deeply unhappy.

Despite my growing dissatisfaction, by 33, I was still pushing through. When my sister, certain her baby was coming early, asked me to stay in the country, I boarded a plane anyway, not willing to miss my work meetings. She was right, and missing the birth was a gutting culmination of a series of missed moments.

I knew I needed a change. So nine months of saving later, I sat in an office with a view of Lady Liberty and told my business partner I was quitting to move into a used station wagon. The only path I saw back to the girl who ran fearlessly and trusted her instincts was to quit the life I had never wanted and instead take a risk: I was going to climb America’s wild places.

To say I didn’t know what I was doing would be an understatement — I’d spent the last 16 years in cities, only recently began climbing mountains, and had never camped alone. But days later, I was on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, known for record-setting winds, to climb an icy gully with two men I barely knew. I’d never even held an ice axe, let alone climbed ice, but the guys made climbing look easy.

It wasn’t. After struggling through the first steep sections, 50-some feet off the ground, I couldn’t get my axe to catch. Fumbling with frozen hands and my stomach twisting with doubts, I swung again, again, and then I lost my grip, catapulting the axe through the air watching it land in the snow near where other climbers had gathered.

As the wind numbed my cheeks, my entire body trembled. Not only had I failed, I’d failed before an audience of climbers in grand style. But as hours and then days passed, I saw how I’d not only survived, I’d learned important lessons in humility and preparedness. That empowered me to keep trying, keep risking during the year I lived out of my car.

It wasn’t seamless. The first night I camped alone, I didn’t sleep. I also made many more mistakes. After a storm detoured me on a run, I spent the night in a stranger’s car. Another time, I trusted a fellow hiker over my instincts and ended up lost. But I kept trying, kept learning.

Ten years later, I live a quiet life in the mountains with art and nature at its center. I’m no longer hiding the parts of me that were once buried under someone else’s definition of success. I’m here now because leaping into the unknown wised me to the truism that failure was inevitable. I could either fail once by never trying, or I could try many times, risk many failures, and in doing so, discover what true success means to me.