introvert

I Need Alex Honnold, Who Can’t Feel Fear, To Give Me Access To All The Feels

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For 90 minutes my body went through a rebellion: hands clutching and releasing anything they could grasp, palms sweating despite the chilly room, tears bursting out of thin air, all punctuated by the occasional gasp of joy. I was not undergoing dental work. I was not on trial. I was not fighting with a loved one.

No, I was watching a movie about a man with no boundaries and a compulsion to seek perfection, even if just for a moment. I watched him create mastery with death on the line. The man is Alex Honnold. The film is Free Solo. It was exhausting, and—oddly enough—life affirming.

That’s right: 99% on the Tomatometer.

 

I chose the film for a very specific reason: I needed to FEEL. Deeply, engagingly, with my whole body. I wanted—and received—a brutal dose of the feels. Why? I’m odd that way. I need something large to draw out feelings that seem routine to my friends and most other humans. I am slow to rile, slow to react, and am seen as so laid back that nothing much phases me.

Alex tells a similar story when he talks about how most things just don’t get to him one way or the other. His nickname is “No Big Deal”. Everyday annoyances, the daily grind, relationships: he appears a canyon. Vast, deep, immovable. Only when he gets into his comfort zone of flow—complicated, demanding climbing routes—does he start to feel the pleasure that comes from competence. Add to that the all-too-real danger of free soloing, and he can feel alive.

When I walked out of the theater I was in the right mindset to open up with a friend and explore a recent emotional quagmire. Hours earlier, I couldn’t let myself get there. I felt frustrated yet incapable of expression. Letting my mind get lost in the tension onscreen was key. Tension on Alex’s behalf, and on behalf of his friends and filmmakers. The buffeting my mind and body endured were just right. Just what I needed.

Apathetic Amygdala

Alex is odd that way, too. During the film it’s revealed that Alex has some “alternative” brain wiring, starting with his amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear (in addition to all the other “primal” emotions). When tested in an fMRI machine—the kind that shows your brain lighting up in response to stimuli—Alex does not muster much in the way of, well, anything in the way of reactions in the amygdala. Structurally he’s fine: there’s an amygdala in there. But it’s slower to rouse than a hibernating bear.

This makes him highly unusual—even the control subject, a “thrill-seeking” climber, showed fMRI amygdala responses to shocking imagery. In Alex, this primordial deficit might not have been noticed in a conventional, non rock climbing life. If he’d opted for the civil engineer career path he started and abandoned, he might not have known that he didn’t feel things like other people did. Life just might have seemed . . . fine. Boring, but fine. He wouldn’t have known any better.

But Alex is not a civil engineer (yet; he’s still young). Instead he finds that he is able to touch perfection and truly feel alive when he is using his mastery to stay one smear away from death.

I’m no Alex Honnold.

And yet. I see some interesting parallels in how we process the world. Go big or go home is typically how I take on challenges. Everything else is so “meh” that I am doomed to fail. I don’t just break up with someone: I do that and then get rid of most of my stuff and move across the country. Rather than take a job that’s reasonable in a new company, I find a brand new subject matter in a new company and take over a whole department. Oh, and when I run, I run ultramarathons.

Yep, that’s me. Wanna go run this weekend?

 

When I step into a big change, I get a lump in my throat. A quiver in my belly. A deep sense of purpose that is damn near addictive. Purpose is fantastic. Purpose helps you open a door, peek through, and realize you—to remain “you”—have to step through. It’s not unlike falling in love: in both we find deep meaning and a dizzying “oh shit here we go this is happening” beginning phase.

But that kind of quivering sensation isn’t repeatable forever. Is it? We grow accustomed to nearly everything. That’s a human strength, allowing us to persevere through some truly awful shit. And it can be our downfall when we seek a meaningful life.

The bridge between those big purposeful feels and just being able to experience emotions without judgement is where I get stuck. And that’s where running comes in. A lot of running.

Endurance + Exhaustion = Feels

After an ultramarathon or an energetically challenging psychological experience (movies can do it, sometimes books, sometimes particular music) I can get to that vulnerable place. It is then that I can open up, have those heart-to-hearts if needed. My normal introvert self can’t be bothered to put up a fight when the rest of me is soooooo tired.

Yet I still wonder how sustainable that pattern is. One can’t go through daily life making big life-altering moves AND draining one’s body of energy just to experience an acceptable level of emotions and be able to connect with people.

Can you? I don’t know. It starts with an observation and a theory about normal people and normal emotions. We’re about to go deep. Buckle up.

The Emotion Is Not Strong In This One

I believe that humans are built to experience a large range of emotional intensity. And like all human characteristics the potential range varies immensely from person to person. Let’s say all emotions are on a scale from -10 to +10. A daily chart might show most people existing between -4 and +5 depending on all kinds of things from social interactions to blood sugar. Meaning: in the middle, but fluctuating a bit. This is based on observation and talking with friends and family.

Rare events (tragedy, great news) spike the numbers into the high numbers in either direction. Overall, it seems that the “normal” waves, the -4s and +5s, are good for mental health. When a person is wired to stray too far away from the norm, there will be a price paid. To the conscious mind, or to the spirit.

At one extreme, some people feel BIG feelings more often than average. They’re in those 8s and 9s too frequently. We might call them drama addicts. They probably have issues with cycling between rosy and shitty in their relationships. They could have diagnosed psychological issues. That can’t be fun.

And then there’s the other side of the bell curve: the underfeelers. Here’s where odd me and even odder Alex come in.

I’ve grown to observe my personal daily pattern between -1 and +2. Not much rocks my boat. I am aware that I could be feeling things more deeply, good and bad, but it doesn’t seem to happen organically. The rub? This also leaves folks like me untrained for bigger fluctuations that would be normal to everyone else. So when faced with a -4 or a +4, I freak out a little and go for a run to smooth things out. A bit of self-medication to open up the little release valve.

But that release valve wasn’t serving me or my relationships. After maintaining my emotional ripples at a safe level, my spirit finally made some demands. It WANTS the big ones: those -5s and +6s. It craves them. So I must create them. I do that by watching Free Solo. Or running all day long, which interestingly is the opposite of those short “valve opening” runs. Long bold and exhausting runs contain big ups and downs within, as well as a payout in emotions at the end. Or becoming a freelancer before it’s financially stable. Or moving across the country. In the meantime, I’m going to watch Free Solo, again.

I hope that in learning more about emotions and how to understand and gently let them flourish, I’ll find that joyful spirit. Because feeling the intoxication of possibility is lovely.

With much love and gratitude to Hugh MacLeod and GapingVoid.com

How To Induce Existential Terror Using An Inflatable Kayak

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I found existential terror over just two days on the Green River outside Moab. Packrafting was going to be my next new skill, but it turned out to be far more complicated than I could have imagined.

We’ve all heard people say, “go with the flow“, intending to calm and get others to mellow out and let things happen naturally. Go with the flow even sounds harmless—you just sit back on the proverbial river and let whatever’s around guide your course. But in March, the opposite happened to me. On a literal river, in a literal blow-up boat, facing the flow transitioned into a crisis of self.

What if going with the flow was not calming but rather like trying to let go and relax during an avalanche? Or a dust storm? What if “the flow”, even as a metaphor, is a tsunami-sized wave you can’t stop, and it’s your own personal version of hell and death all rolled into one? And, jeebus, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I have FUN?

Women packrafters outside Moab Utah on the Green River in drysuits

Smiling only on the outside?

I found myself pondering this and other obnoxiously huge thoughts when I was out on the Green River trying to have a nice packrafting and paddling skills weekend. Questioning my very purpose and meaning was not what I expected. Instead of quickly getting up to speed on stroke mechanics and how to put on a drysuit, I found myself over-metaphorizing the river itself. Each day I tried to navigate my craft downstream with varying degrees of success. I spent all my energy just trying to keep up with the group until I was exhausted, soaking wet, and freezing.

At night, I stared into the campfire and thought about death. Instead of talking to the rest of the women in the circle, I assumed a thousand-yard stare and went digging into that feeling of being out of control. I realized you can’t stop time or the creeping specter of our own personal grim reaper. Time flows, just like that river. You have to try to navigate as best you can, paddling downstream with as much skill as you can accumulate, not going too fast and not going too slow lest you get hung up on boulders or dead-spin eddies along the way.

Women around campfire; headlamps

Rad women being rad with each other. I wondered why this was so not rad for me.

And the river never stops. Never, ever. Until it does and that of course means you’re dead. But you don’t know if your river will end around the next curve or in the middle of the next set of frothy rapids or a bajillion miles downstream. You. Just. Don’t. Know.

Paddling isn’t so much about making speed. It’s about navigating well, avoiding traps, getting through the rough shit without a boat flip, bouncing over rocks without tearing a hole in the boat, bailing water sometimes, and just managing through everything while that water just keeps going. It feels scary to be pulled downward and to only have the chance to pivot this way or that but never to really stop. You could pull up in an eddy and rest, or spin, but the river still continues and you can’t spin forever. Or maybe you can spin forever, and then eventually your boat deflates and you get hungry and you doubt yourself and hate the water and think things like, “why can’t I just get up on the shore and stop moving and just WATCH!? Fuck.”

And that is how I discovered that paddling was no fun. River dynamics combined with my little human self whipping the paddle back and forth generated an existential terror that I could not face.

But I will. I have to. What else is there, after all?

trail end at fisher towers utah

Hostels vs. Introverts: Homey or Hostile?

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I am not a good hosteler.

I adore hostels. Let’s put that out there. The unique spaces often in renovated old houses with peeling paint and tin ceilings, the shabby common areas, the kitchen full of mismatched dishes and silverware and pots and lids. The clump of people on the porch all chatting with each other and seeming to enjoy it. That, too. And, of course, the reasonable fees to stay at hostels is another huge draw for any traveler, whether frugal or legit short on cash.

And yet, I do not conform to what seems to be the expected social contract one signs when staying at a hostel.

The accepted and expected behavior for a hostel-goer is something like this: check-in while chatting with the staff, say hi to everyone in the hallway, ask about nearby bars and music venues, dump your gear on the bed, wander down to the kitchen to see who’s cooking and who is going to the store for provisions and who is ordering pizza and choose your team, head out to the porch to sit and gab with whomever else is out there, stroll back inside for a bit of unpacking while planning evening activities with your new bunkmates, whether that’s playing guitar in the common area until 11pm or finding nearby social events to drop in on until well past curfew. Sleep, drink free kitchen coffee, repeat.

Playing records for no one but me at Salida Hostel.

Here’s my routine behavior at a hostel: check-in, say a few words to the staff, admire the funky building decor and/or freaky disrepair of said building, deposit belongings on bed while giving a slight nod to roommates, wander down to kitchen to admire mismatched dishes and scope options for meal prep, give a sideways glance to the drum kit set up in the common area, closely inspect the bookshelves for anything interesting, go back to room, get food, cook food, eat food in common area with other people present but reading a book, smile at other people but talk little, play the little portable record player when no one is around, eventually speak at length to the one person who seems compelling on final day at hostel. Leave.

Nothing better than a couch, slippers, and a book.

I’m also uncomfortably aware of some of my social pain-points, so when I am staying at a hostel I am doing what feels comfortable to me but also realizing that I am not fulfilling my ‘duties’. I am comfortable but uncomfortable. I engage little, which results in some curiosity from the other residents, I’m sure. Who is this person? Why doesn’t she hang out with us? Didn’t she hear us offer her some smokey treats if she wanted to chill out in the garage? If she’s so antisocial why is she at a hostel!?

There are folks that I do meet at hostels that I like very much. But they don’t tend to be the people you are supposed to meet: those travelers from a different land, a different creed, a different generation, a different worldview. I gravitate toward a specific kind of friend who in retrospect seems a lot like myself, only “better”. More creative, more inquisitive, more accomplished. But still a grounded adult woman, probably white, probably a little shy, probably a little tomboyish.

Hanna from Oslo and her notebook.

Many people come away from their hosteling experience with friends from every segment of life and planet conceivable. Shy white midwestern gals become friends with that guy from Argentina, that woman from Singapore, that couple from Senegal. That’s hard for me. But maybe THAT is another reason why I choose hostels: there’s something in me that wants to have the ease with others, the ability to connect, the social grace. And in a hostel the barriers are removed almost completely. No need to approach a stranger on the street. They will come to you. They will be on the top bunk to your bottom. They will see your shower clothes and your disheveled suitcase.

In a hostel, the ice has already been broken. So maybe I stay there, in part, to let myself melt a little.