Episode 32: From the Inside, Out (Part 1)
Lor had to decide. They could go on hating themself, or could be a part of making the world a place that was more healed—and that started with healing themself.
This is one transgender climber’s story. And it’s hard to sum up in just a few sentences not just Lor’s identity, but the human being that they are. The impact that they’re having on our community in a meaningful way, and how it’s growing because of it. Just by simply existing.
This is part one of a two-part story.
For the Love of Climbing is brought to you by deuter USA, Gnarly Nutrition, Allez Outdoor, and presented by Patagonia.
Music by: Kakurenbo and Chad Crouch. A HUGE thank you to Chad Crouch for creating absolute magic, and to Peter Darmi for mixing this episode.
Cover photo by Kika MacFarlane.
Catch up on podcast (pod-Kath?) updates and general life things: @inheadlights
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- This podcast is presented by Patagonia. Not bound by convention, Patagonia’s in business to save our home planet.
- This podcast is sponsored by deuter, one of the leading backpack brands that will help you hit the trails with confidence and comfort, but most importantly–your snacks.
deuter has a history of first ascents and alpine roots. Their head of product development even climbed Everest once, in jeans (hashtag not fake news.) deuter is known for fit, comfort, and ventilation. Founded in 1898, deuter believes in good fitting backpacks, so you can focus on way cooler things like puppies, pocket bacon, and gettin’ sendy, whether at the crag or in the alpine.
(FEMALE VOICE): Today we’re going to talk about “allez”. “Allez” means “come on!” in a way, or to encourage. Ok! We are done with the simple and normal uses of “allez”, now let’s cut to the chase:
(KATHY KARLO): Allez Outdoor Personal Care products are made by climbers for those who love the outdoors. Their rich and repairing ingredients for their skincare collection are inspired by desert landscapes, and their simple and recyclable packaging makes them eco-sustainable. Allez commits to protecting the open spaces that we love by partnering with the Access Fund and 1% for the Planet. That’s Allez Outdoor: “A-L-L-E-Z”). Allez Outdoor—made by climbers, for those who love the outdoors.
- This podcast gets support from Gnarly Nutrition, one of the leading protein supplements that tastes “whey” better than they need to, because they use quality natural ingredients. So, whether you’re a working mom who runs circles around your kids on weekends or an unprofessional climber trying to send that 5.13 in the gym, Gnarly Nutrition has all of your recovery needs.
The only question you need to ask yourself is: Are you a sucker for anything that tastes like chocolate ice cream? (Yeah, me neither.) Gnarly Nutrition is designed to enhance your progress—and taste like a milkshake, without all the crap.
(TAP TAP TAP TAP ON MIC)
(LOR SABOURIN): Am I close enough?
(KK): The idea that there are only two genders is called a “gender binary,” because binary means “having two parts”—male and female. But our anatomy doesn’t determine gender identity, and neither does the gender binary. In reality, gender isn’t set in stone and it’s much more like a spectrum—some people have fluctuating gender identities, and others don’t.
“Transgender” is often used as an umbrella term for identities that fall outside of the male/female dichotomy, but none of this is new. Non-binary people aren’t confused about their gender identity or being “quirky” to follow a trend. If anything, non-binary people have been recognized for millennia by societies all around the world.
And I know it gets a little confusing—unfortunately, this is a concept that many people still misunderstand. The definition’s pretty broad because being non-binary means different things to different people. That’s to say, there’s no one way to be non-binary. And the best way to understand is to educate ourselves and to listen to non-binary people’s stories.
This is one climber’s story. And it’s hard to sum up in just a few sentences not just Lor’s identity, but the human being that they are. The impact that they’re having on our community in a meaningful way, and how it’s growing because of it. Just by simply existing.
(LS): (CLICKS TOUNGE)
When I think of who I am, I think of my ability to just be aware of the world around me and take it in. And I guess who I am is just like a person taking in the world, you know? Just like, taking in experiences as they happen and doing my best to interact with them and paying attention. Those are things that are core parts of my identity—is just like, the ability to be here interacting with the world around me.
My name is Lor. I use they/them pronouns.
I’m a climber and I coach mental training. And I guess the best way to describe what I do is: I take these really big-picture, hard-to-understand concepts about mental training and write curriculum that makes them feel tangible and approachable and experiential—so that people can learn to approach mental training as a skill and something that they can incorporate into their lives.
Right now in life, I’m focusing a lot on my personal climbing—that’s been a really important part of self-care for me. And I’m in grad school—I’m studying adventure-based counseling. And so, I’m really making a lot of connections between adventure sports and trauma therapy and the healing process and how we can use the resources that people already have for resiliency and empowerment to help them heal from really big things in their life.
(KK): Hey, a quick heads up. This episode includes discussion of eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide. Visit fortheloveofclimbing.com for resources at the end of the transcript, and reach out to find support if you find yourself struggling with any of these topics.
- You’re listening to For the Love of Climbing Podcast. This is not a climbing podcast. Well, sorta. This is a funny, sad, and somewhat uncomfortable podcast about choosing vulnerability and talking openly about our pain. This podcast is presented by Patagonia. Here’s the show.
— From the Patagonia film “They/Them” which premiered on October 6th: “For Lor Sabourin, climbing is more than a sport; it’s a way of exploring identity and building resilience in the face of adversity. This new film features Lor, a transgender climber, and follows them on a journey to complete one of the hardest routes of their life.
“They/Them” is streaming on the Patagonia YouTube channel. While we’ve done our absolute best to explore these topics conscientiously, please remember that both the film and this episode are told through the lens of a single person’s experience. This is part one of a two-part story.
(LS): I grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan and I wasn’t really a city kid, but my parents had a lot of ties to the city. They grew up there and lived there until we were born—me and my sister, Claire. And they lived there during the race riots and were really involved in the community in the city. So, it was really important to them that we had ties to Detroit as a city, as well.
We spent a lot of time down there and that really shaped my experience of growing up because I just had exposure to so many different people. Detroit has a lot of culture that’s maybe really different from other cities. There’s obviously a lot of poverty and crime there, but there’s also a lot of resilience there.
And just like early on, I think it was important to my parents that I learn to listen to other people’s stories and learn from them. And I was held by a really big community from a really young age and had a really diverse understanding of what it could mean to be a person because I had a lot of different influences around me.
(KK): It’s critical to provide safe spaces for children to safely navigate big feelings. Feeling safe in our own bodies, regardless of age, is a basic human right. Lor had found refuge in a space where they knew they’d be seen and respected at the local climbing gym in Detroit as a kid.
(LS): I first started climbing when I was twelve and I spent a lot of time around multi-generational groups. And so, climbing was super natural for me. Like, when I started hanging out at the gym, I would just convince whoever I could convince to drive me there, like my older sibling or whoever. And I would just want to spend hours there. And I would climb, but I would also just hang out and I got to know all of the people in the climbing community really quickly.
I remember my first week at the gym, I watched someone take an upside-down lead fall. They got their leg caught in the rope. And he mentioned to me that he did it all the time. And at the time, I didn’t really understand why, you know? I was brand new to rock climbing.
And I was like, “Man, this guy needs help.” And I went to the fabric store and bought all these iron-on letters and I made “Save Jason” T-shirts and gave them to people. And we all wore them at the gym. And I think, it was just like, I kind of found a place where I could just hang out and meet people, and I guess it came back to learning people’s stories. And I don’t know that I actually loved rock climbing, but I loved being at the gym.
And the first time I ever climbed, I climbed to the top of this slab and wouldn’t let go. And the manager of the gym had to come up behind the high beams and talk me down. And I finally lowered, but I was basically grabbing every hold as I lowered. And everyone knows that story because it’s like your parents telling your embarrassing kid stories. Every time I walk into the gym in Detroit, they’re like, “Oh Lor, do you remember that when you starting out?”
And so, climbing was really challenging for me. I also didn’t have lots of upper body strength. I wasn’t really a naturally flexible or strong person as a kid. I loved to play sports, I ran a lot. But I didn’t have an innate ability to perform in them. So, yeah. I think climbing—I wasn’t really connected to the physical part of climbing for a while— but I just loved being a part of the community.
(KK): Today, Lor still loves being a part of that community, but like all things in life, that love has evolved. Through coaching mental training to help others achieve their climbing goals, Lor is building a new kind of community—one that’s open and attuned emotionally.
But what is emotional attunement, exactly? It’s our ability to be present with another person’s inner world. Emotional attunement goes beyond empathy to create a two-person experience, and it takes active listening and cognitive understanding to get there.
So, one of the things that Lor teaches, which is kind of the most obvious to climbers, is fear. But it’s not just fear of falling; they delve into other tangible fears, too. Lor articulates that the constant need to regulate with positivity can also be a way that we avoid leaning in—what can we learn when we’re able to recognize, understand, and engage with our own emotional state?
(LS): I would say I definitely teach people to deal with fear, and maybe more importantly, I teach people how to deal with stress in any form. So, it could be fear. It could be other tough emotions—anxiety that comes up from needing to perform in a certain way, social pressure. Like, all these different things that add up to just stress in life. And I think we’re really taught to avoid stress—and that leads to this sense of feeling really victimized by it.
Because it’s not a matter of feeling like we need to put this positive spin on stress, you know, and saying, “Oh, I just really love stress when it happens!” It’s more just that, whether we love it or not, it’s here. And toxic positivity is just a stress response. Right? It’s defensive.
And so, I think when people respond with that rather than saying, “No, that’s not allowed.” I tend to just help them recognize that that is also a stress response. Like, it’s almost surprising to people when you say something like, “It’s ok that you’re responding that way,” instead of saying like, “This is what you should be striving for.” So, I teach people skills for focusing their attention so that they don’t feel victimized when they find themselves in a stressful situation.
(KK): These are skills that Lor had to learn firsthand. Shortly before Lor had gone to college and during college, they were given an opportunity to meet and climb with people who didn’t know them from before. And even though they didn’t have to be the “scared climber” any longer, they still carried that fear with them.
Having to work through that fear meant figuring out why it was there in the first place. Eventually, climbing could become a safe place to explore risk and fear, but Lor had to take some pretty big first steps to get there.
(LS): In the moment when you’re afraid, if anyone takes themselves to, you know, being run out on a pitch or getting to that point where they’re starting to feel panicked—what can be more paralyzing and really defeating for climbers is the fear of getting afraid. So, you’re standing on the ground, looking up at a route and you’re just imagining how scary it’s going to be. And at that point, a lotta climbers just decide not to even try—because they don’t want to experience getting afraid.
Like, you just feel so desperate in that situation. You’re like, “I don’t want to put this part of me in an uncomfortable situation—and I totally want to invest in something that I care about!” And that’s when you really see people deferring out their risk decisions to other people. They’re like, “Well, do you think I can lead it?”
And then, that just becomes, you know—either the person responds, “You probably shouldn’t,” because they want to protect the person. Or they kinda opt into that blind positivity. Like, “Sure, yeah! Of course!” And either way, they kinda rob that person of their power to make the decision.
Whether it’s something as simple as making a risk decision in climbing. Or it’s something more complicated like, giving someone the autonomy over their body or the way that they lead their lives. That is such an important part of healing and growing as a person.
And so, I think those situations where we get afraid of becoming afraid and we start to pass off our autonomy to other people—it spirals out. And then, you end up with someone who’s been climbing for ten years and stopped feeling joy for their climbing eight years ago. And now, they just do it ‘cause they think maybe it’s bringing them joy, but really, every time they go out, they’re just trying to avoid situations that are gonna be painful.
I had a lot of influences when it came to mental training. And one of the first times that I remember changing my approach to the mental side of climbing was when I had just come back to climbing after a pretty major surgery. I had a pretty major hip surgery when I was seventeen. And before that, pretty much when I learned to lead climb and from there on out, I was pretty terrified.
I mean, I would just leave the gym every day in tears. You know, and I felt like I was letting everyone down ‘cause the way that my climbing sessions would go would be like—all my friends would be like, “Today you’re going to fall! Today will be the day!” And I would get on lead and I would be unwilling to fall and they would be like, “Ok, fall now!”
And it felt to me like that rhyme that people say when you’re a little kid and, you know, I grew up in Michigan. So, we’d go to lakes that were freezing cold. And you’d be standing there and there was this little rhyme, and at the end of it and it’d be like, “And now Lor goes under!”
And you’d stand there and be like, “I don’t want to dunk my head in cold water!” And there was so much build-up—and that was how my lead climbing was. It was just every day, it was like, “Lor’s gonna take a fall today!” and then I wouldn’t fall and then I would leave feeling like I had just let everyone down.
And I really, you know, I was—
(PAUSES)
—a kid that wanted to achieve things and also, really wanted to be loved. And to an extent, falling had become a measure of love, and it was getting in the way of me being loved and appreciated and validated by the people that I wanted to care for me. So then, it was interesting. I came back from this surgery—
(GENTLE EXHALE)
—had been doing a lot of self-exploration. Got up on the lead wall and just kinda had a really similar experience of getting up there and being totally unwilling to commit. And I had a friend—I came down and he was like, “Aren’t you tired? Like, aren’t you tired of having that experience?” And he didn’t say it in a judgmental way; he was really naming the exhaustion that I felt of not being able to even find joy in this activity that was kind of my one place that I had, at that point.
And I remember just kind of slumping against the lead wall and being like, “Yeah. I am really tired.”
(LAUGHS)
“Like, I’m just—
(GENTLE INHALE)
—I want climbing to feel joyful again.”
(KK): Lor makes room for joy again, after we come back.
- Hey. We wanna take a quick moment to emphasize that we really love therapy. If you’re listening to this podcast, then you know that we take mental health awareness pretty seriously.
And if the last few years have taught us anything at all, it’s the importance of taking care of ourselves. So, on the regular, canceling weekend plans to stay at home and be an introvert ball is ok. Disappearing to get your life together and resurfacing in a foreign country with a new name ten years later…also ok. It's called self-care.
Therapy is also self-care, even though it’s hard and will make you work for it and you’re gonna feel really uncomfortable and pay someone for that discomfort—it’s there for you. Good therapy agitates. Good therapy is hard.
This podcast works with Better Help to connect you to licensed therapists. Go to betterhelp.com/climbing to sign up and receive 10% off your first month. It helps support this show, and, more importantly, it helps support you.
(LS): What else am I doing?
(LAUGHS)
I’m making a film project right now.
Blake is a climbing partner of mine and one of my first friends in Flagstaff—someone that I’m really close to. And Blake, at one point, asked me to come over to the Tourist Home, which is a coffee shop in Flagstaff. And he was like, “So, I wanted to pitch a film idea to you,” and I was like, “Oh, yeah. Sure.”
And he’s like, “So I wanna make a film.”
And I was like, “About what?”
And he’s like, “About you!”
And I was like, “Oh…That’s interesting.”
And at the time, we thought it was gonna be this really small thing. I was like, “Oh he’s gonna make this ten-minute film about me rock climbing and that sounds cool.” And I kind of agreed to do it because I was kind of exploring what it would mean to be more open about my identity—especially in the climbing world. And I thought it could be a cool way to just be a little bit more visible and share that with other people.
And it’s turned into a big thing now—
(LAUGHS)
—it is not a ten-minute film. And it really explores the intersection of not just my gender identity, but all of the things that have kind of made me a person. Like, all of my identifying experiences and how those have fit into my rock climbing. And identity is actually a really important part of being an athlete. And I often will make the distinction with—there’s a difference between who you are and what you are.
Who you are is super static, and you have an inherent sense of self that doesn’t really need to be explained by anything else. It sounds kind of out there, like nebulous, but it actually isn’t. It’s just like, everyone knows they have just a core human inside of them that doesn’t need anything else to define it.
And then there’s what you are, which is everything from the activities you do and your gender and also, your emotions and everything else that kind of comes and goes. And I think that because there’s a really big exploration process with gender when you’re trans—that sometimes people will think that what you’re trying to communicate is who you are, when really you’re just communicating another aspect of what you are.
(KK): Go to Patagonia.com/climbing, or visit the Patagonia YouTube channel to watch “They/Them”, streaming online now.
- I think that when we get older, we start to learn that being “wrong” often leads to negative consequences. So, instead, we focus a lot on being “right”. Because of this conditioning, we become less and less curious about the world around us—the world we’re living in. We rely on facts and left logical brain functions and our right brain functions—our creativity and our imagination—slowly recede.
Lor brought back a playfulness and an insatiable curiosity to their climbing life during a time when they really needed it.
(LS): Yeah, I mean—and that starts with climbing, right? Like, when we were talking about—I mean, it doesn’t start with climbing for everyone. But when I talk about being playful and curious. Like, when I say, “Oh, the consequences are lower.” It’s like—what if fear of falling and what if the mental game of climbing was something that was playful and curious, instead of something that caused us to be shameful and feel like we were doing it wrong? And feeling like we just hadn’t figured out what all the other non-broken people had figured out about rock climbing?
(LAUGHS)
It’s like, if you can start by just giving yourself the grace to not be a scared or a not-scared person, and just be very interested when different things come up in your climbing—including fear. That is a very powerful place to start. Instead of sitting there and just being totally defeated when you’ve asked for a take because you quote, unquote “gave up” on a sequence.
I hear people say that all the time. They’re like, “I’m really upset with myself ‘cause I didn’t really try.” And it’s like, well—the mental limitation is real, too. It’s not like that means that you just aren’t a great person or you didn’t care. There’s a reason that some mental limitation came up. And so, being able to ask why and be curious and redirect your attention to “What’s really going on here? And how can I engage with this in a healthier way?”
It makes it so that mental training doesn’t feel like such a scary thing to engage with. And then, that teaches you once you start to be aware and ask questions in one part of your life— you start to be aware and ask questions in all the parts of your life.
(INHALES)
And I remember just, that day taking some falls below the quick draw and seeing, “Oh, I can do this,” and having fun with it! And taking that with me was really powerful. And it kind of let me have fun in my rock climbing again. And it was at a time when there weren’t a lot of places that I had to feel fun. Like, life felt really heavy.
I think there’s this interesting juxtaposition that is not interesting—‘cause it’s very painful. But, ok. So, I grew up from the time that I had a concept of what was going in my body—I knew that I had a gender identity that I didn’t have words for. And I had an experience of being human that I didn’t see reflected around me.
And I was simultaneously feeling this confusion about who and what I was—while also learning to hate it. And learning that this part of me that I couldn’t even articulate in words was something dangerous and something that was gonna get me hurt, and something that was dirty.
I remember—I don’t even know where I learned it, but I remember being on the playground and I remember someone coming up to me. This was in like, kindergarten or first grade. And I can’t remember because I’ve gone through this experience so many times, and I’m pretty sure that they just asked me if I was a lesbian. But I don’t actually remember what word they used. But essentially, they just asked me if I was queer.
And I didn’t know how to respond. I was like, “What does that even mean? I don’t even know that word, really.” And they were just like, “It’s gross.” And they ran away from me. And I just have this impression in my brain of so early on, just being taught that this part of me was nasty and gross and not even being sure—
(DEEP INHALE)
—I was like, “How do other people know I’m this thing already? I’m just a kid moving through the world. I’m just me.” And so, I grew up in this space of feeling like I needed to kind of self-destruct, and also feeling like I needed to understand. But every time I would understand a little bit more about myself, I felt more scared of how the world was gonna perceive me.
And so, I learned really young, for a variety of reasons, how to manage those feelings when they came up—feelings of discomfort in my own body and how it didn’t really match the way I wanted to be in the world. Also—fear of being read as actually what I was.
(LAUGHS)
So, it was these conflicting things, but it really manifested in, you know, an eating disorder, in pretty intense self-harm behaviors. And from a really young age, in suicidal ideation. What do you do when you’re nine and you’re thinkin’ about how to get out of the world? It’s sad and it’s scary.
So, when I was seventeen, that was when I leaned so heavily into running and into climbing and into being an athlete as a way to find just some acceptance, and maybe also some distraction. You know, I wasn’t going pro in running, but I was the fastest runner at my school and it gave me a place that I belonged. And it gave me something to talk to people about, something to relate to people about, and there just wasn’t as much focus on my gender. Like, I could just go run.
And, same thing with climbing. There just wasn’t a focus on these other parts of me. I could just be a rock climber. And when I had my surgery and I really got stripped of my ability to do those things, I just had a lot of time alone with my thoughts. I had a lot of time alone with these coping skills that I had learned that were—
(PAUSES)
—kinda running rampant—
(LAUGHS)
—I felt like a pretty profound loss of control, and that was when I made a suicide attempt. And the thing about attempting suicide and surviving is—you wake up the next day and all of those thoughts are still there, but you also have experienced the consequences of what it means to make that decision.
I think for people that complete suicide, they’re gone when everyone goes through their mourning process—and I wasn’t gone. Like, I woke up the next day and the faces of all the people that loved me were there, and they were there to hold me accountable.
(KK): So, suicidal ideation refers to wanting to take your own life or thinking about suicide, but there are actually two different kinds. Passive ideation is characterized by thinking about dying or a desire to be dead, without any intent to act on these thoughts. Active suicidal ideation is when someone has thoughts of suicide or self-harm and has developed an actual plan to carry it out.
Suicidal ideation is a broad term used to describe a range of contemplations with death and suicide, and there’s no consistently universally accepted definition. Ideations present themselves in a waxing and waning sort of manner, so the magnitude and characteristics vary in duration and intensity.
We’d like to mention that even though passive suicidal ideation doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to follow through with a plan, there’s still evidence that even fleeting thoughts can be a risk factor and therapeutic intervention is recommended.
According to The Trevor Project, 48% of LGBTQIA reported that they engaged in self-harm. That number increased to 60% for trans and non-binary youth, and more than half of that percentage strongly considered suicide. All of Lor’s brokenness and all of their problems were, in fact, still there—but, more importantly, so were they.
(LS): And I guess I really realized—I mean, when you’re seventeen, you are such a selfish little human! You’re really trying to figure out your own identity, your sense of place in the world, you’re always thinking about how other people are thinking of you.
And that was a shock to my system to realize—first of all, to not complete something that I had intended to do. You know? To realize that I didn’t have as much power as I thought over my own body. And to realize that bodies are ridiculously resilient, as much as they are fragile. And that I actually didn’t get to make that decision right then. And then, also to realize how much responsibility I had to the people around me to heal.
(DEEP EXHALE)
And realizing that resisting reality—like, before that, I just thought, “Oh, yeah. I’ll just make it through each day. I’ll pretend that this isn’t actually going on inside of me. I’ll just hide from the world and then, eventually when it gets to be too much, I’ll just exit gracefully.” You know? And that was a belief that I had from the time I was nine years old.
And that was when I kinda woke up that day after my suicide attempt—I realized that wasn’t gonna be how I lived my life. That actually, it was a responsibility to all of the people that had held me up for so long to take over that and start holding myself up and start realizing that this wasn’t—it just wasn’t a choice. I could go on and hate myself and put all this stress out into the world. Or I could be a part of making the world a place that was more healed—and that started with healing myself.
But I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned—
(LAUGHS)
—and that’s really painful, right? I’m out in the world teaching, I’m supporting other people. And so much of the work I do is supporting other people’s healing—whether it’s just simply a little bit of access to joy in their climbing or whether it’s a deeper connection. The work that I’m doing in school is supporting really intense healing journeys for people.
I also work on a suicide hotline and I hold space for people that are in that place. And I think for a long time, I felt like I had to hide the fact that I still struggled with thoughts about suicide. With thoughts about self-harm. With an active eating disorder for a lot of years. Right? You can only work on so many things.
And that was something coming back from the desire to actively take my own life, to then working through self-harm. It was like, even starting to heal from disordered eating was so on the back burner for so many years.
And it’s incredible, first of all, that the people in my life stuck with me through that. ‘Cause it’s painful to watch someone actively hurt themselves. And the fact that they didn’t push me until I was ready to put the energy into that was amazing. But I think for so long I saw it as, “Ok, I’ll finally get to this point where all of that will be gone, and then I can start giving back.”
And I think the biggest shift for me was realizing that those skills that I’d learned were really skills for dealing with the world that had taught me that I wasn’t a person that was gonna get taken care of. And, in a way, I just internalized all of that hatred.
One of the most painful things is the number of people in the queer community—close friends, peers—
(INHALES)
—that have completed suicide—that I was so close to. And it was like, watching a hate crime play its way out—from the inside out. It’s like someone—those seeds got planted inside of them and then grew until they self-destructed. And I think so much of the healing process for me was being able to notice where those plants were growing and attend to that and know when I had a suicidal thought.
Like, I think that’s something to normalize in our society and in our culture is—people think about suicide. People that aren’t gonna act on suicide even think about suicide. You’re driving down the road and you think of driving into the guardrail, and people are so afraid of that thought and being able to say to someone, “That thought is allowed to exist and you don’t have to act on it.” You can be out climbing and you can think about jumping off the top of the cliff and it doesn’t mean that you’re about to die.
And I think that learning to notice those thoughts and witness them without feeling terrified of them was empowering for me because I could start to ask, “Oh, where’d that thought come from? What’s going on in my life that’s making me feel like this is too much? Where did I learn that this was a part of me that I had to hate?”
And seeing thoughts about self-harm and suicide and hard things as being indicator lights. It’s like a light on your dashboard in the car that you’re like, “Oh, something’s going on! I need to check it out.” I started to really feel playful and curious about mental health in a different way, and that, I think, led into me feeling playful and curious about my identity, too. ‘Cause it’s like, if I don’t have to hate these parts of myself—what could that mean for my future with these parts of myself?
(KK): Even though I still have no idea what I’m doing—things are happening. And if you’d like to help out and support us, check out patreon.com where you can sponsor us for as little as one cup of bodega coffee. It really helps keep this podcast going, and for the record—we love bodega coffee. Special shout out to Peter Darmi because he makes this thing sound good.
- You’re listening to For the Love of Climbing Podcast. A huge thank you to deuter, one of the leading backpack brands that will help you hit the trails with confidence and comfort. And a big thank you to Gnarly Nutrition for supporting this podcast and the messages that we share. Gnarly Nutrition supports a community of vulnerability and equality—and tastes like a milkshake, without all the crap. A big shout out to Allez Outdoor for supporting the Access Fund and 1% for the Planet. Allez Outdoor Personal Care products are made by climbers for those who love the outdoors. And thanks to Patagonia. Not bound by convention, Patagonia is in business to save our home planet.
Support companies who support this podcast—we couldn’t do it without them. If you liked what you heard, you can leave a review on iTunes or give us a like—like all good things, you can find us on the internet. Until next time.
Additional Resources: If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please consider reaching out for support.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline | 1-800-273-8255
If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911
The Trevor Project | 1-866-488-7386
Trans Lifeline | 1-877-565-8860
National Eating Disorders Association Helpline | 1-800-931-2237