The skin on my face begins to tingle as tiny crystals of ice coat my exposed cheeks. I look up, the warm, yellow light of my headlamp beam illuminating the glittering ice before me but not revealing anything beyond the two-foot-wide circle of light it casts. There is darkness above, darkness below, and, for me, a darkness within.
I am not here against my will. I willingly climbed into Mount Everest’s “death zone”—the section of the mountain beginning at 26,000 feet where human life cannot be sustained for long—not once or twice but six times (including once without supplemental oxygen, in 2016, becoming the first American woman to do so). As I detail in my memoir, Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest, these climbs were all in pursuit of something more than the summit.
The metal spikes of my crampons puncture the ice under my feet, and my axe skitters on the firm ice in front of me as I will my body to move against the weight of gravity at such an extreme altitude. I can hear my heart pounding in my ears, and my breath tangles with the persistent howl of wind. It is hard to think clearly with all these noises. Or maybe it is hard to think clearly because my blood oxygen hovers around 60 percent, depriving my brain of the crucial life gas it needs. This isn’t fun—but I didn’t come here for fun. I came here to push my limits and see what was possible. I came here to escape the weight of my fear that I don’t belong anywhere.
I grew up in a home where I questioned my belonging, raised by a mother who was battling anxiety and questioning if she wanted children at all. I was both controlled and rejected. I craved independence and freedom but also a sense of inclusion and acceptance. When I climbed my first mountain, at age 20, I found the feeling I had longed for as a child. The mountains were wild and infinite, but nature could also give me a place in the world and a purpose. I made the mountains my home.
I became a mountain guide and dedicated myself to learning the technical skills of rope rescue and the soft skills of helping push others past their perceived limits safely. Witnessing others show me their authentic selves, even when they were scared or struggling, started to give me permission to be imperfect, too. I didn’t have to be stoic and perfect-seeming to get to the summit; in fact, that stoicism could lead to my death far quicker than vulnerability ever would.
Climbing mountains takes an enormous willingness to be vulnerable. You have to put your true self out there, with all its flaws and imperfections. There is no other way. For me, the draw of the mountains was always rooted in this practice of forced vulnerability. The mountains that were once an escape for me quickly became a classroom and, in many ways, a mirror.
Back on Everest, I look over to my right, to the east. The sun is breaking over the horizon and tingeing the sky with a smoldering orange glow that changes everything for me. Layers of burnt orange and pink emerge as a new day begins and the darkness retreats. I breathe, feeling the slight glow of warmth touch my face and soften the ice that has frozen to my skin from the wetness of my breath. I move up, up, up. The slope above me begins to lessen in steepness, turning to a ridge the width of a sidewalk. My crampons screech over the exposed rocks as my feet move with unbelievable precision in this space.
As I look out to the west, all the mountains that once towered over me are far below. There is only this ridge and the sky. It is now a bright blue, illuminated by the intense brightness of the high-altitude sun rising visibly by the minute. The darkness is gone. I had to persist through it to get here, and I did. And the journey of trying to get here was an illumination of its own, pushing my internal darkness away and replacing it with something bright and hopeful: possibility.
You don’t have to climb Everest to find a sense of belonging. But I did. I had to go to the highest place on earth to escape my lowest place. I had to learn the skills of survival in the harshest environment to be able to survive myself. It is said that it isn’t the destination but the journey that matters, and I can tell you with great certainty that it is true. And the journey toward your true self is a worthy one if you are courageous enough to make the climb.
Melissa Arnot Reid is an American mountaineer
