A Second Chance
Ever since I was able to walk I’ve been an avid outdoorsman. I grew up hiking, camping, fishing, and rock climbing. Rock climbing especially has always been my addiction in life, when I was on a wall there was a feeling of clarity that I’ve never been able to find doing anything else, I was completely focused on what I was doing and everything else in my life regardless of how seemingly important when my feet were on the group melted away the second I started up a route. In 2015 I started college at ESU and admittedly had the wrong attitude about life. I had stopped climbing started partying and stop caring about really anything. I had anxiety through the roof, I hated my part time job, I felt lost in my major, and most of the people I called my friends were far from it. I made it through my freshman year relatively well didn’t break any records but had relatively decent grades. On October 3rd of 2016, part way through my sophomore year my anxiety caught up to me and I realized what I had changed for the negative since I had moved to school. I convinced one of my friends, actual friends, to go climbing with me wanted to clear my head but let my ego get ahead of me. I set a crap anchor at the top of the wall and knew it. But I didn’t care and climbed anyway with the logic that I’d put in backups as I went. I then put in even lazier backups. I will never forget looking at him and saying “don’t tell anyone I climbed on this….” Between 20 and 30 feet up the anchor ripped out and I dropped. I shattered my right heel, left leg and had a compression fracture at L1. Spent three months in the hospital getting platted and screwed back together thinking about the fact that this was entirely my fault, it was my fault I had to drop out of school, it was my fault my best friend had PTSD from seeing me hit the ground, it was my fault I had to quit my job, and it was my fault my parents had to take care of me again. I spent three months at home recovering nonambulatory and in too much pain most days to even get out of bed and into my wheel chair. I spent those three months trying to smoke and drink away the memory of seeing an ex-fix hanging out of my leg
