It’s All In My Head

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It usually starts with a flash behind my closed eyelids. At first I’m not sure if it was lightning or a car passing by the house. I wait, and no thunder or tires roll. No, no, no. Not this. More flashes. I wait.

I make a mental inventory of where my medications are. How many doses I have left. Then I make a mental inventory of my to-do list. And then I a) hope I can fall asleep and that I’ll wake up without a migraine — that the sleep will have been enough. Or b) take my two prescriptions and cancel all my work and social obligations for the next 24 hours.

Option A is usually only a delay of the inevitable submission into option B.

Last night I didn’t have a warning. A migraine arrived in full force about two hours after I’d gone to bed. Throbbing, pulsing pain behind my left eye that occasionally shoots back to the side of my head. Of course, there’s always denial first. It’s not a migraine. It’s random pain.

What random pain I think it might be after 10 years of migraines, I don’t know. Inevitably, the pain persists, worsens, and I’m in it.

The prescription medication I take makes me drowsy — which is great, I want to sleep — but it also makes my skin prickly, my muscles weak, my joints sore. I trade the pain in my head for a helpless restlessness. If the migraine hasn’t crept down the pain scale in an hour or so, I can take another. Then, that’s it for that day. After two doses I’m left to wait til the next day and try again. After three days, it’s an ER trip where they give me an IV with benadryl and ibuprofen and something for the nausea and then I sleep for a day.

Luckily, migraines that bad are rare for me. This time, like most times, I’ll lose just a day or two, not four or five. I’ll spend today recovering as the pain begins to retreat to its hiding place just under the surface.

But those lost days. Days in bed, waiting. Nauseas, but need to eat. Bored, but can’t look at a screen or read or listen to music. My foggy brain accounting for the work I’m missing, the plans with friends I’ve canceled. Guilt.

It’s all in my head.

 

The Right Rock

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“I’m pretty sure it’s just a little further up the trail and then we make a right,” I said, fairly confident I’d definitely passed that boulder before.

We went up the trail a little further. We made a right.

“Isn’t that the climb we passed on the way to the warmup?” one of my partners asked. It was. I looked at it, looked at the guidebook, and back up the trail.

In a sea of boulders in the desert, we were on a quest for a very specific rock. Because, you know, not every rock is the same. No, a rock made of sandstone that’s fallen off a cliff and landed in the middle of the desert and worn down in just the right way that the varnish edges are idea for grabbing, pulling, and climbing is nothing like a rock made of sandstone that’s fallen off a cliff and landed in the middle of desert with fragile varnish edges and cracked corners and empty promises.

We needed to find the right rock.

I, the one who had been to this place before, was going to take us there. We’d just have to circle a few of the wrong rocks a couple times and we’d be at the right rock in no time.

I, a rock climber, know the right rock when I see it. The thing is, I, a tad bit forgetful, don’t remember which of the wrong rocks lead to the right rock.

But luckily for my partners, we get to see a whole lot of rocks this way.

“OK, we just need to go down this hill and link up with the road then make left THEN a right,” I explained, hoping I was right.

We trudged along. I reflected upon my tendency to only remember destinations and not paths as I looked off into the horizon.

I led. We made a couple turns this way and that. I savored the view.

Aha!

The right rock appeared.

Grounds In Your Coffee Is Better Than No Coffee

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Four women in their late twenties and a middle aged dog were squeezed into a 1998 Subaru Forrester. Since the roof rack on the trusty old station wagon wasn’t quite wide enough for our two 17 foot canoes, we, three scientists and myself, came up with an ingenious plan that involved two two-by-fours and about a dozen ratchet straps.

It worked surprisingly well, aside from the one strap that melted on the exhaust pipe. Luckily the broken strap only resulted in cracked spirits; the boats and our rental deposit were unscathed.

The five of us were headed back to the place where we’d park our cars, slept in the sand and launched our boats. We’d just spent 3 days and 70 miles floating on the Green River as it meandered through the Utah desert. Our canoes brimmed with gear, snacks, wine, and our personal waste discretely stored in a bright yellow ammo can.

“If we forgot anything, it’s non-essential,” Annie and I agreed to one another four days prior as we drove south after staging and packing our supplies in the front yard.

The next morning, we cooked breakfast and debated whether the forgotten coffee maker fell into the essential or non-essential category. No one had forgotten to bring coffee grounds, however, and thus we leaned into the cowboy mentality established the night before by our sleeping arrangements.

We dipped in limbs in to cool off as our boats cut through the brown water of the Green. We counted birds — a canyon swallow, a peregrine falcon, a crane.

We fended off overly inquisitive men in motorboats and insatiable mosquitos and rogue elbows of our sleeping tent-mates. We apologized for the less than restful evening caused by our flailing slumber.

When it was time to get off the river, two daunting tasks still lay ahead of us. We’d opted not to pay for a shuttle service because it seemed like a costly luxury for less weathered souls. We’d run our own shuttles before.

The steep ascent out of the canyon in Moab and back to the freeway that would take us to the other car in Green River was sustained by held breath, staccato conversation and brief tears over the ratchet strap flapping in the wind. Later, one of the two-by-fours the boats rested on would rip a gutter off the side of an apartment building.

We’d also made the error of assuming the college students who outfitted us with our boats and a riverside toilet system known as the groover had given us all the tools we would need to send the more foul remnants of our weekend down the proverbial river. Aided by a full weekend of unfiltered coffee, this would be no small task. Having only experienced a “bagged” groover setup and not the “flush” system we were given, we relied on YouTube videos and internet forums for our waste management beta.

At the Flying J in Salt Lake we confidently paid for a code to one of the RV dump stations. We screwed the black plastic tube to one end of the ammo can, and questioned among ourselves how we were going to get the water out of the spigot and into the entry spout on the other side from of the can.

Our savior came rolling into the dump next to us — a 6’5″ man in a 40 foot Winnebago with an extra garden hose and an inhuman tolerance for other people’s poop. Although he may have briefly led us astray and sent some of our waste careening into parking lot, we would not have been able to empty our groover without his support. Thank you, big Winnebago man.

The river forces a certain rhythm on a trip in which the days are filled with sun-soaked hours where the biggest job is to keep the boat straight and the dog in the boat, bookended by meals and sleep. And then, all of that is bookended by all the logistics you didn’t need to handle while you were letting the water move you to your next campsite.

At the end of the trip, you still have to deal with your shit.

Draft 19

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I’ve neglected this blog for almost 2 years. It’s not for lack of trying — my drafts box is overflowing with abandoned bits of writing. But every time I’ve sat down to write, the product has been too raw. Too mad. Too sad. Not funny enough. Not researched enough. I have endless excuses for why I wouldn’t hit publish.

Certain life events rattled my confidence so much that I questioned why I ever felt bold enough to make a blog in the first place. Surely I had been deranged to think my musings warranted self-publication on the internet.

The truth is, I’d been head down, full on enduring.

There’s no spark or inspiration when all of your energy goes towards pushing through each day. My stubborn streak won’t let me stop moving forward, but it also won’t let me put out anything that falls below some arbitrary standard I’ve created for myself.

My answer: Post nothing. Share nothing.

I’d always thought I was resilient — the type that bounces back higher, brighter and better than they started. I thought I was on to something and that I didn’t need anyone’s help or advice, and I would come back stronger and wiser for it.

Wisdom doesn’t isolate itself. Strength doesn’t retreat into itself.

My last post from 2016 is a glimpse into where the descent began. A medical emergency, a car accident, a climbing accident and some other hardships peppered between cracked my foundations. It also shook me awake.

It made me realize what it really means to bounce back.

This won’t be my best piece of writing. But it’s the beginning of my re-ascent.

Being Trapped

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TRAP Laws – Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers

 

In October, 2015, I had an ectopic pregnancy. My IUD failed, and an embryo had implanted itself in my right fallopian tube, where it grew larger than a green grape inside my pencil-wide tube. An ultrasound showed that it was on the verge of rupturing – a life threatening circumstance, in which the best possible outcome is surgery to remove the tube and ovary.

Luckily, results from a more thorough review of the ultrasound confirmed that my tube had not yet burst, but would if the pregnancy progressed any further, and I was able to receive a small dose of chemotherapy to treat the ectopic pregnancy.

Treating an ectopic pregnancy is not an abortion, and has never been considered as such medically or legally. But, the instant the strip turns blue on a home pregnancy test, you are thrust into the middle of the overly-politicized world that is women’s health – especially if you were seeking to avoid said pregnancy with one of the most effective birth control options available.

In Utah, a woman seeking an abortion needs to contact one of the 9 providers in the state (97% of Utah counties do not have an abortion clinic)

At those clinic, she must go through group and private counseling.

She waits 72 hours.

We don’t all have 72 hours to wait.

Prior to the ultrasound confirming the ectopic pregnancy, when I called my doctor regarding a positive pregnancy test with an IUD, I was told that they may not be able to provide my care if the pregnancy was not life threatening. If I hadn’t been bleeding – like my friend who in a sick twist of statistical anomalies, also had an ectopic pregnancy with an IUD a month later and never bled – I would have had to wait until the next available appointment.

They would have removed my IUD, and waited to see if the pregnancy miscarried, as happens with half of pregnancies occurring when an IUD is in situ.

My HCG levels would have eventually tapered off, prompting concern, but before that I would have had to schedule an appointment at the only clinic that would provide abortion services.

Before I could get an ultrasound (that would inevitably show the embryonic sack in my fallopian tube), I would have to sign up for a counseling session, and wait the mandatory 72 hours. During this time, my pregnancy gets more dangerous.

This experience is real, it happened just weeks after mine.

Because the pregnancy was thought to be normal, this woman was unable to have the continuity of care that a person would expect in any other medical situation. The pregnancy was unsafe, and each day that passed while she navigated the bureaucracy created by a legislature that thought her decision was immoral, her life was at risk.

TRAP laws aim to make it more difficult for a woman seeking an abortion to acquire the procedure.

“We cannot overturn Roe v. Wade. That’s the law of the land, but there’s nothing that says we can’t protect that unborn child.” – Utah State Sen. Curt Bramble. This is the type belief that drives such legislation. I am not arguing whether the desire to protect an unborn child is right or wrong. But please, consider the morality of making adequate care more difficult to acquire for all women in the name of fetal protection.

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Academic and non-partisan resources on TRAP Laws:

TRAP Abortion Laws and Partisan Political Party Control of State Government -American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Abortion Laws by State – The Washington Post

Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers – Rewire News Legislative Tracker

Try Harder

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My house growing up had a big stone fireplace that would occasionally, tauntingly, beckon me off the couch to climb up to the mantle, or higher if I was feeling bold. Luckily I was pretty scrawny because those rocks were not held into the wall by much. I’d scurry up, and sit on the mantle until I heard (or thought I heard) someone coming down the stairs then I’d jump off and run back to the couch.

The itch to climb has always been there for me. I didn’t really get to scratch it until I was in my twenties, though.

Now that I’ve graduated from climbing trees and fireplaces to ascending actual rock with a rope, I want to climb even more things. Most of the things (i.e.: cliffs, mountains, desert towers) that I want to climb are more challenging than the things I’ve been able to climb so far (i.e.: other cliffs and mountains). That means I have to try harder.

That’s actually some of the feedback that we got in our climbing assessment – try. harder.

I also learned that I need to create more strength and balance in my scapula and core to allow me to have better tension on the wall, as well as allowing me to lock off and reach for big moves.

But let’s talk about trying harder. Or rather, trying harder better.

I was relatively aware that this was an area I needed to improve upon. I’m great at talking myself out of things, even when it feels like I’ve committed to trying. Just ask my former gymnastics coaches who tried to get me to do any sort of backwards tumbling on a balance beam. Chelsea’s brain was not having it.

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Here I am trying hard, but not quite hard enough.

Even if I do work on the areas the trainers identified as musculoskeletal  weaknesses for me, I’ll still have to try harder if I’m going to utilize those gains.

For me, the try harder barrier is psychological. Here’s the typical internal dialogue around a particularly hard move:

Chelsea: “That looks like a long reach but I can do it, I’m tall, and like kind of strong.”
Chelsea’s Brain: “haha yea kind of”
Chelsea: “Oh wow, now that I’m on the wall, that looks a lot further away.”
Chelsea Brain: “YEAH REALLY FAR HAHA”
Chelsea: “Oh well, going for it! Come on everybody!”
Chelsea’s Brain: “haha no guys don’t bother”

And fall.

But Chelsea is smarter than Chelsea’s Brain in this scenario. Chelsea’s brain is wrapped up in fear, ego, and self-doubt (a winning combo, eh?) that eventually pulls me off the wall.

Acceptance is the first step to recovery. Try harder, Chelsea.

In training

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I’ve been climbing rocks for a little while now. Not long enough to resemble anything near an expert, but hovering somewhere around moderate. I climb just hard enough to scare my mom and have a smattering of laughably ambitious “super projects” across the intermountain west. I’ll send that v7 in Joe’s Valley one day, I swear. So what if I’ve only climbed v4 so far?

And hey! Maybe that day will come sooner, because I just signed up for a 3 day ‘whip your lazy butt into climbing shape’ training session program experiment.

Currently my climbing training consists of:

  • Strength training:
    • Climb at the gym til you get tired or bored or hungry. Beer is not allowed per the “rules.”
    • Climb outside when weather permits. Beer is allowed.
  • Cardio:
    • I walk from my bus stop to work most days.
    • Hiking to climbs is cardio, right?

Given that most climbing in Utah is about a 5 minute walk from the car, and since the weather has permitted a very beer friendly climbing environment, I think things are looking pretty good for me next week.

Day one is an ability assessment, where they watch me climb and then (presumably) ask me if I’ve ever climbed before. Stay tuned.

10 Reasons the list you read on the Daily BuzzPost Catalog is bullshit

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Here are a few more things every 20-something needs to realize in 2015.

There is an epidemic of vapid, shitty self help guides masquerading as articles on several of the websites most highly trafficked by “Generation Y.” It’s an onslaught of the most unfiltered, misguided advice that Cosmo and GQ never printed.

People spouting off the same #basic opinions on the same basic way about the same basic things.

“Here’s why you should let go of X and embrace Y.”

“Here’s why you never should have let go of X.”

“10 ways to convince yourself that the way you’re living your life is unique from the millions of other people doing the same thing as you.”

“Why you’re probably a little bit different now than you were 5 year’s ago, and that’s OK.”

“How to behave like an awful person and justify it afterwards by applying spin like your favorite crooked politician you don’t actually know the name of.”

How about we call this Generation “Why Me?” Who knew everyone born between 1986 and 1996 fell victim to what has proven to be a culmination of decades, if not centuries, of fuck-upery by the woefully incompetent members of generations past. How could we all have been dealt such a shitty hand?

These articles are the cyber version of an enabling community. By participating in this dialogue, we are allowing ourselves to settle into a mentality that appeals to the basest collective consciousness. Everyone wants to be able to apply blame to some uncontrollable outside force – some biological predisposition or the psychological damage done by parents, teachers, and television. At some point, however, we have to take ownership.

There aren’t 15 simple steps to take control of your life, there are just 15 vague ways of saying “try to do something – anything – about it.”

L.N.T.

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I hope this message is heard above the sound of Edward Abbey rolling over in his grave.

Almost exactly one year to the day since Boy Scout leaders took it upon themselves to vandalize save innocent lives from being squashed by a precarious boulder in Goblin Valley, UT, we have ourselves yet another idiot wilderness vigilante. Casey Nocket of New York recently traveled west to several National Parks, where she was so taken by the beauty she faced that she had no choice but to ruin it leave her mark. She promptly began painting on rocks in each of the parks she visited and posting them proudly to various channels of social media.

One of Nocket’s paintings – Death Valley

The National Parks Service, now conducting an investigation for potential felony charges, holds a high standard when it comes to vandalism. In a statement issued by the agency:

“National parks exist to preserve and protect our nation’s natural, cultural and historic heritage for both current and future generations. Vandalism is a violation of the law, and it also damages and sometimes destroys often irreplaceable treasures that belong to all Americans.”

What it comes down to is entitlement. Ms. Nocket has been taught that she is has the explicit right to act upon her every whim regardless of its potential impact. Though it is unlikely that she will quickly unlearn the lessons taught by a lifetime of reinforcement, one would hope that she might understand the concept when explained in the manner that it is often delivered to children. That is, consider how an action would impact the environment and how others are able to experience it if everyone were to do that action. What if everyone who walked up to the iconic Delicate Arch in Arches National Park painted on a rock? Would it still hold the same beauty? Leave No Trace (LNT) is a simple concept: when in nature one should leave only footprints and take only pictures, so that all forms of life can fully benefit from the surrounding environment.

In a post on her tumblr, Nocket compared herself to Banksy. A bold juxtaposition, to say the least, when one looks at the skilled hand and well constructed messaging conceptualized by the infamous street artist that serve as a gorilla form of socio-cultural commentary to the markedly childish retorts on her blog.

The words of President Theodore Roosevelt ring as true today as they did when he gave his speech dedicating the Grand Canyon as a national park:

“You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”

To reiterate: you cannot improve on it. What Nocket did was not art. It was vandalism.

Nocket, like the two Utah men responsible for toppling the formation in Goblin Valley, should be held accountable for her actions. Let the consequences she will face serve as a message to those who might find themselves struggling to resist temptations to maim embellish natural landscapes carved by the hands of time.

“Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.” – Lyndon B. Johnson

Books to Consider Reading Instead of Kim Kardashian’s “Selfish”

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Kim Kardashian is breaking new ground with her latest business venture “Selfish.” It’s not literary ground she’s breaking by compiling a 352 page book of her unpublished selfies, though. She has achieved a level of self indulgent vanity that Narcissus himself would envy. Instead of looking at 16 practically identical versions of this picture, I’ve put together a list of alternative reading material, each of which would be more intellectually stimulating than nearly a year’s worth of one person’s #selfies.

The Great American Hot Dog Book

– by Becky Mercuri

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Fill your time admiring pictures of something equally artificial and yet still less nauseating than hundreds of pictures of the same face.

 

The Biography of Zachory Taylor

– by John S. D. Eisenhower

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Did you even remember that he was our 12th president? Brush up on your knowledge of the man who served an unremarkable 16 months as president of the free world. Because despite his short time in the oval office, he is still more important than a fame-hungry socialite.

Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine!

– by Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller

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Everyone needs to know how to cook a turkey on their carburetor in a bind. Definitely more than they need to know how to work their angles in a helicopter.

C D B !

– by William Steig

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Originally published in 1968, this masterpiece is ahead of its time. Much like the modern tween girl, and probably Kim, Author William Steig writes using only singular letters to tell this tale. Can you crack the code?

Happy reading!