Gleeson Reboots

I've met someone. It happened, the way it always seems to, when I was looking the other way. Innocently minding my own business, getting ready (or so I thought), to summit the highest mountain outside of Asia. I was planning to start dating again when I returned, to maybe try some dating websites, a prospect that I find only slightly more thrilling than getting my teeth cleaned by a dental hygienist hopped on speed and mescal. But this man, who I met briefly a few years ago - I'm not sure we were even properly introduced - and know from Facebook, where we've followed each other's doings since that time, started messaging me a week or two before I left for Argentina.

I've long liked M - I was attracted to him immediately upon seeing him - but I wasn't sure why he was messaging me. I answered him happily back while asking my friends, "Why is he messaging me? Do you think he likes me? Like, likes likes me?"

"Well, YEAH," my friend Amber said. "Dudes don't generally start messaging gals unless that's the case."

But it's been a long, lonely year, and M wasn't exactly flirting. He was just being friendly. Which was really different than just about every guy I've been with, casually or not, almost my entire life. I have been called variously, "a handful" and "trouble" and "dangerous" and all sorts of other terms which tend to euphemistically mean something along the lines of "sexy, crazy bitch." And I think...I think that aura, that gleam, that thing I've had - honestly, probably the result of being a somewhat crazy bitch - attracted more sketchy characters than not. But I've always liked bad boys anyway.

So, aside from my ex-husband, who loved me in a way I doubt anyone ever will again, although (being a crazy bitch) I left him for a drug addict, I haven't been wooed by too many nice men. My last love, who was supposed to be nice - oh, I used to tell myself, he's just broken, he's been hurt, he needs patience and understanding - was the worst of all. Worse than the addict, who was responsible for the night a crack dealer put a gun to my temple. Worse than the rageaholic, who screamed in fury at me when I fell down the stairs on Christmas Day and hurt myself. That stuff didn't break me, or even come close.

But that last guy, he just about did. It was all so subtle, the manipulation, the gaslighting, the way he withheld things from me - from sex to emotional intimacy to affection - when I'd displeased him, which was often. He would get "irritated" by me doing anything from accepting a press trip (although I'm a travel journalist, so it's really, seriously my job to travel), to wearing clothes he found too revealing. The near-constant, steady subtext was that I was a bad person, wrong, not worthy of him.

It's pretty easy to make a woman who's long struggled with mental health issues believe she's a bad person. Especially when she's done things she'll regret to the day she dies - like leaving the husband who loves her for a drug addict. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. It can't be much fun. Although that's not fair, because I don't believe he ever meant to hurt me. I really don't. But he was very good at it anyway. And when he finally left me in the most dehumanizing way possible - without a forwarding address, never to be seen or heard from again - it was nearly the coup de grâce.

It's only right now, this minute, that I can admit it. I spent years being emotionally abused by a man I loved more than anyone I've ever loved. It's not that I fear a reaction from him that makes this admission so difficult (though somehow I think I still do, a little), it's that I find it humiliating. I've spent so long wanting to be strong, pretending to be strong, that it is nearly impossible for me to acknowledge that I let myself be treated this way. I can't remember in what context, but M recently said to me, "It's obvious that someone really hurt you." And I responded with something dismissive, along the lines of "I'm fine, after all, everyone's been hurt."

I will not be a fucking victim. I won't.

So. Not a lot of experience with nice men. I still can't quite believe how often M messages me - whenever he feels like it, which is all the time, no games here - and that he actually wants to spend hours on the phone with me. And when he started talking about visiting me in State College - he lives a couple hours out of town - I wondered if he really meant it. I kept thinking, "He's going to go out of his way to see me?" He's been talking about taking me out to dinner and teasing me about how the hotel he booked is a surprise and telling me over and over that he's so excited to see me - and nervous, too - will I like the way he kisses me? And it's taken me 'til just about now to finally accept that this man really is this kind and this open. He doesn't have an agenda. He simply likes me the way I like him.

That doesn't mean I won't backslide, of course, that there won't be times, should we continue to see each other, when I'll wonder and worry if he's for real. I think it might be a long time before I'll be able to easily trust anyone again. Maybe it will be a fight I'll always wage with myself - trust or don't, open up, or not.

But there's other good stuff, too, about M. He's handsome, funny, intelligent and really tall, too. He's younger than me - and young enough to be my ex's son. (I find this gratifying, I admit.) He's sweet. And he's really, really kinky. We're going to push each other's boundaries in wonderful ways, ways that I have been wanting to push and be pushed for years. At the very least, this will be a helluva way to trade in my 12-month celibacy chip.

Kidding - I'm not a sex addict. At least, probably not. I don't have a chip, in any case. But it's been that long since I've been with anyone because I needed to not only heal, but to get my head on straight. Never again. That's what I promised myself. Never, ever again am I going to be with someone who isn't good enough for me, who mistreats me, who hinders instead of helps, hurts instead of loves. Never, ever again. I've spent the past 18 months - barring that brief, wonderful fling with CC - learning that I can survive being alone, that I'm mostly just fine. I've spent that time getting over my ex and working on fixing the bent and bruised places inside me that let me believe it was okay for me to be with men like him. That I didn't deserve better.

M and I may meet and find the chemistry off. Or maybe the chemistry will be incredible, but there won't be anything beyond it. Whether we see each other again or not, I'll always be grateful he reached out to me. Because he's shown me that good men do exist - and that they can be so much more thrilling than bad boys.

It's been one week to the day since I was banished from Aconcagua, summarily sent down from it, like an inept baseball player kicked from the major league to the minors. I haven't really had time to process what happened, or to understand what it ultimately means to my life, other than to label it a failure. After all, I wanted something - to reach the tippy-top of the highest mountain outside of Asia - and it didn't happen. I didn't summit Aconcagua. Hell, I didn't even get close. I didn't even make it past the approach camp, a victim of mountain sickness, according the physician who fretted over my vitals before announcing, with great gentleness, that I was in jeopardy and would continue to be until I descended.

That's failure and I will always label it as such, which seems to confound and annoy just about everyone around me. I've heard this week that I can't be a failure because I tried to accomplish something most wouldn't, because it was my body that gave out and not my will, because this kind of setback is just a part of mountaineering and because, simply, I didn't die. I understand the reasoning behind all that, and am grateful for the kindness that led my friends and fans to share these thoughts with me. I just don't agree.

I had a goal. I didn't achieve that goal. I failed.

Why are we so afraid of failure in this country? Why do we twist and turn the situation in which we failed upside down and all around, spinning it like a kid appraising a package on Christmas morning, just so we can call it anything but what it is? The way I see it - and I'm quoting President Obama here - "If you are living life to the fullest, you will fail." As Oprah Winfrey says, "If you're constantly raising the bar, if you're constantly pushing yourself, higher, higher, higher, the law of averages, not to mention the myth of Icarus, predicts you will at some point fall."

And that's okay. Because the alternative, to not even try, is far worse for me. I don't mean to sound like Dr. Phil or Tony Robbins or Brene Brown, as much as I love her, or Yogi Bear or the Dalai Lama himself. I don't feel comfortable making pronouncements about how anyone else should live. But for me, passion, adventure, excitement, which I now get mostly from pushing myself damn hard and then harder and harder still, make life bearable. If I didn't try - be it anything from climbing a mountain to moving to a country where I know no one on not more than a whim - there's a chance I might go mad. Or at least back to the self-destructive ways I once utilized to get my fix of chaos, the metaphorical equivalents of driving too fast in a big-motored car down a dark highway, fucked up on mania and dope and lust, the thick fingers of the dangerous man perched beside me in the passenger seat creeping up my naked thigh. Or, actually, the literal equivalents, too.

I'm not a great white shark - I don't need to be in constant motion to survive, although I have some former lovers I expect would disagree on both counts. But I do need something to work toward. Looking ahead keeps me sane. I need to challenge myself, the more viscerally the better. That little divot I have inside my soul, the place damaged, if not quite broken, by what I've never discovered, is filled for a time when I do. Risking it all, or as much of it as I can, soothes me.

My plan to climb Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro, which I announced a little more than 18 months ago, was undoubtedly an outgrowth of this need. But more crucially, it was an attempt to save myself. I was in danger back then, more danger than I ever faced on that mountain. The loss of my brother to a heroin overdose, an event that still lurks beneath every moment of every day, ready to rise up and throttle me with grief; the decline of my parents, with whom I live, rendered in cruel close-up and most recently encompassing my mother's dementia diagnosis; and the final blow that nearly destroyed me, the end of a relationship filled with enough love and toxicity it's taken me nearly two years to emerge from it fully, like a freed prisoner creeping slowly from a basement cell - these events and more, piled fast one atop another, made me question whether living was a worthwhile effort. I questioned it a lot back then.

I needed to find a way to quiet all that tragedy, to hush it, so I could hear the sounds of life again, find the path back to it. Embarking on a quest so massive it was ridiculous, like scaling two of the Seven Summits within a year, seemed the way to do it. I hoped along the way it would turn me into someone I wasn't - a woman not vanquished by pain, but one heroic, strong, invincible. A warrior, inside and out. A woman who ascends big damn mountains. And I failed. I came down from Aconcagua two days after I went up it. I suppose I should be humiliated.

But I'm not. Because I have felt a shift within me. Maybe I'm simply riding high with a giddiness born from emerging off Aconcagua with fingers, toes and nose intact (I was never really afraid of the mountain killing me, but not so the idea of of losing bits and pieces of myself to frostbite). Maybe I'm simply grateful to be released from the exhaustion I felt nearly as soon as I started the first trek. Pervasive and absolute, it destroyed my resolve, turning what was supposed to be an easy five-mile hike into a grim battle marked by my tortured, runaway breath and staggering feet. The next day, when I was forced to ask one of my expedition's guides to take me back to camp less than halfway through our trek, was worse. I didn't understand why, when I'd trained so hard for Aconcagua, I felt a fatigue on its lower trails that nearly trumped what I endured during my eight-hour push to Kilimanjaro's 19,341-foot-high summit.

Would Aconcagua have killed me if I’d have bullied and begged, stamped my feet and cried, somehow convincing the physician - an improbably beautiful and compassionate Argentinean woman who looked like a grittier version of Salma Hayek - to let me continue the ascent? I don’t know. I don’t know how sick I really was, only that over the course of two nights my blood pressure had risen from 140 over 90 to 165 over 110. My heart rate increased to 130 and my oxygen saturation fell to 84. Not awful numbers, but what concerned my glamorous doctor was that my vitals were worsening instead of getting better. I wasn’t acclimatizing to the altitude.

It hurts that I failed to summit Aconcagua, hurts like a pinch cruel enough to leave a bruise, a result common to the collision of dreams and reality. But I'm grateful for the experience I had in Argentina. Right now, as I sit here typing this, I feel something that could be called hope and I think that brutal bitch of a mountain that I love and fear in equal measure returned it to me. Will I return to her? I don't know. But my hunger for her summit, a growling yearning very different than the pain that consumed me 18 months ago, continues.

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