24/08/2025
My ability (climbing and otherwise!) came into question in an online forum recently. I should know better than to click when I stumble across stuff like that online, but I did. Doesn’t try hard enough. Too nervous. Hasn’t made enough progress. Not real V6’s. Isn’t good enough. She’s teaching people that it’s ok to be mediocre. She doesn’t speak confidently enough in her voiceovers.
For as much as I could just brush off remarks about my climbing or the way I share my work online - it’s not the most important thing, and people are entitled to critique - I respond because to me, conversations like this bolster a culture and a mindset where looking the part and ticking the boxes matters more than trying to step out of your comfort zone in the first place.
Attitudes that treat trying as uncool, prioritise looking strong over getting strong, or value success only at the top grade teach us that vulnerability is a weakness. When climbing is framed as something where you have to never show fear, look a certain way, speak a certain way, never fail, never show weakness, we lose some important parts of climbing.
I might not speak very confidently in my voiceovers, but I do feel I can speak confidently that at its best, climbing is so much more about finding a space to work on yourself than the speed of your progression and value isn’t so narrowly defined.
Rather than teaching people to be mediocre, I hope I’m teaching people to be proud of their own individual effort. I know the climbers I admire most are the ones who embrace climbing in full colour, and accept that learning asks us to be vulnerable. For 99.9% of us, it’s not a competition unless we want it to be. I’d love to unlock a new grade every month and never feel scared of top moves, but if I could never climb past V2 again, I’d keep climbing because to me, climbing is falling a lot, trying hard, learning as I go, building tools to find strength in mind and body and not being embarrassed to admit and explore the things I don’t know.
