Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today I’ll be pouring my heart out so it feels scary but also necessary. I’ve been back at home for almost a week now and gone climbing four times already: bouldering, top-roping, climbing outdoors with some buddies, and even starting the two-day class “Learn to Lead Climb”. I’ve bought myself new, more aggressive, technical climbingContinue reading “Climbing and finding my voice”

Since getting back home in California from my fun, healing, liberating, and empowering vacation in Colorado & road trip, there have been mixed feelings for me.  Loneliness is always looming and is intensified both by the cold, wet, foggy weather where I live and by the limited social life I have so far built here.Continue reading “Back at home: a warm welcome”

Okay, I’m ready, the time has come! Yesterday I sent a “coming out” email to most of my close friends, sharing how I realize that, although my “biological sex” is female, my gender identity is non-binary, it’s part female/part male, and I would now define my gender as “androgynous/gender-fluid”. So I let them all knowContinue reading “Coming out!”

Arys is an athlete, a committed amateur athlete, and has been her whole life. And her whole life has had a love-hate relationship with her body.  “Technically” or biologically a female and brought up in a family where sex and gender — and their “appropriate roles” — were very binary, she has always felt “androgynous”.Continue reading “Body image and gender identity”

… On the one hand, sadness at having to leave these places and people and activities that I have been enjoying so much for the past three weeks; and some fear because all these wonderful experiences are coming to and end (for now).  On the other, an itch to get back home as soon asContinue reading “Mixed feelings”

“Darkness on the edge of town” (Bruce Springsteen): “…  Everybody’s got a secret Sonny Something that they just can’t face Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it They carry it with them every step that they take Till some day they just cut it loose Cut it loose or let it dragContinue reading “Just cut it loose!”

One of the most concretely healing and liberating aspects of my vacation here in Colorado this summer has been all the rock climbing I’ve been doing, learning so many new skills outdoors (trad climbing, focusing mainly on multi-pitch and cracks) and simply enjoying it thoroughly. I’ve always had the instinct to climb and scramble anywhereContinue reading “The climber in me”

Two years ago, between the end of June and beginning of July 2019, one of my closest friends & I met up here in Colorado for a “ fun girl trip” together, she coming from the East Coast and I from the West Coast. That summer, we were both trying to get over some upsettingContinue reading “Sweet, healing power of friendship”

Today, I was hoping to go hiking up to Ouzel Falls in the Rocky Mountains National Park but was turned away by the ranger as I didn’t have a reservation (a novelty due to COVID). So I went and did an impromptu hike from Meeker Park Lodge up towards Lookout Mountain instead.  I tend toContinue reading “Bears and butterflies”

As I enjoy my vacation in Colorado, staying with my Austrian-American host family and going on daily adventures either with groups or on my own out in nature, I realize that, on one hand, I really have two or three chosen families, while on the other, I am spontaneously able to open up, meet andContinue reading “Chosen families and wandering meteors”