Loss? Or just giving up?

There's loss of innocence like trying desperately to be 21 when I was only 15. Loss of the ability to do something I used to be able to do like back walkovers into the splits. There's real loss, like when my boyfriend fell 240 feet in a fatal climbing accident.

Then there's two days after his death when I was climbing with Nettle, wailing and pounding my fists into the rock barely able to mutter words when Nettle said to me "time has a wonderful way of healing and I know you don't think this now, but you will love again."

Years later cancer stole from me. I've lost my insides - every part that makes me female from my breasts to my cervix. I write "droid" on forms where I should check either male or female.

When I stand at the bottom of a climb I look up. Many times I've already given up in my head. It's a long climb. The ice is brittle. What if I don't have the gear I need. I'm done before a single ice ax is swung.

Loss is real, it makes life go round. My brother desperately tried to have kids for more than a decade. My niece was born almost exactly 1 year after my grandmother died, She's my grandmother in a beautiful new way. My brother never gave up. And after our other grandmother died, his son was born.

What will happen next when I'm standing at the bottom of a climb - figuratively or for real? How will I write the ending to the story? Will I blame loss as I give up?

I bought myself a greeting card a week before I started chemotherapy. Today it still hangs on my fridge and some days it is the reason I put one font in front of the other. I changed "you" to "me". On the outside it reads: Believe. On the inside it reads: Because I Believe in Me.

I'm not even close to the top of the mountain, but I show up and I climb.