The following piece was written in July 2024.

My husband is climbing a mountain.

I don’t mean a metaphorical mountain. I mean a literal mountain.

Yesterday morning, my husband woke up with an unshakable feeling that he needed to climb a mountain in Oaxaca. He asked me if I wanted to go, but I hadn’t woken up with the unshakable feeling of climbing a mountain. It was his feeling, his task.

So, my husband went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Oaxaca from Mexico City, where we live. He wanted me to tell him not to go and even until an hour before, he was willing to stay if I protested. My husband is climbing a mountain right now because he needed to climb a mountain.

I’m a big believer in intuition. If you wake up one morning feeling like you need to climb a mountain, you definitely should and don’t let anything or anyone stop you. Because your intuition is your teacher and guide if you allow it to. There is for sure a reason my husband felt the need to climb a mountain on an average Sunday and if the mountain was calling him I was not going to be the one to stop him.

I have never tried to step in the way of my husband’s dreams. I met him last year at a coffee shop and he had a dream of owning a Brazilian jiu jitsu academy. There has never been a part of me that wishes that he did not do BJJ or have such lofty dreams for it. 

A human has to dream.

People sometimes press me for more details as to how we met exactly. Well, he was working and I was having a pastry and coffee. A mistake with my credit car which we both blame on each other, he came to my table to charge me again. We locked eyes a few times. 

The encounter would span several months and take place over two locations of the same coffee shop—shy girl that I am.

We would chat each time I saw him at the coffee shop. His tattoos told stories—I know because I asked him about them. And they told stories not just of this circumstance in his life at the time but also where he was physically located. This one was created in Chiapas, Mexico by a Colombian artist, this one was made in Puebla, Mexico despite the fact that it says “peace and love” in Arabic.

Eventually, chatting one day of his journey from Oaxaca to Chiapas to Mexico City, I told him “you seem really cool and interesting,” and he told me “you seem really cool and interesting too! Do you want to hang out sometimes?” We met for coffee the next morning, the same day I was leaving for a six week trip that would span Turkiye, Egypt, Tunisia, and New York. The rest is sort of history. We have been together a year and two months and married for nine.

My husband’s life is full of interesting stories and even a few near death experiences. He hitchhiking across Mexico even in one of its more dangerous times. He escaped a tsunami in Oaxaca. He almost drowned once while surfing. He started training BJJ just one day, on a whim. He loved to camp, not in the American sense of camping, but the idea of being one with the earth for a few days as opposed to a structured, coordinated, manufactured car camping experience most of us know as camping. He cut himself with a machete once while on the road and had to give himself stitches. He’s been a vegan and managed hostels, exposing himself to many different kinds of people, and I would like to think between the buses and hitchhiking the open roads, Mexico could be traced in the veins under his skin as if he were connected to this country by blood.

My husband’s life has been full of climbing literal and metaphorical mountains.

In some ways we were both adventurers, though this is a point of contention in our relationship. I see us as coming from very similar backgrounds and having similar experiences. From a superficial level, they look different. I have not hitchhiked in Mexico, but I have picked up hitchhikers at 3am and taken them literally hiking—a charming story which I look back on fondly.

I was one of the first people I know who began traveling internationally, with a candy bar phone, printed maps, and limited understanding of the local language. I remember my first international trip alone and having to navigate the airport as someone who had only ever been to Egypt a handful of times growing up, my parents navigating us through the airports probably with the same level of hesitation I had going on my first international trip. We almost slept on the sidewalk in Paris during one of those first trips because we were unable to find our couch surfing host. A kind Moroccan-Frenchman helped us find a 3 star hotel room as the sun was going down, him and my best friend communicating in the best broken French-Arabic they could forge together. 

My husband and I are both adventurers even though I come from a great deal more privilege than him. To traverse this earth with as much confidence as we have and with the faith that we’ll always find what we need and be okay—we have to be adventurers.

So my husband is climbing a literal mountain right now because he realized it had been too long since he had climbed a mountain. Decompressing our lives together last night, he shared how when he went hiking with a friend in Sayulita, Mexico, where we were for my birthday a month and a half ago, he realized he could not remember the last time he climbed a mountain, and he cried as he recounted that he felt scared hitchhiking back. “When did I lose this part of me?” he told me between tears last night before he headed to the bus station.

And I understood. I have been thinking to myself lately, when have you climbed a mountain? Unlike my husband, for me, these are not literal mountains. But I have been a mountain climber in a metaphorical sense. I have done and overcome difficult things such that no one can call me afraid of scaling a rocky peak. When did my life become so comfortable? When did I become scared?

Sometimes these things just happen over time. Certainly, a big part was getting married and feeling like you have someone you are responsible for now. That’s a very big shift for any independent person when you get married. But if we are both adventurers, can’t we both traverse the earth, together?

I find it ironic that my husband is scaling a mountain right now and I am writing a book. A book. I finally admit after writing all these pages that what I am writing is a book. I have wanted to write a book since I was 19. I don’t know what was stopping me. I wondered what I would write about, if anyone would read it, how to publish it, and if you can really call an unpublished book a book.

Now I see, 20 years later, that if not now then when? When am I going to write this book that I have seen the cover of in dreams? If not now then when? All it takes to write a book is to write, and that is something I know how to do. Why have I avoided scaling this mountain? When did I get afraid of scaling mountains?

In a way my husband is also scaling a metaphorical mountain. When we met, he was coming off of a difficult time in his life, our life together becoming a comfortable paradise for him. The honeymoon period was fine, but at some point, I started to become frustrated. He wasn’t taking risks in himself. Wasn’t he an adventurer? 

He balked at the difficulty of getting around Egypt when we were there and felt so bad after he was mugged in Istanbul. Adventure comes at a cost—everything does. Sometimes it is an actual danger. Sometimes it’s a perceived danger. Sometimes, it’s just feeling bad about yourself because you made an adventurous move that did not pan out as well as you would have liked. The slipping and falling is, on occasion, a part of climbing a mountain. I thought I married an adventurer. Where was the sense of adventure in him? I felt like I hadn’t seen his power in so long.

We have struggled since we met. I had my own misfortunes in the last year—hearing loss, tinnitus, an unexpected autism diagnosis, the fall from Big Tech grace. To let myself stay in the rut, I cannot fully blame myself. I tried to dust myself off on several occasions, until finally after falling for what felt like the millionth time, I asked God to pick me up himself because I just felt like I could no longer get on my feet. Scaling a mountain? I was asking for direct, divine intervention, to help me just stand up.

I am writing a book. This is one of the first times I am saying this. I am not thinking about writing a book one day or even going to write a book soon. I am writing a book. This is my mountain. I am scaling it now.

Dammit, I know I’m a mountain climber, because dammit, I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid to do what it takes to live life on my terms, even when it’s scary and filled with unknowns.

Without giving myself airs, there is something about me that people find fascinating and may like or be intimidated by. It is not that I am a particularly delightful person, and I am far from perfect. Being autistic, if you were put in a room full of people and one of them was me, it is unlikely that I will be your favorite person in the room. I have come to terms with this and am okay with it, and I joke I am more of an acquired taste—I have many, many friends from a variety of places and walks of life, and I am eternally grateful for that.

But what I think people like about me, even if they cannot fully put their fingers on it, is that I am an adventurer. I am curious. I take chances and risks. I am not fully aware of authority and I am not terribly afraid of it. I figure I will deal with bumps on the road as they come, instead of planning for them such that I never put my foot on the pedal. I’m willing to try things and learn how to do things, even if few have done them before—a trailblazer if you like. I might not look like or be a vagabond but I have an adventurous spirit that goes back to my fascination with the Boxcar Children series.

And the thing about being an adventurer, a mountain climber, a trail blazer is that it takes guts. It is not easy and it can be scary. It might not always go well. You may not always meet charming strangers along the way that become lifelong friends but instead you can meet literal bandits. But you do it because you know that if you don’t go and climb that mountain today, now, you will be saying that a part of you that’s important has died. So you choose the mountain instead of dying. You choose to write a book instead of dying. It takes guts and it takes confidence. And perhaps in this way being an adventurer is a lifestyle, not a trip.

My husband is climbing a mountain right now and I am writing a book. We have been looking at our lives lately, wondering where they are going, together and separately. Will I go back to Big Tech and he go back to cafes? It is unclear and at this stage there is no way to know.

All I know is that both of us, my husband and I, are the kind of people that can’t help but scale the damn mountain when we know it’s time to scale the mountain, figurative or literal. And because of that, I know, no matter what happens to us over the course of this life, we will end up exactly where we are meant to be—the road less traveled will take us there. We will always choose it.