Most people think the challenge is the mountain. It isn’t.
The real challenge is staying with yourself when it gets hard—
when your body wants to stop,
when your mind starts spinning stories,
and when walking away would be so much easier than walking forward.
This isn’t a story about summits.
It’s about the distance between who I’ve been and who I’m becoming—measured one uneven, breathless step at a time.
I’ve done seven Himalayan treks in the past fifteen and a half months.
Not because I’m an adrenaline junkie or looking for transformation.
I wasn’t trying to find myself in the mountains.
I was trying to stop losing myself in everyday life.
The kind of life where promises are made in notebooks and broken quietly by Tuesday.
Where motivation flares in the morning and disappears by dinner.
Where the voice in your head sounds wise, but is secretly terrified of failure—so it tells you to wait, to pause, to not try just yet.
I knew that voice well. I needed something stronger than it. Something that didn’t flinch.
So I climbed.
The mountain isn’t a metaphor. It doesn’t play along.
It doesn’t care if you’ve had a rough week or a broken heart.
It doesn’t care how many self-help books you’ve read or what your last therapist said.
It just waits for your next move—and mirrors it back to you.
You either walk, or you don’t.
That binary stripped everything down.
There’s no room for overthinking when you’re wheezing at 4,200 meters, wondering why the air feels like glass in your lungs.
No space for imposter syndrome when your thighs are burning and all you can think about is reaching the next rest stop without falling over.
You become brutally present. And in that presence, something honest wakes up.
I’ve always been the kind of person who shows up with intensity and leaves quietly when no one’s looking.
Big beginnings. Messy middles. Rarely a clean end.
Trekking didn’t fix that.
It just didn’t give me the option to disappear.
You don’t get to ghost your own effort in the middle of a glacier.
There’s no “I’ll try again tomorrow” when camp is 6 kilometers ahead and the sun is gone.
You move. You commit. Or you get stuck.
That’s what changed me—not the scenery, not the sense of adventure, but the discipline of staying with something when it’s no longer exciting.
The summit was never the point. Summits are short-lived.
You’re up, you’re breathless, you’re cold. You take a photo. You smile.
And then the descent begins.
No one tells you that the descent is harder.
The thrill has passed. The energy is gone. And all that’s left is gravity, fatigue, and the quiet, gnawing awareness that this isn’t over.
But something strange happens there—when you keep walking even though you have nothing left to prove.
That’s when you begin to trust yourself. Not the shiny, motivated version.
The gritty one. The one who finishes.
People think you climb for the view. You don’t.
You climb for who you get to be on the way up.
For the voice in your head that says this is too much and the version of you that responds, and yet we continue.
That gap between panic and progress—that’s where your strength reveals itself.
And once you meet that part of yourself, the rest of life starts to change shape.
Deadlines feel lighter. Self-doubt loses volume.
You don’t need constant reassurance, because you’ve seen what you can do without it.
You’ve done something hard without anyone clapping.
You’ve kept a promise no one asked you to make.
You’ve stayed, even when leaving would’ve been easier.
I don’t trek to escape. I trek to return.
To the version of me that doesn’t scroll her way through hard days.
To the girl who says yes even when her lungs protest.
To the woman who finally knows how to hold her ground—not with force, but with quiet, unshakable resolve.
Each trek gave me another layer of that woman.
And none of it came at the summit.
It came in the parts no one photographs.
The breathless climbs. The silent doubts. The stubborn grace of not giving up.
That’s where I met the strength I’d been waiting to become.
And I’ve never abandoned myself since.
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