After dinner, I talk to Rachel. We have a good laugh about the poo story. From this point forward, the laughs will be few and far between. We both know it will probably be a week before we can talk again. The team is leaving to climb up to the more dangerous higher camps at first light. But for the moment, I focus solely on Rachel and her sweet laugh as my bride’s love radiates through me, warming me on this cold, dark night on the side of the mountain.
7
When Nothing Is Certain,
Everything Is Possible
RACHEL
As we worked toward making this whole Everest adventure come to life, it ignited this spark to look back over my own childhood dreams. Of course, my biggest desires were to find love and to one day have a family, which were now starting to happen, but I had other dreams too. If we could work together to see Harold’s Everest dream come to life, what was to say the same couldn’t happen for my dreams? So, I started to reminisce about what paths and decisions had led me to where I was at that point in my life.
I had this entrepreneurial fire in me because I really liked the idea of being my own boss and having the freedom to create my own path. I had always really enjoyed baking, so the thought of owning my own bakery someday was a fun idea. During my junior year of high school, I started my own little culinary business and named it Bite-Sized Delights. One of my mom’s best friends also had this amazing hydroponic farm, where I would occasionally help plant the fruit and work at the U-picks.
I bought strawberries directly from her that I used to make chocolate-covered strawberries and chocolate bowls full of fresh strawberries. My specialty, though, were Oreo cheesecake balls. I sold my creations to kids at school and family friends, and I even catered an event or two. I loved the freedom and excitement of being an entrepreneur even more than the money. The whole process felt empowering.
I feel our culture gets it backward and conveys the idea that money leads to happiness, but in reality, many people are unhappy because they spend so much time in jobs they hate simply because they earn a certain level of income. Money is a wonderful tool that can enable people, but living an unfulfilling life for the sake of money will leave them unsatisfied and complacent. I believe we were all made for more.
At that point, my path to the future didn’t seem very clear. In fact, it was one cloudy mess with almost no visibility, and I had no clue what my professional goals should be. I wished I had a clear calling to become a lawyer or doctor or something, but all I really knew was that I wanted to work for myself, which would allow me to keep my family life a priority. I also knew I wanted to help people and make a positive difference in the world. I felt pressure from my family to continue down the business route in college. Sure, I wanted to own my own business someday, but was I passionate about business calculus and accounting? Not in the slightest. Taking all those classes meant I’d end up working in someone else’s business and climb the corporate ladder. Not my idea of fun.
For the first time in my life, I experienced true anxiety. I’d cry on my way to my business classes or stay up all night studying something I hated and then cry at my campus church after I failed a test. Chasing after something I had no passion for left me feeling empty and anxious.
Failing wasn’t something I did. I had always been an A student with a résumé piled high with academic honors, club involvements, and extracurricular activities. So, when I began to really struggle with my studies, I felt embarrassed and defeated. I was so embarrassed I didn’t tell anyone how badly I was really doing. I began to feel a deep sense of shame, like somehow my school success was tied to my self-worth. I felt stuck. The fear of judgment and criticism was holding me back from fixing my situation.
I was incredibly unhappy trying to live up to other people’s ideas of success. It took redefining what success means to me to be able to climb out of my hole of shame. I love the way Maya Angelou said it: “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”*
I had to acknowledge that my self-worth was not, in fact, tied to my career path, my potential income, my achievements, or my level of success according to the world’s standards. My internal joy would never be dependent on external measures. This is the reason I am so passionate about people never settling in any aspects of their lives. We often settle by pursuing what the world wants from us when it’s not truly what we want for ourselves. If we all stopped living according to other people’s timelines and expectations, we’d feel freer to take the reins of our own stories.
I reached out to my pastor and after some long talks realized I needed to switch my major to something else to preserve my own sanity. I thought about pursuing ministry and going to seminary after I graduated, but God kept showing me that my ministry was going to be outside the walls of a church. I switched to an interdisciplinary social sciences major and also ended up with minors in child development and religion simply because I enjoyed the classes so much.
What I couldn’t see at the time was that what I perceived as a failure was just a turn in direction, which led to a happier me. Failure isn’t an end state. I chose to keep going and keep growing. I changed my major and still graduated on time with honors, while being significantly happier and free of anxiety.
HAROLD
I remember on one of our video chats when we’d been dating for only a few months, Rachel told me she got a C in her math class. I made what I thought was a playful joke about it, and it led to a big argument. I immediately knew this was an area Rachel took seriously and had been struggling with for some time.
Rachel derives great joy and zeal for life from helping others and making a difference. When she told me she changed her major, it made sense. Business wasn’t her passion. Rachel has such a pure heart, and it is the driving force behind how she pursues her life. She couldn’t care less about the size of our home or the type of clothes she wears. I mean, she met me for the first time in that camo T-shirt, of all things. Not to call her out, but as we sit writing this book, I’m noticing that she has been wearing the same pair of baggy sweatpants for the past three days! But I love that about her.
Rachel has shown me that life is about serving rather than getting, doing rather than having, and being rather than wanting. She keeps me grounded in this way, building our marriage on a strong foundation of what is important. I may be the man and protector of the house, but she is our family’s foundation. I learned I needed that foundation during my Firstie (senior) year at West Point after she had graduated.
During my final season of baseball, I ended up with a rear labral tear in my shoulder after diving for a ball. My injury was pretty devastating on all fronts. Obviously, it affected baseball (not just my playing but the whole team), and it also potentially affected Everest. How could I climb with a torn shoulder?
I decided to wait it out and play through the pain until the end of the season and then have surgery. It was an unfortunate situation, but it actually worked out in my favor. You see, I had been having a hard time figuring out how the Everest climb would work into my military timeline and obligations, but strangely enough, the surgery meant I would be classified as a MedHold during my recovery time, which then lined up my schedule and Everest perfectly. What a God thing hurting my shoulder turned out to be! As Rachel stated, a lot of times our failures end up leading us in better directions.
There were still a lot of pieces that had to fall into place, but more and more it seemed possible. We were about a year out at this point, and I estimated my chances of going at a generous 40 percent. We still needed to raise over $100,000. We were already starting to gain traction raising awareness about PTSD with an Army Times article about our efforts and cause. Momentum had started slowly but was now beginning to build.
Originally, I tried to get the US Army to officially approve the expedition but quickly learned that would not be possible. I then tried to get some other vetera
n organizations to help with funding, but they politely declined, saying it was too expensive and they didn’t have full trust in a cadet’s ability to make it happen.
That’s when we decided to start our own nonprofit called US Expeditions and Exploration, or USX. We ended up raising more than six figures to fund the expedition, despite having zero business experience. How, you ask? Hustle. We rolled up our sleeves and got creative. It also gave us the ability to really focus our efforts on mental-health issues among Soldiers.
In hindsight, my time was occupied by so many things. I wish I would have been more of a spiritual leader for us, and I know Rachel wished it too. I struggled with having wrongfully overcommitted myself, and rather than growing in my faith, instead I only maintained it. I became so deliberate in planning for this climb and the safety of our team that I was negligent in planning for the safety of our marriage. Over the course of this year, I noticed Rachel started to seem unhappy.
RACHEL
The first half of Harold’s senior year brought back some of those same feelings of inadequacy I’d experienced before I even met him. I didn’t want to take my frustration out on Harold, but I knew that if I were single, I could be anywhere, maybe at a new job somewhere else in the United States or even off on a cool adventure somewhere abroad. I could pursue anything I wanted.
But, at my core, building a life with Harold was the most important thing to me, even if it meant my life would take a very different turn. Still, I sometimes questioned if I was selling myself short by sacrificing my potential for work success with this upcoming Army-wife lifestyle. What was I getting myself into? Sure, I’d be happy in my marriage, but would struggles of inferiority follow me around and cause problems between us?
I knew I had to communicate to Harold what I was feeling because I had learned before that staying silent only did a disservice to myself and ultimately our relationship. He set me straight by reminding me that he would support anything I wanted to do and empowered me not to put limitations on myself.
In the midst of all this, I witnessed one of those childhood dreams of mine suddenly become a reality.
HAROLD
The time apart was hard on us. We both felt a very intense longing to be with each other, but my senior year schedule made it tough. Rachel was always recording little videos on her phone about where she was and what she was up to and then sending them to me, which made me feel close to her. I loved hearing her voice.
I knew Rachel felt comfortable on camera and had been part of a video production team in middle school and high school, so I thought of something she might enjoy doing.
“Why don’t you start a YouTube channel?”
* Maya Angelou, quoted in Aberdin Louis, Famous Success Quotes (Brooklyn, NY: Let’s Go Big Family, 2015), 75.
April 27, 2016
As we climb higher up the mountain, more dangers present themselves. The sun, for example, can reflect off the surrounding glacial ice and cause blisters to form on the inside of your mouth as you pant for air. Dehydration is also a threat. As we climb, I see deep, dark crevasses snaking through the glaciers. People who fall into these crevasses are often there forever. Their bodies become preserved as frozen sculptures and are sometimes slowly crushed by the shifting of the glaciers over time.
The team and I make it to Advanced Base Camp, which is over twenty thousand feet in elevation, and we rest here briefly before traveling up the North Col, the one-thousand-foot vertical sheer-ice wall. This will be the first time we get to strap on our crampons (sharp traction devices that look like spikes coming out of your shoes, which are used to gain stability on ice and glaciers), and we’re all super excited!
After retrieving my gear from the yaks, I set up my lantern and picture of Rachel in my tent. I open the front zipper and take in the clear view of the summit of Everest…and the intense route we will be taking to get there. We have Camp One directly in front of us on top of the North Col. We can see climbers slowly moving up it, looking like a small line of ants.
Camp Two stands at the top of a long and gradual snow-banked slope. No technical climbing skills are needed for this part of the climb. It’s essentially just a suck fest of a hike. Camp Three is where things get interesting. It is perched at roughly twenty-seven thousand feet on the ridge face of the mountain. This is the intense, black, mean-looking part of the mountain that struck me when I first saw Everest. Camp Three stands right in the middle of the black. Moving from Camp Three to the summit is the most difficult part of the climb. The route is complicated to navigate, requiring traversing narrow ledges and dealing with the high wind and weather. The extreme altitude and thin air add complexity and danger to the already treacherous conditions.
I sit at the opening of my tent, looking up at nearly two miles of vertical height. An afternoon storm starts to swell in the distance. The summit of Everest quickly fades behind dark, ominous clouds. All of Everest and her fury stand in front of me.
8
The West Point Girlfriend
RACHEL
When Harold mentioned YouTube, my ears perked up. I was substitute teaching occasionally, nannying, and working for a nonprofit, but I wanted more for myself. I’m so thankful Harold helped me find a way to reach my own dreams.
One dream that had stayed with me since the age of six was having a television show. This dream is what led me to join the video production team in middle school and high school. I used to pretend I had my own talk show called The Rachel Show, and later when I had a laptop and cell phone, I would record all kinds of embarrassing videos of me talking to an imaginary audience.
It all started when my brother and I were little and we went to visit our older sister, Julie, who was living on her own. She had this amazing black-and-white video camera with a long cord that attached to the television so we could watch ourselves while we were recording. That was the moment my six-year-old heart fell in love with videography.
My brother, Will, and I would stand in front of the television and dance, although I’d usually take over the show, going crazy while jumping up and down, shaking my curly hair, and spinning around. Will was slightly shyer and focused on drawing comics, so naturally, as the younger sibling, I would pester him, asking a million questions as I pretended to interview him on camera. “Go away, Rachel. I’m trying to draw,” he’d say. But that was okay with me because my sis had the holy grail toy, an Easy-Bake Oven! In five seconds, I went from interviewing my brother about comics to having my own cooking show!
“This is a double chocolate chip doughnut cookie, and we’re about to do the best part—SPRINKLESSSSS,” I’d say as I did a silly dance. My catchphrase for the evening was to say in my high-pitched voice, “We’re having so much fun!” Julie was a good sport and played along too, even ad-libbing commercials for the camera when I asked.
It’s funny how our early years can be a reflection of who we become. I didn’t know it at the time, but my childhood dream of having my own television show would, in a way, become a reality as I started sharing my life through online videos. This quickly became a new passion that would turn into my dream job.
The night Harold suggested I start a YouTube channel, I came up with a rough outline in my journal, pulled together a few props, and used the camera on my computer to make a video. I called it “Signs You’re Dating a West Point Cadet.”
“You have plenty of camo,” I said, waving my camo-wearing teddy bear at the camera.
“Your boyfriend decides to serve you a super delicious MRE for breakfast.” I rolled my eyes.
“Everyone stares at you when you walk onto campus in civilian clothes and with your hair down.”
“You pick up random military terms, like Roger…Copy…Over.”
“Your boyfriend gets haircuts more often than you.”
After a couple of takes and a quick edit, I showed it to Harold and
my mom. I uploaded it to YouTube and posted a link on the West Point girlfriend support group on Facebook. I wasn’t normally someone who was active in online groups—in fact, it may have been the first time I posted—but I thought someone might relate to my very cheesy video.
Within a couple of hours, a few hundred people had watched the video. When I woke up the next day, it had over seven thousand views. The girlfriends loved it! Unfortunately, some of the West Point cadets didn’t, and they slammed me.
While a lot of people liked the video and felt it gave us girls a voice, there was also a ton of backlash. Some of my family members were even worried I was going to hurt Harold’s career because of the negativity that initially surrounded it. I also received a couple of death threats in the comments. The internet can be a cruel place. One thing was for sure: whether people liked the video or not, almost every person at West Point now knew who I was.
I quickly became known as the West Point Girlfriend, rather than Rachel. It had a negative connotation, which made me feel weird and uncomfortable. The cadets would announce my arrival on campus whenever I visited. “West Point Girlfriend spotted in the parking lot” they’d post on an app called Yik Yak. Luckily, Harold is the greatest and seemed completely unfazed. He was supportive through all of it, reassuring me that he wasn’t embarrassed but was actually really proud of me.
A Higher Calling Page 6