Last month, I was writing as I was taking a giant leap of faith – taking a job teaching students in China how to make comic books for three weeks. What resulted was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had.
When we arrived in China, we were treated like royalty. The company that hired us paid for everything – our rooms, our transportation, all of our meals, most of our tourist trips. They even paid us a stipend on top of everything else. Sounded too good to be true. Luckily, it was true and the company was amazing.
Our first major dinner in China was given by the Chinese partners.
Not bad, huh? The grace and propriety with which we were treated was incredible. I have never felt more blessed and more taken care of. They put us up in the best hotels, treated us to the best food and really catered to us in every sense of the word.
But one of the most incredible adventures while we were there was climbing the Great Wall of China.
One of the reasons this whole trip was so important is that my father’s family was from China and I am the first person in my family to return there since he emigrated to Canada when he was 16.
So climbing the wall, I could almost feel the ancestors in my family crying out in joy. I’ll be honest. I lost it. I stood at the beginning of the wall and cried like a baby. I realized that this was something I had wanted to do all of my life and here I was, about to climb the Great Wall. One of the other teachers, Bryn, stayed with me while I processed this. I told her to go on ahead without me because I was going to be very slow and probably be very emotional. She said, fine, and stuck at my side throughout. She became a very good friend throughout the trip.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I still struggle with stamina and fatigue from my cancer treatment and my asthma has never been the same since that same treatment. And staring up at some of the almost vertical climbs made me think that there was no way I could do this.
I stood at the bottom of the steepest of the vertical climbs and was ready to give up. I was exhausted, could hardly catch my breath. There was no way I was going to be able to make it. It was probably an 80 degree vertical.
And as I stood there, overwhelmed with a sense of failure, I again cried. For all the things I had lost over the past few years, for all the hardships I had faced, for all the things I wanted but had yet to achieve. I cried because I just knew I could not make this climb and that it would be a hard failure to live with. To come all this way and not do this broke my heart.
Then slowly, I started to laugh. This was a literal metaphor for so many things in my life: my directing career, my comic book career, ending a bad marriage and starting over, my breast cancer battle, my battle in recovery. How many times had I stood at the bottom of things, looking up to where I wanted to be, and said “I can’t do this”? And how many times did I find myself eventually looking back down at the climb I had managed to make and said, hey, I can do this. It was never easy. It was never simple. It was hard and it was almost unattainable. But I had made it.
And I laughed again. Poor Bryn must have thought I lost my mind. But I explained the metaphor and she laughed with me. I’m sure the locals must have thought we were nuts, two Americans laughing until we cried.
And we climbed. One step at a time. Stopping every few steps until I was ready to tackle the next few. It took a long time and several times, I wanted to give up. But eventually, we got to the top of the steps, and then to the top of the wall. Again, I stood there and cried. But these were tears of joy and tears of relief.
I made it. I got there. We got there.
The rest of the trip was inspiring and amazing. The high school students especially made the trip so very special. We managed to communicate through various language and cultural barriers. And they created some really cool little comic books.
They were sweet and smart and I will never, ever forget the profound effect they had on me.
What does this all mean? Well, I’m not Dr. Phil but I think I can figure this out.
Our guide said that many boys in China make the pilgrimage to the Great Wall when they hit a certain age. There are some areas that are more challenging than where we were and that’s where they had – the toughest spots of the wall. When they finish the climb and return home, they are declared a man. I understand that now.
Every day, we all face that wall. We all stand at the bottom and declare that it’s impossible. But that’s when we get to choose. Do we suck it up, figure it out and make the climb, one ridiculously difficult step at a time? Or do we give up and say, I almost did it, I almost made it but it was too hard?
I say choose the hard. Tackle that wall and even if you don’t make it all the way, give it everything you’ve got, because the view from up there is worth all of it.