The Surprising Lessons of Mt. Kilimanjaro
Revisiting my fourteen year old self. And other funny things high altitude can do.
The vomit came suddenly and I lurched into a squat. It was bright blue as it hit the dirt between our tents. I’d taken methylene blue a few minutes earlier, trying to biohack the altitude. It didn’t work. The altitude sickness came on without warning. I’d been fine the first three days of our hike. We were at 14,500 feet and I woke up at three am with a headache so painful I immediately swallowed three ibuprofen and the prescription mountain sickness med I’d brought just in case. I naively–and perhaps smugly–didn’t think I would need it.
Now it was six am, and I felt like I might die.
The sun was barely coming up. We were supposed to leave our camp soon to hike for six more hours. I could barely move, my arms leaden, my nausea so severe I was almost shaking. I sipped more water from my Nalgene, but it did not help.
I knew when I signed up for Kilimanjaro ten months earlier that it would be a challenge. And so I trained, and I prepped. I had all the gear I needed. But it was more than just having the right socks and pack. The reality of this mountain was humbling me.
Paul, our fearless Tanzanian head guide, came over to me. He was calm and unbothered by my blue vomit in the middle of camp. He’d seen it all.
“It’s just your body adjusting to the lack of oxygen. It’s normal. It will pass. Sip lemon water,” he said. “Better now than on summit night.” He passed me my second Nalgene full of hot lemon water the cook had prepared. It was bitter but I liked it.
I wiped my wet eyes and stumbled into the dining tent in my parka. I poured myself a coffee and dumped powdered milk and sugar–because fuck it–into it. My family and two new friends–now my teammates–huddled around the folding table, orange hued from the tent, their coffees steaming.
“I’m here,” I said.
My niece and nephew and their mother told me they were climbing Kilimanjaro ten months earlier over an epic meal in Manhattan on the sixth anniversary of my brother/their father’s death. My mouth moved faster than my brain.
“I want to come!” I said. I’ve said foolish things before which never came to pass, but something told me that when my niece said “You’re definitely coming!” that it really was true.
“How high is it again? 15,000 feet?” I asked.
“It’s like 19,300,” my niece said. My feet went slightly numb. “It’s one of the seven summits.” I didn’t know what that meant.
As it turns out, Mt. Kilimanjaro is the tallest freestanding mountain in the world.
For the record, I’m not a particularly outdoorsy or rugged person. I’m an artistic Pisces, a city dweller for most of my life, and I can do almost nothing practical except cook.
But I said it out loud and now it was in the universe. Perhaps the idea would disintegrate in the light of day.
I woke the next morning with a nervous buzz in the pit of my stomach, and my sister in law emailed me and the Alpenglow coordinator to book my trip. It was happening.
And still, I wasn’t really sure why I wanted to do it. I’m not interested in climbing other big mountains, like my niece. I have no interest in it; it actually sounds horrible. Even as I started training for Kili, I knew it was an incredible once-in-a-lifetime adventure with my niece and nephew. But I wasn’t exactly sure what was at work in my psyche.
Mt. Kilimanjaro entered my consciousness in 1990 when my family went on safari in Kenya. I remember being in Amboseli National Park, staring at the mythic snow-covered mountain in the distance. Someone said You can climb it, you know. You have to get up at midnight for the summit. It sounded horrible and awesome and that’s when the seed must have been planted.
I was fourteen years old. I had bangs and a full rack of braces and raging hormones. I was in feverish puppy love with Bill Winter, our guide, who was twenty-nine and had perfect teeth, brown hair, and kind eyes. He wore khaki and knew everything about wildlife. He had a perfect Kenyan-British accent. I was desperately in love with being in love and blasted Lady in Red on my walkman Sport.
I could not have known that in climbing Kiliumanjaro, I was really revisiting that fourteen year old me. The one who blossomed early and hated her body almost immediately. The one who told herself she wasn’t athletic. The one who learned she had to be The Good Girl in order to survive.
According to Simba, one of our Tanzanian guides. There are four rules when climbing Kilimanjaro:
Go slow. Pole pole means slow in Swahili. GO SLOW. They aren’t being facetious or annoying when they say this. Take your time. You’re hiking fifty miles, and you will be too tired by summit day if you go too fast. The relative ease of the hike in the early part can fool you. It’s a really big mountain.
Get lots of rest and sleep well. (HAHAHAHAHA.)
Drink lots of water and eat lots of food. Yes, and yes, except there is no appetite above 14,000 feet.
Have a positive attitude. This is, as I came to discover, the most challenging and important rule.
As it turns out, hiking was the easy part of Kilimanjaro. It was everything else–the sleeping, the altitude, the camping–that was hardest for me. The first two nights on the mountain I barely slept at all due a nasty combo of jet lag, altitude and disorientation. That third night, I realized I hadn’t pooped in days. I lay in my tent, finally remembering the earplugs to drown out the cheery laughter of the porters, and my eye mask to dim the flashlights. My headlamp lay at the ready to inevitably go pee in the toilet tent every few hours. Every ten minutes I would hear the zip of a tent or a cough. One night I heard my new friend Suzie screaming at someone in her sleep (she’s an attorney). I was sleeping on a blow up camping pad which was so narrow I kept rolling off all night. The altitude started to do funny things to my mind; was I sleeping? Was I awake? Was I dreaming? Once I woke up in a panic, convinced that my tent was being filled with protein bar wrappers.
That third night, I had to forcibly allow my body to relax as much as possible. I was too tightly wound and exhausted. I was physically clenching against being away and being vulnerable. Not knowing what the fuck I was doing there. I missed my husband and kids, and the comfort of the known. I felt lost and untethered in my tiny tent. As soon as I relaxed my limbs, I felt hot tears. They streamed down my face, and I sobbed silently so as not to wake my niece who was sleeping a foot away.
I’d spent the last several decades of my life in therapy, learning how to feel–sometimes even admit to– my feelings. Not the feelings I thought I should have, the acceptable ones, but the actual ones I was having. The messy, raw truth of my body in that moment in my sleeping bag was that I was scared.
I thought I knew this already, yet there it was again: I had to feel my feelings. I was away from my children and husband, far away. What if I couldn’t do it? What if my body failed me? What if I hated everything and ruined the trip for everyone? Rudderless and vulnerable, I let myself feel it all.
And there she was in that tent with me. Fourteen year old me was learning she wasn’t a child anymore. On the border between girlhood and womanhood, she was rewarded by ignoring all the dark feelings and fear in her. She had everything and nothing. She knew she had to be happy to keep the peace, and so that’s what she did.
I grew up in a cliche WASPy family. Feelings weren’t really acknowledged much. The dysfunctional bumps of my family were smoothed over with white Burgundy and blithe aphorisms. That trip to Kenya was one of the last times I remember living in romantic childhood fantasy land. After that, the ugly, complicated truth of my alcohol-riddled family began to seep out.
In the morning, after having a hard cry, I was able to poop again, which I knew wasn’t a coincidence. And once I allowed the difficult feelings, they all came; childlike wonder, delight, and joy moved in, too. I regularly burst into tears during the day while we walked because life was just so beautiful. How did I even get onto this mountain? Yes, I flew a long way to Ethiopia and then to Tanzania, but really: how did I get here?
As we made our way through four distinct ecosystems, it occurred to me that I had a history of taking adventures in my life. In 1995, my brother Brooks was in Nepal studying for the year and I chose to go visit him for my senior minicourse project. My father, brother and I went over to Nepal for 10 days and trekked with Brooks. It was hard on my privileged and untested body, and I also got hit with altitude sickness. Brooks helped me cross the ravines on a rope bridge while I had panic attacks.
When I was twenty six and an actor, I spent six weeks in Bali studying mask and dance. I got hit with amoebic dysentery and spent days weeping alone in my room, puking and shitting. I lost fifteen pounds.
I’d done hard things before but for some reason—no doubt related to that fourteen year old—I undermined my own achievements. For goodness sake, I gave birth three times, twice with no pain meds. Walking up Kilimanjaro, I realized for the first time that I truly had a desire for epic adventures in my life. In each case, I’d listened to some non rational voice inside, beckoning me to take off even if it didn’t make sense. But rarely are our soul callings convenient.
Fourteen year old me learned to keep herself in check, especially the part of her that had deep desires. The part of her that demanded she be seen and go after what she wanted. She suffocated that part of her because it made others uncomfortable, and she couldn’t have that.
The morning of the blue puke, we had our normal breakfast: coffee with powdered milk, fruit, sweetened cassava porridge, eggs, and cassava pancakes. I hadn’t eaten real sugar in years, preferring a low-carb or ketogenic diet. But mountain life was different. My body wanted carbs so badly at high altitude that I gleefully put sugar in my coffee. My niece and nephew were dumbfounded, having watched my carefully curated protein-heavy sugar-is-the-devil restrictive diet for years. Seeing their faces, I started laughing hysterically, which turned into crying at the same time.
“I’m Mountain Lilah!” I shrieked. “I don’t give a fuck!” I’d officially run out of fucks around 14,500 feet. Because what else was I going to do? Except listen to the guides and put one foot in front of the other? I put honey in my porridge and felt myself come back to life a bit.
Perhaps that was why I was there. To meet Mountain Lilah, the Guide for my 14 year old. Mountain Lilah did what was necessary. She fueled her body with what was available. She threw out her controlling food rules and ate the seed oils and sugar and carbs that the wonderful cook prepared. She relished in nourishing her bad ass strong capable body.
Fourteen year old me learned to fear food just as she needed and wanted it. She would close off to receiving help and guidance where Mountain Lilah relied on her guides and teammates.
Mountain Lilah howled with laughter at the idea of an “ancestral” “primal” diet. I’m a well-to-do Connecticut mom who grew up in Pittsburgh. There is nothing primal about me, no matter how many times I sauna or cold plunge or how much raw beef liver I eat. I drive a BMW for the love of Christ. Who was I fooling?
High altitude is a different world. Everything had to be slow, not just the walking. Moving around my tent made me breathless. I was gasping after going number two, which made me laugh on the toilet. Life had to be slow and purposeful. No wasteful movement, which meant loss of energy. Rest was important in a way it wasn’t back home. My red blood cells needed glucose, and so my body craved it. Honey, sugar, starch, this was what my body needed. I sucked down juice boxes of mango concentrate. Protein, eh, I ate a few meat sticks I’d brought, but I really wanted a Snickers. Red blood cells can’t use ketones, they need glucose. If I wasn’t eating it, my body was having to make it from my liver, and it’s a metabolically expensive process, especially when my body is already working overtime with less oxygen and hiking.
By giving my body what it needed, I found a new love for it. It was doing everything just right. Even the altitude sickness was just right. All I had to do was trust it, surrender and respect my body’s needs. I realized how controlling I’d been of my body since I was a girl. How I was speaking to my body was creating the very issues I said I didn’t want. I’d been telling myself I was a sugar addict, that I couldn’t tolerate carbs, but now I suspected I’d been telling myself a story that wasn’t true. It was time to let go of the stories I’d created when Wilson Phillips was singing about holding on.
On Kilimanjaro—like in 1990!—I was completely off grid. There were a couple spots with cell service, so I was able to call my husband once. It made me miss him and the kids more. I used my nephew’s Garmin satellite device to text Jeff each day. I’m alive! I wrote. At 15,500 feet, base camp for the summit. I miss you! I missed him and the kids with a ferocity that bordered on physical pain. But lying in my tent at night, I felt how deeply connected I was to my husband and kids. They are my heart. The love that I craved back when I had braces? I’ve got it in spades. There was no need to doubt it anymore.
I didn’t have the internet, only a deck of cards, a trivia game and my Kindle. My phone was to take pictures and that was it. No news to make me angry, no X, no Instagram selling me on what I was supposed to be that day, no memes to inspire me or influencers to envy. Just me and the mountain, and the people I was with. As we progressed up the mountain, the pace slowed even more. The walks became quieter. I could feel my brain being reset.
In many ways, the last six years have been about healing that fourteen year old girl who hates her body. And it’s worked. I love my body now. But Mountain Lilah wasn’t there to feel her sexy body, she was there to do something hard and taxing. To get to the summit. I found a gorgeous freedom in this. My appearance didn’t matter in the slightest. Was I warm? Was I blister-free? Was I hydrated? Those were the only questions that mattered. I was returning to the innocence of my pre-pubertal self, the one who knew her body’s capability for play and sport, exploring and having fun.
Camping and climbing are about practicalities, not unearthing the decadence of my body. Each evening while it was still light enough, I would remove one piece of clothing, wipe my body down with a wet wipe and replace it with new clothing. The higher we got the colder it became. And the less clean stuff I had.
I had no mirror or even a hairbrush. I realized how much I looked at my body at home, as if I were passing a test each day in front of the mirror. What if my body didn’t need to pass a test?
How could I really love my body when I was constantly judging it? When I was constantly evaluating it to see if it was good (thin) enough? I wasn’t thin, I was strong and meaty, and there on that mountain I was grateful for this. My muscles tethered me to the mountain.
When summit night arrived, I was nervous. I was afraid I’d be unable to sleep before departure and be exhausted. When I went to the bathroom earlier that evening, a rainbow sat in the distance and I thought of my brother. I smiled.
At 6 pm, I donned my eye mask, put earplugs in, bundled in my 0 degree bag with a melatonin patch on my stomach and dozed to the laughter of the porters in the kitchen tent behind me. We rose at 11 pm, drank tea with milk and sugar, and put on our headlamps. It was freezing. I wore four layers, one puffer and my giant blue parka. My gloves were so big I couldn't do anything with my hands except hold my hiking poles. I put on my headphones and pumped my favorite music that got me energized. It was a clear, cold night full of stars.
Off we went. We walked up the steep pitch and I tried to clear my mind of anything. To let go of time, altitude, of a need to arrive or even know what was in the blackness ahead of me.
My niece checked in with me on a stop to pee, eat a snack and drink water. “How are you doing?” she called to me from beneath a large boulder we named Poop Rock due to the amount of human feces and toilet paper surrounding it. If you had to go, you had to go.
“I’m fucking great!” I shrieked. And the thing was: it was true. It was hard and steep climbing, but we went step by step. I just followed Paul’s steady rhythm in front of me. There was no talking. There was just one step after the next. I had trained for months for this and I felt my confidence. Any time my mind said this is hard I changed it to this is fucking amazing. I could just turn my thinking around instantly, and there is nothing more powerful than this.
With each step, I pictured crushing my self-doubt like I was stamping out a cigarette. Slowly it became clear to me why I needed to climb this mountain. It was for this. This use of my body and my own voice, a crystal kind of clarity in myself. I had a lot of support on the mountain with me, but in the end, it was between me and my fourteen year old self. She didn’t know her power, and she didn’t feel amazing. But I could and did.
Before long, it was 4 am. I was standing on the tallest mountain in Africa. God was good to me in so many ways, and I felt it coursing through my body. I breathed and felt my heart pumping madly, and sometimes I had to stop to just take in more air. My head began to ache at 18000 feet. The guides began chanting gorgeous Masai warrior songs when the darkness was overwhelming and the energy sagged. I let the stream of headlights above us show me how much was left. Not being able to see the top was actually helpful. I just had to stay present where I was at that exact moment. Gratitude was my fuel.
Fourteen year old me convinced herself she wasn’t athletic. It was patently untrue; since I was little I’d been snow skiing, waterskiing, playing tennis, and riding horses. I rowed crew, played lacrosse, did pilates, spinning, running, weightlifting, hiking, barre, yoga, boxing, surfing, and swimming. I was an actor for years, and I had damn good kinetic awareness.
I’d always been curvier and struggled with my weight, so I never thought of myself as athletic despite all evidence to the contrary. I wasn’t Elissa McCarthy or Stephanie Kalson, two of the best athletes in high school with their lithe sporty bodies. I thought of myself as “artistic” despite always making room in my life for movement and fitness, so my self image wasn’t that of an athlete. Working out had been more about not being fat (or punishing my body if I was) and being a Good Girl than athleticism. I didn’t realize at the time the power of my thoughts. That telling yourself something over and over can make it true.
Climbing Kilimanjaro crushed any doubt that I can achieve whatever goal I set my mind to. My body will follow. Minimizing myself doesn’t work for me anymore. Mountain Lilah taught me that.
We reached the summit just after 8 am. The last two hours were some of the hardest and best of my life. Reaching the top of Kilimanjaro was a proud moment, but it was a watershed moment in my own understanding of myself. After the summit, I would never again be able to treat my body as a problem, as not good enough. My fourteen year old self relished this; I gave her all the love, acceptance and confidence she still so desperately needed.
Mountain Lilah knew she was never going to make up the mountain with doubt, fear and hatred. These needed to be left behind for good, they were too heavy to carry anymore. Love, trust and confidence got me up Kilimanjaro, hand in hand with that frightened girl.
This was why I said yes. This was why I needed to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Thank you for taking me with you-- what an incredible journey you look so HAPPY in that last photo!!!