At What Cost

I stayed up while my family slept.

The house was quiet, but my body wasn’t.

I had a sense of impending doom—the kind that settles in your chest without explanation, heavy and insistent. I tried to soothe myself the only way I knew how: a hot shower and ASMR. Steam filled the bathroom as water hit my back, and through my phone someone pretended to part my hair. The creator goes by mothcountyasmr. I let the soft tone, the careful pauses, convince me—just for a moment—that someone was there to take care of me.

I started the new year with borrowed comfort.

Not long after, the quiet broke. Gunshots. Fireworks. Celebration colliding with violence, or maybe the other way around. The sounds echoed through the night, sharp and disorienting. It felt fitting.

I didn’t actually get up for the day until close to noon.

We drove to Pinnacle Mountain in Arkansas—a mountain I had climbed once before with my mom in 2020. Six years later, we tried again. From the base to the summit, there are ten checkpoints, meant to break the climb into manageable pieces. Instead, they felt like ten checkpoints from hell.

I started strong. My legs moved easily at first, my breath steady. By checkpoint three, I began to second-guess myself. It felt easier this time. Faster. I mistook momentum for endurance.

That’s when I went solo.

My mom tapped out.

From checkpoints four to six, breathing became work. Each inhale felt shallow, each exhale forced. I refused to stop. I refused to slow down. I kept walking because stopping felt like failure, and failure felt heavier than the pain.

By checkpoint eight, I finally allowed myself to sit—no longer than one minute. Long enough to feel the burn, not long enough to recover. Just past marker nine, I fell. My hands scraped against the rock as I caught myself, then I knelt to retie my shoe with shaking fingers.

As I stood back up, my younger brothers sprinted past me, barely winded. I was drenched in sweat, my heart pounding so loudly I could hear it in my ears, feel it in my throat. Embarrassment and determination tangled together until I couldn’t tell them apart.

When I reached marker ten—the top—I didn’t celebrate. I just sat.

How did I do this six years ago?

I had climbed this same mountain with ease, smiling, laughing, taking photos. Now I watched other families talk, pose, and point out the view. I realized that was me once. Same place. Different girl.

The girl in those photos will never exist again. And the version of me sitting here—exhausted, shaking, silent—will never exist again either.

The way down felt like letting go.

At first, it was manageable. I made it to checkpoint seven before the pain arrived—pins and needles crawling through my legs, muscles spasming without warning. By checkpoint five, my legs turned to jelly, unreliable and weak. By checkpoint four, they stopped responding entirely, shaking so violently I couldn’t stand on my own.

My brother had to hold me upright.

I fell three times.

By the final checkpoint, both of my younger brothers were on either side of me, holding my arms as I cried my way toward the parking lot. I wasn’t quiet about it. I didn’t try to be.

I made it to the top.

And I made it back down.

“But at what cost?” my mom asked.

I didn’t have an answer.

She shook her head. She couldn’t understand why I kept going when I was clearly in pain. My legs shook for five hours after the hike, but I saw something beautiful. I cried in a way that felt necessary, overdue even.

To me, it was healing.

Her words linger, though—at what cost. They feel less like a warning and more like a promise. A reminder that everything worth doing asks something of you.

I don’t want to live held back by fear of what something might cost me. I will gladly pay the price if it means I don’t wake up at fifty saying, I never got to.

Some things hurt.

Some things break you open.

Some things are still worth it.