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When ice climbing, Weihenmayer listens to the sound of the tools to help find the best route upward.
When people said I couldn’t do this or that, I didn’t say anything to them—I responded by going and doing it.
What is the typical reaction you get when you tell people what you do? There are always people who share your vision and there are those who don’t. When I was younger I would tell people I wanted to climb Everest. Some people would say, that’s so cool, I’d love to get behind that and help you. Other people—of course I couldn’t see them, but I envi- sioned them looking at me like, are you crazy? They’d say, you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to slow everyone down. You’re going to have to take massive amounts of risk. I guess that’s how I’d split the world up: either you’re a believer or you’re a naysayer.
So what do you tell the naysayers? When people said I couldn’t do this or that, I mean, I didn’t say anything to them—I responded by going and doing it. I don’t try to do things in the mountains or on the rivers just to prove that blind people can; I try to be motivated by friendship, by great teams, by figuring out how to problem-solve and innovate around barriers. I think our country was founded on this pioneering mind-set—people finding passes over the mountains,
starting homesteads, and figuring out how to survive and flourish with their families and their communities. That’s our history, and I think in the modern world it’s still important to see ourselves as pioneers: to discover, to innovate, to create. This kind of attitude can make our lives harder because it brings adversity. When you’re striving and reaching your life will be clearly harder—but it will be more fulfilling as well. The most exciting moments of our lives are when we break through those barriers standing between us and the things that other people see as impossible or improbable, but we believe in our hearts to be possible.
How did you arrive at this approach to adversity in your own life? I went blind from a very rare eye disease just before my freshman year in high school. At first, I was being led from class to class, being led all around, and I hated that. I remember sitting in the cafeteria alone and listening to people—all the kids around me laughing and telling jokes—and wondering, is the adventure and the happi- ness of my life gone? Is it over? Is this it? Am I going to
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skyler williams
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