The Dirtbag Diaries · Duct Tape Then Beer

The Shorts— Holding On By Letting Go

November 8, 2024·18 min·1 clip

Shara Zaya faces a racist who told her to go back to her country, declaring her people belong to the cradle of civilization.

The narrator opens on a climbing route in Tensleep Canyon in September 2023, her focus narrowed to the delicate crux of what she describes as her first 5.13. The memory gives way to her history. She was born in Ohio to parents who emigrated from Iraq: her father from a family with ancient Assyrian roots that span modern-day Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and her mother who came through the pharmacy and neonatology training that earned them both positions at the Cleveland Clinic. The Assyrian people suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and her parents were part of a growing diaspora in the Chicago area before settling in Ohio. After September 11, 2001, the ambient racism in her childhood became sharp and derogatory. She describes hearing terrorist, towelhead, and go back to your country directed at her. Her response was a form of methodical self-erasure: straightening her hair, adopting trendy clothes, begging her parents to stop speaking to her in Aramaic, and cutting off any cultural marker that would make her visibly different. She describes this as trying to be American in the most Eurocentric sense possible. She discovered climbing at a Denver gym in early 2019 when two friends invited her, and found almost immediately that the sport demanded a kind of total physical and mental presence that had no room for the performance of identity. Climbing, she writes, asked her to trust her body as a body rather than as a symbol of something threatening or foreign. Over the following years, as she progressed from indoor walls to outdoor crags, she found herself encountering other climbers of Middle Eastern and immigrant backgrounds and realizing that the outdoors community was not uniformly white. The essay returns to Tensleep Canyon and the 5.13 crux, where the physical precision required blocks out everything else, including the years of shame, and she completes the route. The Dirtbag Diaries outro includes a segment called And Then What, an unrelated spoken vignette about a climb in the Minstry of Magic area.

As heard by us

A reflective climbing story where Shara's first 5.13 attempt carries questions of identity, racism, diaspora, and release.

Shara's story turns a first 5.13 attempt on Ministry of Magic in Tensleep Canyon into something larger than a climbing milestone. The route gives the episode its spine: chalk, thin smears, a delicate crux, and the frustration of wanting to send while feeling left behind.

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Why you'd press play

A climbing day opens into a hard, clear story about being asked where you really come from.

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