I didn’t choose the name because it sounded poetic. Okay, perhaps I did, just a little bit. But I primarily chose it because it felt true.
Life, at least the way I’ve lived and felt it, is a kind of balancing act. Between meaning and madness. Between holding on and letting go. Between the gravity that keeps us tethered to what we know, and the longing that pulls us upward toward what we can only imagine.
The tightrope is that narrow line between the two: the space where balance is fleeting but movement is still possible. And the high… the high is both the danger and the exhilaration of being there, and being alive.
I used to climb. Real cliffs, not metaphors. And I remember how the air would get thinner the higher I went, how the world fell away until everything below became a quiet blur. You couldn’t see the bottom. You couldn’t predict where you’d land if you fell. There was only the next hold, the next breath, and the echoing reminder that the rope might be the only thing between you and disaster.
That same dizziness, the mix of awe and fear, the trembling that comes from standing somewhere both beautiful and unsafe, that’s what life often feels like to me.
Because uncertainty is its own kind of height. We can’t always see what’s below, or know where the rope will lead. We only know that it’s in our nature to climb. To rise. To reach.
It seems written into us, this human impulse to go higher, even when we can’t see the bottom, even when the air thins and the rope sways. From mountains to moon landings, from the search for knowledge to the ache for meaning, we’ve always risked the fall for the chance to touch something just beyond reach.
Tightrope High became the name because it felt like an honest description of being human. That fragile, thrilling act of trying to stay upright between meaning and madness, heart and reason, fear and faith.
It’s not about control. It’s about courage. It’s about the quiet bravery of continuing to walk, even when the rope shakes, the wind rises, and you still don’t know what waits on the other side.
If these words help someone else feel a little steadier on their own rope, or simply less alone in the balancing, then maybe the act of walking, and writing, was worth it after all.
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