The Pit of Despair: What Getting Stuck in a Pit Taught Me About Being Seen
A few winters ago, I got stuck at the bottom of a pit in the middle of the Utah desert and could not get out. Picture 15 feet of smooth rock above me, no handholds, and my husband already half-convinced this was how we were going to die. The trail marker actually called this spot “the pit of possible return,” which I found very funny right up until I was standing in it, at which point I renamed it the pit of despair in my head.
We eventually got out (obviously, since I’m here writing this). But how we got out has stuck with me longer than almost any business book I’ve read, because it taught me something I watch talented women get wrong all the time, including me. When you’re stuck, the way forward is almost never trying harder in private. It’s two things most of us are really bad at: staying calm enough to look around, and being loud enough to be found.
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The safety briefing I was too cocky to take seriously
Let me back up. Before winding up at the bottom of said pit, a park ranger spent a solid while trying to keep me and Tzvi from winding up in any situation like this. The Fiery Furnace trail requires a permit you have to win in a lottery, and before they’ll let you anywhere near the trail, they sit you down for a long, detailed safety briefing. Bring more water than you think you need. Don’t follow other people’s footprints, because everyone wanders in different directions and you’ll get lost. Stay oriented. The trail isn’t really a “trail,” per se.
I half-listened. The hike was listed at two miles round trip, and we’d been doing ten- and twelve-mile days all week, so I was feeling pretty cocky about this experience. We left most of our water in the car and brought a single protein bar between us, because I had decided in advance that this would be quick and easy and nothing would go wrong.
Boy, was I wrong.
What I didn’t get yet is that the briefing was never about the difficulty level of the hike; it was a warning about what happens when the path stops being obvious.
In the Fiery Furnace Trail, as in business, the path stops being obvious eventually. The early stretch is often well-marked and a little thrilling, so you start to believe that’s just what the terrain is like. Then the path starts feeling murkier, and the choices you make in that moment are the ones that decide whether you climb through or fall into the pit of despair. The people who handle that stretch well are the ones who took the unglamorous prep seriously back when nothing felt urgent.
Why “just try harder” is the worst approach
When the trail got confusing, I spotted footprints dropping down into a lower section and followed them, which is the exact thing I’d been told not to do twenty minutes earlier. The drop was steeper than it looked, and within five minutes it was obvious there was no path down there, but when we turned to climb back up, the rock was too smooth and too high. With just two of us, there was simply no way out.
Tzvi went straight into panic. The thing about panic is that it feels productive, even responsible, like you care enough about the situation to lose your mind over it. But panic is the opposite of useful, because it shrinks your vision down to the walls of the pit. When you’re in that state, you can’t see the options that are right in front of you, because seeing options takes a little distance and panic erases distance completely.
I watch business owners live in this kind of stuck state constantly. Revenue stalls, or the launch flops, or the thing that always worked suddenly stops working, and the response is to dig in harder. More hours, more posts, the same effort applied with more desperation. Or the opposite, where you abandon the whole thing and bolt toward something new with no strategy at all. Both come from panic, and both keep you exactly where you are, just more exhausted.
I am not naturally the calm one in my relationship; in most emergencies, I’m the one spiraling. But in that pit I made a deliberate decision that one of us had to keep a clear head, and it was going to have to be me. I didn’t feel calm at all. My insides were screaming, but I understood in that moment that both of us panicking was going to lead nowhere good. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Staying calm under pressure is a choice you make in the moment. And staying calm right then is the only way I heard what would eventually be our salvation.
The thing panic made my husband miss
Out of nowhere, I heard voices of other people on the trail, somewhere above us. Tzvi, locked inside his own head, didn’t register them at all, and I only did because I’d spent the last few minutes forcing myself to stay present. I ran toward the sound and started yelling for help.
It was a group of women hiking together. They couldn’t reach us from where they were, but they stopped, took down our information, and promised that if our car was still in the lot when they finished, they’d go find a ranger. And then they did something I didn’t find out about until later: they told every single person they passed for the rest of the trail to keep an eye out for a stuck couple.
This group helped by broadcasting our situation loudly, to strangers, on the simple bet that the more people who knew, the better our odds. And it worked exactly the way they planned, but I’ll get to that.
The couple who looked at us and walked away
Not long after the first group of women had taken our info and gone on their way, I heard a second set of voices, this time from a section below us. I called down to the man and woman below with the same plea: we’re stuck, we can’t get out, can you help? They looked up at us, said nope, good luck, and they kept walking.
I was genuinely stunned, and I’ve turned that moment over a hundred times since, because I can’t picture looking at two stuck people and not even trying to help. I want to be careful here, though, because the easy read is “some people are good and some people are bad,” and that’s not the lesson. I don’t know what was going on for that couple. Maybe they were scared. Maybe they’d had their own hard day. The point isn’t to tear apart their characters, but their unwillingness to even engage meant we got nothing from them, whether or not they actually could have helped.
This might be uncomfortable to face, but if you run a business, you are very likely that couple sometimes. Not because you’re unkind. The opposite, probably. You most likely got into this work specifically to help people. But every time you stay quiet about what you do, every time a post feels too self-promotional so you don’t hit publish, every time you keep your offer to yourself because announcing it feels icky, you start to look exactly like someone who doesn’t want to help at all. The person who needs you can’t tell the difference between “unwilling” and “invisible.” From where they’re standing, both just look like a closed door.
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Being visible is just being findable
This is the reframe I most want you to take from this one, because I think it gets lost every time we talk about marketing. We treat being visible as a performance, something a little vain and a little gross, the price you pay to grow. So the generous, humble move feels like staying quiet, doing excellent work, and trusting that the right people will somehow find you anyway.
But the women at the top of that trail show the powerful effect of being loud about how you can help. The only reason a completely different couple, strangers who weren’t even part of their group, eventually climbed down into that pit and pulled us out one by one is that those women had told everyone to look out for us. Without that visibility, all the goodwill in the world stays trapped in someone’s head while the stuck people stay stuck.
If you have something that can get someone out of their pit and you keep it to yourself, the help you’re so proud of being capable of never reaches anyone. The most caring thing you can do is to be loud enough that the people you’re built to help can actually find you.
You also have to be willing to yell
There’s a flip side to all of this, and it’s the harder one for a lot of us. The reason those women knew we needed help is that I yelled. I had to admit, out loud, to strangers, that we’d made a dumb call and couldn’t fix it ourselves. If I’d been too proud to shout, if I’d just kept trying to scramble up smooth rock so nobody would see us struggling, we’d have stayed down there until the rangers came looking at nightfall.
Plenty of capable people are stuck right now in exactly that way, trying to claw out of something in private because asking for help feels like admitting they couldn’t hack it alone. But some pits really do take another set of hands. Knowing the moment when effort alone won’t do it, and saying so out loud, is the thing that actually creates the possibility of change for you.
Return is possible
That trail marker had it right and I had it wrong. Return was always possible, it just wasn’t possible through effort alone, and it wasn’t possible in silence.
If you’re stuck right now, if the thing that used to work has stopped, if you can’t see the path from where you are to where you want to be, if you know you could help people but can’t figure out how to talk about it without feeling like a sellout, the way out is the same one that worked for us in that pit. Stay calm enough to actually see your options. Get loud enough to be found. And when you hit the part that just can’t be done with two hands and a lot of trying, call out to someone who can pull you up.
Your action steps this week
Pick the one piece of your work you’ve been hiding the most — the offer you mention only when someone asks directly, the thing you’re best at but rarely post about. That’s your stuck spot. This week, say it out loud, on purpose, somewhere people can hear you: one post, one email, one conversation where you actually name what you do and who you can help.
Then notice where you’ve been banging your head against a wall, trying to scramble up smooth rock alone. What’s the thing you’ve been trying to white-knuckle through in private because asking for help feels like failing? Name it, and name one person who could be your other set of hands. Being found starts with letting yourself be seen, both by the people you can help and by the people who can help you.
RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED
- NeetoCal — The calendar booking tool I use to keep my business running smoothly
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- Work with me 1:1 — brand messaging, website strategy, and content that sounds like you. Start with a free 15-Minute Vibe Check
