My boyfriend can do almost anything.

Forgive the love-besotted hyperbole, but hear me out. He can mend a ceiling, rewire a wall, re-tile a roof, carve a chess-set, play about twelve instruments, build a bench, remodel a house, replace plumbing, landscape a yard, make a perfect fire.

He plays baseball, tennis, basketball, ice hockey, soccer, and football. When he decides he likes something, he tries to see if he can make it or do it better himself.

He makes his own chocolate. He cuts his own hair. He bakes his own bread. He mends his own clothes. He makes his own juice.

Ben will occasionally agree to spend money on something he can’t make or do. But there are very few things he will admit to not being able to make or do. He needed a root canal and a crown this winter, and there was a period of time in which he actually entertained the idea of just yanking the diseased tooth and saving the expense and bother.

He only takes medicine when pain is extreme. He climbs mountains and sleeps in snow huts and on frozen lakes or in piles of leaves or on deserted beaches with considerable regularity to remind himself he can.

Part of this rugged self-sufficiency, I’m told, comes from being Swedish. One of the legends that surrounds Ben’s late grandfather, an immigrant from Sweden to Minnesota, is that towards the end of his life, he had an inexpensive pair of tennis shoes that needed replacing. Having always mended and resoled his own shoes, he sent his son to purchase supplies for the resoling. The supplies cost around $35. The shoes had initially been purchased on sale for $30.

Although my parents certainly required a good deal from us in the way of regular chores growing up, I certainly did not grow up with the same level of belief in my own ability to make or do anything that Ben seems to take for granted in himself.

All the things I’ve learned to do well as an adult have always seemed to be near miraculous. Sometimes the mere fact that I live in a house and can pay my own bills and feed myself is about enough to stagger me.

When faced with an unfamiliar task, my default response is all too often panic, followed by a rooted conviction in my own inability to perform the task, and then that is followed closely by despair.

However, in the last few years, I’ve gotten increasingly better at jumping off cliffs into the unknown and learning to trust that I can not only learn how to do new things, I can become quite good at them. I am learning, in short, to trust myself. And trusting myself in that way makes me like myself. And I like liking myself. It beats the hell out of hating myself.

Ben has played a big role in that, but so have other family and friends—friends like Amanda who gutted and remodeled her house, who grinds her own wheat, and makes artisanal soaps.

So too has age. And travel. And broadened circles. In my thirties, I’ve driven across the country several times, lived for the very first time all alone, bought a house, baked a wedding cake, camped alone, traveled to Europe. Soon I will travel to Africa for the first time.

When I was a camp counselor in college, my biggest challenge was climbing the ropes course in order to facilitate campers. Every start up a tree for a zipline or challenge course would clench my stomach and constrict my breathing so much that I had to force myself up, sometimes with no small amount of self-talk. But I loved getting to convince kids to jump off the small ledge into that air below the zipline and then seeing them smile back at me the same giddy smile I felt within myself when I jumped.

We are told too often that growing up is about accepting restrictions, about resigning ourselves to the small portions allotted to us, about accepting the smallness of our abilities and making do with them.

But can’t growing up be more rogue than that? Can’t growing up be about the intoxicating confidence of learning that more often than not, whether you jump, slide, or fall off any zipline, usually we land safer and sounder and better than we expected?

In one of my favorite poems, “The Self-Slaved,” Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh writes of what it feels like to “put away” a self that is contingent, that is merely adequate, that has resigned itself only to accepting limitations. To slough off this self, the speaker must claim his own ability to make, his own ability to attempt what he didn’t know he could do, to claim knowledge he didn’t know he had. He writes:

Me I will throw away.
Me sufficient for the day
The sticky self that clings
Adhesions on the wings
To love and adventure.
…
I will have love, have love
From anything made of
And a life with a shapely form
And capable of receiving
With grace the grace of living
And wild moments too
Self when freed from you
Prometheus calls me: Son,
We’ll both go off together
In this delightful weather.

The gift of trying, the gift of learning to do what you didn’t know you could, are the wild moments too—jumping off ledges and laughing all the way through the unbridled air beneath.

In this delightful weather.