I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me. That I could catch my breath.
But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.
I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms. Without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.
When my father was in my life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. What has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised. But he is still the father who raised her.
Some days the hiking comes easy. When I played college sports, it was called being in the zone, so I guess it’s similar to that. My steps are smooth, my breathing is even, and my mind is present with my surroundings.
Some days, though, the hiking is just plain hard. The baggage feels like too much. The pit in my stomach is so deep I feel like if I take one more step I’m going to tumble down into a hole I can never hope to crawl out of.
Today was one of those days. I had lofty goals. I wanted Mount Madison. And I wanted the King Ravine trail. I was riding a high from a few weeks ago when I went up and down Beaver Brook trail and then did the Baldfaces and Eagle Crag the next day. I was in the zone that weekend. Today was very different. There was this pit. I couldn’t shake it. Nothing I could do would get rid of it.
I hiked a mile with that pit. It grew larger with every step I took. I finally sat down on a rock, ate a pop tart, and gave up on my original plan. I tried a different plan, one that didn’t involve a mountain. But as I started hiking out the new trail I had picked, that didn’t work either. Now, not only was I crying, but my anxiety was so out of control I was sure that if I took one more step the trail was going to plunge me into mortal danger and I would be lost in the mountains forever. It was a long drive back home.
That pit sucks.
That pit is hard to understand, but I’ve come to realize that it encompasses feelings of sadness, grief and loss. Sadness for all the pain that these past two years have held. The enormity of what I’ve been through seems to have slowly crept its way into my consciousness. There are not words strong enough to describe my experience, but what I do know is that the desperation, emptiness and gut-wrenching depression felt intolerable and impossible to escape. I feel the intensity of that experience as if it was yesterday. Somehow, the past still feels like the present.
It is a stark contrast to where I am now, and perhaps this is why I feel it so deeply. Today, my emotions are light, my soul has more moments of contentment than it does depression, and I see free time as areas of opportunity. Moments of hope are more common than moments of dread, and the phrase “live your best life” no longer seems like some stupid cliche.
Even today, as I struggle with being able to accept where I am and owning the happiness that I have, I remember what it is like to not have any of this. And the sadness I feel for all those years I struggled is part of what makes up this pit.
The other part of the pit is grief. Feelings of loss for time I can never get back. Feelings of loss for time I feel was wasted away. I think the reason I feel this grief so intensely today is because I understand how quickly time can be taken away. Today, the time I have is filled with moments of joy, peace and anticipation for the moments ahead of me. The time isn’t perfect, but it is so much more than tolerable. And I grieve the loss of so many years when it wasn’t.
“Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
–Shel Silverstein
The next time I hike, I will honor that pit. And after I pay that pit the respect it deserves, I will gather up my feelings and keep walking.
I don’t want to see anything outside of my little boxed-in world. All I can do is sit here on the couch and pray that no one needs anything from me, or that nothing else exists. Being numb to everything = safety. The crying starts and I feel like it is going to break me. And I have nothing to soothe it. No alcohol. No drugs. No eating disorder. No cutting. The intensity of the pain I am feeling is unreal. I have two options. First, I can stay very still and let the internal agitation and anxiety threaten to well up inside me until I pull out every strand of hair or bang my head on a wall so hard that I see stars. Or I can give into that agitation and watch as it turns into tears. And not just any tears – full-out body shaking sobbing that has the potential to rip my heart and my stomach outside of my body.
Neither of those options are acceptable to me. But here we are.
To engage with life again feels like slowly creeping across an old, battered bog bridge that should have been replaced years ago. It is rotting and feels more like a teeter-totter rather than a way across the water or mud. Bog bridges can be a lifeline sometimes. They preserve both the trail as well as dry hiking boots. But to use them appropriately, one must treat them with respect that their long life has earned them. Your first step must be a tentative one. Your second one might be equally as tentative. This is how it is trying to recover from a bout of depression. You try and take a step outside of your comfort zone. And for me, on this journey, it can mean something as simple as getting up off the couch and getting a snack. Or taking the dog for a walk. Or reading a magazine. All of these things feel monumental at the time, and the shitty thing is, they are supposed to make you feel better. And then they don’t. All they end up doing is making me feel like a kindergartener, trying to navigate my life over a set of bog bridges, desperately trying to make it to the other side without being completely swamped by the disgusting mud I am attempting to walk over. To me, life feels like a trail built solely of rotten bog bridges – they do the job, but nothing is ever certain, and every little moment takes real focus so as not to fall off the bog bridge.
The most important thing to do right now is stop being so afraid of falling off the bog bridges. For the most part, they are there to protect the trail, and to prevent us from soggy feet. Fear can be paralyzing. If you see the bog as an adventure, maybe the fear can dissipate a bit. I’m afraid to act outside of the tensed-up ball of anxiety that has such a grasp on my stomach, but this is clearly not working. Life feels mundane right now. I want action. I want activity. But paradoxically, I also want routine, structure and consistency. But paradoxically again, I want excitement, even a little bit of enjoyment wouldn’t be so bad. Next hike – bog bridges. Bring it on
Keep reading this. Don’t be impulsive and rip it up. I know that’s what you want to do. You want to quit again. You’re tired of trying. Tired of fighting. Too many demons.
Keep reading. Look down at your wrist. Feel that pain, that desperation. Acknowledge. Remember. Remember where you went after that night. Remember the pain you fought through. Remember the grieving.
But also remember the growing. Remember the confidence you gained. Remember the power you held once again. Remember the countless people who helped get you back on your feet. Remember the process, and remember the anticipation you had tobegin again.That anticipation, that power, that fight – they always come back. Each and every time. Don’t quit. Get help if you need it. Reach out. Ask. But don’t do irreversible damage. Every time you have gone through something like this, every time you have come to a place where you didn’t think it was possible to go any lower, you fought your way through. You are a survivor, and no-one can take that away from you. You may feel worse than you have ever felt in your life, and you may need help again. And that is okay. Get that help, before it’s too late. And know this – you will make it out of the darkness once again. I promise you.
Typically, I would write something inspiring about what the mountains have taught me, or something the forests and the trees have helped me accomplish.
But right now, I want to tell everyone who wants me to keep trying, to fuck off. You haven’t been in my shoes. You haven’t had to carry my bag. You just don’t know. That’s not your fault. But it’s the truth.
I’m holding myself too tightly to manage one step forward. I’m afraid the demon that seems to be living inside me will explode out of my stomach and cause a rage that I have no idea how to tolerate. If I don’t move, if I lie very still, the demon doesn’t wake. If I stay, safely within the walls of the present moment and pretend nothing else exists, I am safe. I feel protected. But don’t ask me to stand up. Don’t ask me to look ahead. Certainly, don’t ask me to make a decision. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I can’t.
If I lay very still, the demon thinks he has defeated me, and that he can rest a while before his next attack. If you’ve ever read stories about how the approach to being attacked by a bear is different depending on what type of bear it is, then the next few paragraphs might make some sense to you
Who am I kidding? I don’t want to write. I just want to have this all be over with. I feel like I have nothing to live for, but no reason to die. Things just feel stupid. And I hate stupid. More on the bears later.
I promise I haven’t forgotten about the bears. To put it simply, if it’s a black bear chasing you, you fight. If it’s a brown bear trying to maul you, you play dead and hope for the best. My demon seems to be a grizzly. Which is brown. There you have it.
As it turns out, the demon is bipolar disorder. And the demon is a widely raging tornado that is determined to obliterate everything in its path, including both my own past and my own future. How can two simple words make me question my whole entire life to this point? How can two simple words make the here and now seem so intolerable? And how can those two little words make me so afraid of the future?
Two words. Words don’t have power, but the symptoms that make up those words absolutely do. The diagnosis makes sense, but with that diagnosis comes more pain than I ever thought was possible. Acceptance is usually met with a profound sense of relief, but I am not there yet. There is way too much to sort through yet. For me, all I feel is pain. It feels like my body is going to explode from all the hurt and bitterness and anger and sadness and grief and loss, and that all of these emotions are going to swallow me up whole so that I’m left with just a shell of a person that might as well not even exist anymore. Either I’m flat, emotionally cut-off from myself and everyone else, or I am crying so hard I think my chest is going to explode or my stomach is going to rip apart. What do you do with this? What? Pop me full of pills and send me on my way. I understand the pills. It’s not the medications that I’m fighting. I’m fighting the pain and the loss that I cannot seem to tolerate. I look back at my life and if feels like 25 years of wreckage and sewage. I have made so many bad choices, I have been so impulsive at times, I’ve lost relationships and I’ve lost time. I know this is the start of a way to move forward, but right now, all I can see is pain. I know this is meant to be a hiking blog, but I can’t, for the life of me, come up with an analogy. Nothing related to my experiences with hiking and backpacking can compete with this. Trying to compare hiking to this deep-seated pain seems sacrilegious. Hiking brings out the parts of me that I am proud of, and the deep sense of grief has no business here.
“Exactly,” she said again. “You have to tell. It can’t be a secret. Secrets make everyone alone. Secrets lead to panic like that night at the restaurant. When you keep it a secret, you get hysterical. You get to thinking you’re the only one there is who’s like you, who’s both and neither and betwixt, who forges a path every day between selves, but that’s not so. When you’re alone keeping secrets, you get fear. When you tell, you get magic. Twice.”
“Twice?”
“You find out you’re not alone. And so does everyone else. That’s how everything gets better. You share your secret, and you change the world.”
“It’s not that easy.” Grumwald felt his lungs scritching to become one in his chest. “I can’t just share my secret. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to understand. It’s complicated.”
“Of course it is. It’s life.”
“So how do I do it then? How do I share my secret? What do I tell?”
“Your story.” The witch didn’t even hesitate. “You tell your story. That is what we all must do.”
“That’s not magic,” said Grumwald.
“Of course it is,” said the witch. “Story is the best magic there is.”
–Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is: A Novel
I see your face in front of mine, so close I can see directly into your bluish-gray eyes.
I don’t know what to do with this except try to punch you away from me. But no matter how hard I keep punching, your face keeps reappearing. It won’t go away. That face. I have no words to describe the look on your face only that it is inches from mine, and I know it shouldn’t be.
I don’t have a hiking analogy for this one. There is no part of hiking that invades your privacy as intensely as you did mine. It seems sacrilegious to even try to compare my Eden of hiking and mountains to the intrusiveness and perversion of your face.
A map shows you what’s obvious if you know how to use it. It shows you the route you should go. It shows you which way to turn. It tells you when to ask for help. It tells you how hard you are going to have to work to get where you are going. It will tell you when you’ll get a view, when you’re above treeline, and how much farther you have to go.
If you know how to use it.
Sometimes knowing how to use it is more terrifying than being blissfully ignorant. Sometimes knowing what is coming makes the effort you are putting in even more exhausting. Someone once told me that pain is what you are feeling right now. It is the fatigued muscles and the gasping for breath that you are having in the present moment. Pain is okay. Pain is tolerable. What makes pain no longer tolerable is suffering. Suffering is when you take the pain you are having in the present moment, look ahead to the future at all the pain you are sure is coming, and adding that pain onto the pain you are already having. In other words, you are piling pain upon pain upon pain that hasn’t even happened yet. You are looking at that map and looking at the elevation gain per mile you are walking, and you know that the hell is coming. This makes your level of fatigue and your racing heart feel unbearable and leads to doubt, exhaustion, and an extreme desire to turn around and quit. But if you focus on just the next step, and then the next one and the next one, bit by bit, you realize that what you thought was terrifying was actually just pain that eventually will subside.
I want to tear up all my fucking maps.
I know what I wrote. I know what map is staring me right in the face. But I refuse to follow my map. I follow another map. The one that says to protect your family at all costs. The one that says if what I wrote is actually true, my heart will break into a million pieces and the suffering will continue day after day after day. I follow the map that refuses to shatter the image of the perfect family we had growing up. I follow the map that tells me to keep running. I follow the map that allows me to be anywhere in the world except for where I am. I follow the map that tells me to keep secrets, to keep my mouth shut, to hide my trauma and addiction and pain from each person I meet, every day, every month, all year. I follow the map that says I’m a hero. And that is much easier to follow than my own map that shows me truth, reveals secrets, and offers freedom.
