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.