Selfish, egotistical, irresponsible, and lazy

Why I'm planning a thru-hike even though I pretty much hate myself for it

[ CW: this is a pretty dark piece. I don’t need you to come along on that ride if you’re not in a place to do so. ]

It’s selfish, it’s irresponsible, it’s escapist. It’s anti-community, it’s abandonment, it’s a mid-life crisis, it’s a symptom, it’s a sin. I’m flaunting my privilege, I’m choosing to look away, I’m navel-gazing at a time when only rabble-rousing is an acceptable response to the problems we face. I’m running from my children because I don’t know how to help them. I’m running from my town because local politics is difficult. I’m running from my identity because I hate myself, running from civilization as if that’s any kind of sustainable solution to anything. I’m running from work because I’m lazy and from people because I’m anti-social and from activism because I’m scared. I’m just generally shitty and this whole trip is just one more brick in the wall of my shittiness.

Most people I talk to, most of the time, will tell me they think my plan to thru-hike Vermont’s Long Trail this summer is kinda cool, or brave, or badass. But that’s not what I’m telling myself right now. Oh, I’m still planning to do it. It’s pretty much the only thing I’m planning to do. But I don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel proud. I don’t feel like a badass. I just feel bad.

****

Objectively, I think it’s pretty cool that last July I had never been backpacking before in my life, but that when the forest told me to come and live there, to walk through it, I said okay I guess I’ll learn how to do that. Objectively I’m impressed with myself for the sustained focus I have given this project, the varieties of ways I have been preparing myself for it. I’ve learned about bears and about giardia, cat holes and compasses. I’ve learned that the two main forest communities I’ll be walking through are northern hardwood (beech, birch, maple) forests and spruce-fir forests. I’ve learned the difference between a bog and a marsh, I can tell you the pluses and minuses of shelter systems ranging from tarps to hammocks to single wall tents and double wall tents.

I can tell you what the umbles are, and what they mean. (Stumbles, fumbles, grumbles, mumbles, and what they mean is you’re at the edge of some physiological limit — heat exhaustion, hypothermia, dehydration, hunger, lack of sleep). I know how to dry my damp socks against my chest while I sleep, I know how to filter my water, I know that if the temperature at night might dip below freezing, I should sleep with my water filter, because my kind of filter can’t freeze. I know about trail angels and resupply stops and how to treat blisters and chafe.

I can pitch a trekking pole tent, I can tie a tautline hitch, I can tell you how much my stove system weighs (13.5 oz) and how much my sleeping pad weighs (12.5 oz) and how much my rain paints weigh (2.5 oz). I am studying my maps and guides and I’m doing squats and I’m doing foot exercises and I’m learning more and more about the ecosystems I’ll be traveling through: what bear tracks look like, what to do if you encounter a moose, how to hitchhike safely, why the trails are closed during mud season and why the alpine tundra is so delicate. I’ve read a lot of journals from the Long Trail so I know that the northern half is more remote and more difficult, the southern part more crowded. I know about the blackflies and the ticks and the mosquitoes. I have a kevlar bear bag and a satellite messenger.

I’ve been training with long hikes, by climbing hills, by going to a rock gym, by going to hot yoga classes. I went on a 3 day backpacking trip in Arizona led by an experienced thru-hiker named Carrot, who taught me how to pack my pack, who told me what I didn’t need to bring and what I did, who cheered me along and taped my blisters and answered my “where can I poop” and “how do I pitch this tent” questions. At the end of the trip Carrot told me I was “durable and competent” and I took that assessment back to my family and to my psychopharmacologist as a kind of certification of the basic sanity of this plan.

Look, I say, pointing to those words “durable and competent”: I’m not crazy. I’m just driven to do this thing. I’m sensible, I’m prepared, I’m practical.

I’m sane.

***

Still, mostly I think I’m probably shitty.

For the record, yeah, I think we need a ceasefire right now, just as I thought we needed one in October and in November and so on. I think it’s part of my responsibility to stand up for that, as an American, as a Jewish person, as a woman, as a human. Which I do, but I also think I’m doing a shitty job of it, that I fumble my words at times I should be clear, that I don’t do enough, don’t speak enough, say the wrong thing when I speak, that I’m wrong wrong wrong.

I don’t think I’m doing enough about that. I also don’t think I’m doing enough about trans rights, or fascism, or the upcoming election, or abortion rights, or the climate crisis. I don’t think I’m doing enough for my kids, or for my community, or for my cats. I’m not doing enough for my friends, my clients, my parents, my in-laws.

Basically I’m fucking everything up all the time, every day.

There are some items on the Beck Depression Inventory, my favorite depression measurement instrument, that are relevant here. “I blame myself all the time for my faults.” “I feel guilty all of the time.” “"I hate myself.” “I feel I may be punished.”¹ What I love about the Beck Depression Inventory is that some of these things just sound absolutely bananas when you take the test when you are feeling fine, but then, turn around, and here you are, certain that something you did the other day will result in your impending punishment, that everything bad in the world is somehow your fault, that you are looking old, that you are generally a failure, that everyone hates you and every word that comes out of your mouth is trash, and likely self-serving trash at that.

Honestly it’s a miracle I ever get on with anything in my life, the way my mind goes on and on about how much I’m fucking it all up. It’s exhausting.

***

A friend sent me some pictures of an artwork he saw at the Whitney last weekend, and I said it reminded me of ECT. You didn’t have such great memories of ECT, you said, he texted me, and I texted back, that’s true, but it wasn’t the ECT that was really The Problem. The ECT was just one of the many, many things I’ve tried over the years to throw at The Problem, and for all the trouble ECT caused me it’s The Problem that makes my memory of the ECT so bad. The Problem of Pain, as I wrote in an issue of my other newsletter, Woe:

But even so, all that pain piles up in the body, just like any other kind of trauma would. It’s unreasonable, a disease that breaks you again and again on its rack, takes years of your life from you even when you survive each episode. It wears you down and it uses you up.

[***]

And you have a right to treat that pain with gravity, to call it a demon, to cry out to any god or none to spare you from it, as you’d ask to be spared from any disaster.

***

I have lived my entire life with that demon. I have done so by my willingness to try every trick in the book, many of them more than once, as well as tricks not found in any books, not offered by any doctor or therapist or rabbi or shaman — tricks I invented myself. I carry a list in my back pocket, if a no longer works, then b. If not b, try c. If not c, maybe a again? I pull something off the top of that list and I try to put something else back down at the bottom, so I never, never run out.

Somewhere on that list, so far down at the bottom of it that usually when I put something new on the list it doesn’t go to the very bottom, because it goes on top of the things that live on the very bottom of the list, somewhere down there it said thru-hike. Thru-hike was probably added around 2012, right when I was getting the ECT and also when Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild came out. I was a big Cheryl Strayed fan at the time. It was likely a more specific replacement for the vague “drastic outdoor experience you’ll probably hate the shit out of” that would have been living down there at the bottom of the list before that.

The stuff down there at the bottom of the list is stuff I never really wanted to have to get to, never anticipated arriving at. Down there at the bottom of the deep ocean trench that is my despair, such ideas appear to be grotesque, bizarre, amoral, indefensible, even Unclean. They are ideas that, to me, only made sense when the alternative appeared to be death.

I have a lot of reasons for going to the forest, but one of them, maybe the main one, is that I hope and believe that somehow in the forest I will find some question to ask besides "when do I get to be done with living?” It would be too much to hope for some kind of answer — I’m just hoping for a different question.

Against all the reasons I can name that I ought not to go, is that reason enough to justify going?

Who am I trying to justify myself to, anyways?

It’s I who thinks these harsh thoughts about my plan, it’s not other people. I’m the person I need to justify myself to, and the fact is that I have always found myself unjustifiable. Isn’t that one of the reasons I’ve declared the sunset so important? — because it too is unjustifiable, it is beyond judgment, and to stand before the unjustifiable sunset as an unjustifiable person isn’t all that different from standing before the whirlwind, before a universe so large and so mysterious that the need for my own life to make sense to me falls away.

I can tell you all the reasons that this apparently wholesome, life-affirming, healthy adventure for which I am, in fact, quite adequately prepared is actually a sign of my moral turpitude, but I hope — I suspect, I even trust — that when faced with days and days of walking in the forest, days and days of listening to the wind in the trees, sleeping on the ground, slogging in the rain — that my ideas about my own moral turpitude may evaporate.

Faced with the endless tasks involved in surviving in the woods, I hope that I will find less mental energy for hating myself, and less craving for death.

reductress

A post shared by @reductress

Do I make this trip about life and death so no one can question me (“it’s for my fucking health, okay!”) because I'm selfish? Or because this plan has been in my back pocket for a while now, like exorcism, and I finally pulled it out: "you can always try a thru-hike" — crumpled up in the bottom of my back pocket like a goddamn fortune fished from a crushed-up sat-upon cookie?

Here I am, finally arrived at this particular fortune: after therapy, after CBT and ACT and DBT and MBCT, after every kind of med, after ECT and ketamine trips and paleo diets and yoga and shakti mats and hospitals and cold plunges and antipsychotics and breathing exercises and meditation retreats and sex and cigarettes and alcohol and shamanistic practitioners and prayer and reiki and strength training and fish oil and probiotics and adaptogens and entheogens and so many things I don’t even remember anymore — given all that, given how basically non-harming a long walk in the woods is, how wholesome — you’d think I’d feel better about it.

You’d think I’d feel some pride, or calm, or excitement, or at least not quite such self-loathing.

But in this moment, I mostly feel bad. But maybe feeling so bad about going, so unreasonably, so pathologically, is paradoxically the proof I need that I ought in fact to go.

Somewhere out there in the woods I hope to find joy. Going on a quest to seek my joy sounds like the most hyper-privileged white lady shit ever, really, and it absolutely is, but it really does feel like it’s that or just lie down and die. And if I lie down and die, I’m no use to anyone or any cause at all.

****

But here’s the thing I’m really afraid of, even more than I’m afraid that this whole plan is just evidence of what a bad person I really am:

If this outdoor adventure, this thru-hike is truly the thing at the bottom of the list, the most unpalatable and unlikely thing for me to do short of Lie Down and Die — WHAT THE FUCK COMES AFTER?

***

When I look at this fear, I try to remember that I don’t have to know the answer to that question, and in fact, I can’t possibly know it. Like all quests, I can’t know what comes after. I hope to be changed; I most certainly will be changed; I can’t know now what kind of changes those are or who I will be after. All of this noise, all these words — just my mind running and running, making shit up, like it does.

Ultimately what matters is not what I think, but where I walk. I don’t know where to walk after I walk up the spine of the Green Mountains. I don’t have to. I have 272 miles of walking to do before I need to know where to walk next.

I better get back to reading about patching blisters, I guess, and let the part of me that hates me and all my dumb ideas ramble on in the background, while in the foreground I practice taping my feet.

***

Carrot runs many backpacking expeditions and I wholeheartedly recommend her as a guide.

Fixing Your Feet has more than you will want to know on the topic of feet. It’s disgusting but useful.

The Kevlar bear bag is, in SOME places, an acceptable alternative to a polycarbonate bear canister weighing approximately a thousand pounds and almost impossible for a woman with small cold hands to open.

The Nature Guide to the Northern Forest is a great book about Vermont forest ecosystems.

NOLS Wilderness Medicine is the book that taught me so much about hypothermia.

I just read Robin Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, and did you know there is a kind of moss that only grows on whitetail deer dung only in peat bogs only in July?

None of these are affiliate links, because that’s not something I can logistically manage setting up right now and it wouldn’t be profitable to me even if it were.

I do still offer engineering career and leadership coaching and despite my own difficult current emotional state I’m still oddly very much capable of helping other people in this domain, somehow.

1. (There are 21 questions; today my score is 26, which is “moderately depressed”, which is where I live a large part of my life.)