The Tales We Tell Part 2
This is Part 2 of a two part series. You can read Part 1 here.
The next morning dawned with a valley full of mist. I made myself breakfast in the outdoor kitchen and sat watching the mountains sitting like islands in a sea of clouds. It was peaceful. I was not at peace. That was the theme of this trip. I wanted to make my mind settle down to match my surroundings. I was so very, very tired of being sad. Last year, I’d found peace and happiness on my own. I wanted to be back there again. But I kept slamming into the fact that I had to make friends with the sadness first. I bled-wrote some more, and then took off in my car. Destination unknown.
Here’s what happens when you drive without a destination: you pay a lot more attention to the road. You notice your surroundings in a new way. It’s a practice in mindfulness, because you must choose at each intersection what to do next. There’s no GPS to remind you to turn, while you zone out. No internal auto-pilot. You’re very aware. You decide, That road looks interesting. I’ll follow it. You come to a four-way stop and choose which direction looks most full of mystery and adventure.
Just like the previous year, I enjoyed it, but also the sadness rode with me. I dipped into some of those wells periodically, letting the sadness morph into despair. I think that needed to happen. I used music to pull myself back from the edge; I played Sara Bareilles’s “Many The Miles” on repeat and sang along at top volume with the windows down.
It had been a year since I’d done this. The misty mountain roads took me winding through fields and vineyards that morning. I turned down a promising-looking road, only to find a “No Outlet” sign. As I turned around, I remembered a key part of my unplanned trip from the year before that I’d kind of glossed over in my head: there had been a lot of “wasted” time, missteps, backtracking. I had driven west only to drive around half of Charlotte and turn south and then west again the first day. Every single plan A I had had for food had broken down (and sometimes so had plans B, C, and D). I spent hours going not the direction I ended up. I could have spent that time doing more activities. But that time wasn’t wasted. It was the point of the trip, and I found beauty at every turn and much-needed time to think. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t rushing to be somewhere on time.
As I got back on the main road, it hit me that I wanted to approach life like this: with a sense of adventure, knowing I can always turn around if I hit a dead-end, instead of with anxiety and dread, waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Like I felt that moment backpacking in January. There is no straight line to our destination. We spiral back through thoughts, lessons, experiences. We regress and we grow. Things knock us back on our butts and we get back up, still hurting, only to trip again. We start out heading one direction and then change our major, our career, our relationships. I saw so much more of the world and my inner world because of wandering.
The sky was gray. An angel statue sat on the roadside, her head in her hands like she was completely over it. I wanted to say, “I feel you.” I’ve been so overwhelmed and angry and disillusioned with the world recently. I think the past year and a half have taken everyone to that point to some degree or another, but events of the past three months on top of the past three years had made me bitter. I don’t want to be. I want to keep believing in the goodness and the magic. I don’t want to harden. I’ve been trying to direct that hardness into my boundaries, not my soul.
And then I took one turn and suddenly it was sunny out. I left the mist behind, and it was a bright and beautiful day.
Eventually, I pulled up my map and discovered I was only about 15 minutes from where I’d thought about hiking that day. I sat with the sadness and battled my own mind the whole way there.
I’d chosen a smaller trail. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if I’d found the right place, but there was a path. I parked in the gravel on the side of the road and followed the little footpath to a stream pouring down a dam.
I set off into the woods. Spider webs grabbed me once I’d passed the dam; clearly no one else had been hiking there that morning. The first ten webs or so, I took like a champ. I like to think I’m not so squeamish about creepy-crawlies. But after taking a couple to the face, one with a spider landing on my ear, I started to get jumpy. I found myself on edge. I picked up a stick and started waving it to clear the way ahead of me. It got me thinking.
Trauma is like when you find a bug crawling on you, one you’re afraid of. Maybe it bites you and leaves a mark. You freak out, do a frantic dance, and squash it. The bug was real, and it was on you. But now your nervous system is on high alert. Every little itch or ghost of a breeze makes you think there are more. Your skin crawls with imaginary insects. You find yourself swiping yourself for the next hour, but there’s nothing there. Or mostly nothing; if you find another one, your brain now feels completely justified in its suspicions.
This little guy was ready for his photo op.
Trauma is that, but on a much bigger scale and for months and years. If you don’t address it, heal from it, and learn to calm your nervous system, it’s forever. It makes you never feel safe. It makes it hard to tell when there’s something that’s an actual threat vs. what your brain perceives as a threat. Maybe you’ve become more aware of threats around you similar to what you’ve gone through—that can be a good thing; an early warning system. But maybe you also perceive innocuous things like a string from your t-shirt as a bug. If you’ve been through emotional abuse and gaslighting, you get to the point you don’t trust yourself at all and question if anything you feel is real. And back to the bug analogy, if you don’t work on your past, on your traumas, when you swipe, you’re not just swiping yourself. You’re swiping your loved ones; your kid, your significant other if you’re lucky enough to find one who’ll stick around, your friends. Maybe you’re waving a big metaphorical stick back and forth to keep the pain away, but it also serves the purpose of keeping everyone at a distance.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to figure out when my reactions to people are justified. That’s part of why the t-shirt I wore the day before felt so good. Boundaries are the flipside of the trust yourself coin. They protect you from the people you need protection from. I’ve learned I am justified in most of my reactions, despite consistent messaging from toxic or confused people to the contrary. And I’ve learned that my experiences have also helped me. I’m so sensitive that I pick up on others’ emotions quickly. And I have such a strong reaction to toxic people at this point that I call them out or fade away from their radar very quickly. (How many times have abusive people told me they have to watch what they say around me because I take offense at everything?). And no matter how many times I’ve doubted its messages, blamed what it was telling me on my trauma, or been told pointe blank I can’t trust it, I have found out the very, very hard way that I can always trust my gut. Even when I don’t want to.
But also, simple things like seeing a happy couple send me into a scary place.
I wandered through spider webs and let my mind wander:
There should be a special word just for the sound of a bird’s wings flapping when it flies away. If the sound were a sight, it would be a blurring. If you could touch it, it would be soft like feathers, but snappy like a kite in the wind.
I waded through wildflowers and thorns, waving my stick like a deranged wizard trying desperately to cast a spell.
When we went for walks in the woods with my dad, he would always help us find walking sticks. There was an art to finding the right one for each person. It had to have the right height, thickness, and place to put your hand. We always had a story or a game we were playing as we walked; those sticks became fighting staffs or the only thing holding us up after our helicopter crashed and left us stranded in the woods. I thought about grabbing a walking stick for myself, but I needed my spiderweb stick more.
After thirty minutes or so, I gave up and turned around. There are only so many spiderwebs I can take to the face. I was making excruciatingly slow progress, stopping every couple of feet to clear the way, and I was still covered in webs whispering across my skin. I decided to leave the future spiders in peace. I was disappointed at the time to not do more hiking, but looking back, I think this decision was symbolic, too. I’m proud of the points in my life when I decided, No More. Giving up isn’t always failure. Sometimes getting to the point where you finally see things clearly and can value yourself enough to make that impossible decision is the biggest victory, even if you make it with tears in your eyes.
The whole time, I carried that heavy sadness. I was so weary from it. I hated that I felt stuck in it, tried to decide if I was letting myself feel it “correctly,” compared it to how I felt last year. Wondered how much was a reaction to the things I’m struggling with now, and how much was a reaction to trauma in the past that has linked itself to my current storyline. As I walked back, I went through all that I’ve lost recently. I wrote the list down in my phone.
Looking at my list, I realized again that it was a lot for someone who already carries a lot. I stopped in the sun at the top of the dam and gave myself permission to continue to struggle with all that had happened. I wrote as I walked away, “My world sometimes still seems so flat. Sometimes it pops up in 3D again, and that’s a huge improvement. But sometimes all I can see is an almost colorless, dimensionless future laid out ahead of me. Maybe it’s like fog: it looks flat until you get into it, and eventually it goes away with the sun.”
I thought about lunch, but I was too emotionally spent, so I headed back to my cabin after that. My intention was to write, but I couldn’t even do that. I gave myself permission to veg out.
That afternoon, I had a virtual therapy appointment (one of the great things that came out of COVID). I told my therapist about my hope to use this trip like the last one, as a way of coming out the other side feeling whole again. She cautioned me not to rush things, that this was a different situation from last year and I might not just snap out of it afterwards. She reminded me to let myself feel sad. I told her just how tired of being sad I was. I told her how writing helped. She suggested I write a blog post about just that.
I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Partly because I was in a new place and my back doesn’t like beds other than my own. But partly because there were thoughts I was trying to avoid, and now I was alone with them. I lay looking at my phone for hours, trying to keep them at bay, but eventually the lack of sleep and some music unlocked the door to and let them catch up to me. I cried some more.
The last three months, the last three years, the last three decades have been full of grief. Just when I think maybe I’ve gotten a handle on life, a new batch of things to grieve hits me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing life right; shouldn’t I have found ways to dodge some of these events and people? Why does it feel like I’m constantly under barrage the past three years? But also, when you’re lost in deep grief or depression, it feels like you’ve been there forever and always will be.
I didn’t used to let myself feel at all. It was too much, and my coping mechanisms were too insufficient when I was younger. Instead, I told myself things weren’t so bad. I gritted my teeth to “just get through,” and I was proud of how much I could “handle.” I locked things away and looked the other direction, and then shocked myself when anger and anxiety popped out at random places in my life. I learned when a friend was murdered that this didn’t work; it just delayed the grief. I was already in therapy when I witnessed that attempted mass murder at school, so that was the first thing I really processed right after it happened. The first step.
Then passed years where all I wanted were stability and safety. I bent myself over backwards to achieve those by maintaining the peace and trying to do everything “right.” If I could just be okay with whatever circumstances I found myself in, it would all be fine. Even if some of those circumstances were ones I shouldn’t have been okay with. If I ducked my head down, I could dodge the hard things. It didn’t work. I just got more anxious and depressed. Hard things happened anyway. My world got grayer. I didn’t get safer.
I got up before the sun the next morning. I wanted to let a mountain stream run over my hands, listen to a waterfall before I drove home.
I chose a less popular waterfall—one I’d never been to before—not too far off the road to home. But once I parked, I realized I wouldn’t have time to hike to the waterfall and back. So I clambered down the steep embankment to a stream right by where I parked.
The water flowed under the road between massive rock walls.
My therapist told me every time I cried, every time I felt sad, I was picking back up a piece of my heart. I liked that, because it let the crying feel productive instead of feeling like I was stuck. As I let the cold water of the stream flow through my fingers, I let the tears flow. I tried to imagine it washing away some of what I was holding on to. I didn’t notice a difference, but told myself it helped.
I wandered downstream a bit, following a promising rushing sound, and sure enough, I found a small waterfall—several together, in fact. I climbed rocks that I would have been told to stay away from in the past. I climbed them because I’d been hiking with a group of badass women and the caution wasn’t, “Don’t climb on those rocks, they’re probably slippery!” It was, “Careful when you step on that one, it’s slippery!” I knew from those hikes it wasn’t the end of the world if my feet got wet. After all, they did fine when I had days between me and dry shoes. Today I had five minutes.
I got as close as I could, until the water was roaring past me on three sides, powerful and unstoppable. I felt the sound in my bones, felt it rumble the rock beneath my feet. I stood there and let it flow past me.
Many writers have written about the transformative power of the woods. Thoreau comes to mind, and Shakespeare, and the many stories where people walk into the woods and walk out different because of the fey. One rainy day in fifth grade, my best friend Meghan took me walking along a creek behind her house. We were certain there was magic in those woods. We found a fairy circle—a ring of mushrooms—and eagerly stepped in, hoping to be taken somewhere new.
I wasn’t sure I was any different from this trip—I was still too close to it—but I hoped I’d set the right things in motion. Either way, I had to get home to work and my son. The poem in my head as I left was by Robert Frost:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.”
Driving home, I focused on letting myself sit with the feelings wholeheartedly. I wanted to let them flow, because I knew they would have to be tucked away at home, only let out after work when my son was in bed. I wanted to do this trip “right,” to heal as much as possible. But I couldn’t seem to let them out to play as much.
One realization did come to me. Most of my life, I was searching for someone to save me. I couldn’t always even say from what. I was looking for someone wiser, better than me, to give me permission to do what I wanted or point me down my path—someone to show me who I was. My whole life, the narrative that others knew better than me had been pounded in. I tried to be what others wanted me to be. I have been learning over the course of a decade to protect my own wants and needs (that came to a crisis when I had my son and lost those completely for a while). I finally have a firm grasp on who I am, and I find I no longer want anyone else to try to define me. They never get it right anyway. I know where I begin and end and will ferociously protect those limits. I need help from my friends sometimes to give me support and perspective, but I know who I am and I choose my path.
Two weeks after my trip, I realized that while I hadn’t walked away into a happy, abundance-filled mindset like I had after my last trip, I did start to leave some important things behind in the past. Some hopes that I’d had, that I needed to release. Some attachment to what’s gone. I’m not fixed, but new insights have come since then, set into motion by my time in the woods. I woke up in the middle of the night a week after I got back to go to the bathroom, and as I walked through the moonlight back to bed, I was seized with a feeling like freefalling. I was suddenly very aware that I’d completely stepped off the path I thought I’d be on, and had let go of other people’s opinions of what I should do, which I’d been clinging to for a sense of balance. It didn’t feel bad. It felt exhilarating.
I still cry. Sometimes from the grief. Sometimes from hitting triggers in my day-to-day life. For a week or so, I thought I’d passed another threshold, but then it got harder again. Today after talking to a friend, it’s easier again. That’s the way this goes. And it’s still progress. Sometimes I can note the feelings, acknowledge that they are there and that I feel them, name them and then let them drift by without falling in the well. It’s like in stories of magic: names have power.
That mountaintop meadow no longer feels safe. But it feels important. The edge of something.
I was walking the dog the other day and understood something else. Much of my life I have felt restless, inherently unhappy in the still moments, like my skin didn’t fit just right. I had to keep moving to avoid this feeling. The times in the past that life hasn’t felt gray and itchy like a too-small wool coat, have been the times when I found something that actually fit me. I found something that made me come alive.
My life used to be mostly full of those gray, itchy moments. I thought that was just the way I was built. But it turns out those were signposts that something wasn’t right. I had to be alone, to go through the rough terrain of the past three years, to continue to undo the more subtle effects of the trauma of the distant and recent past. I had to undo my life. Stop bending to the expectations of others. Turn around, go another direction. Take a really hard look at relationships, my career, my self-perceptions, and change basically everything.
I’ve been afraid that walking with this sadness and constant trouble is as good as it gets. But when I think back on the last three years full of trouble, I realize they are also full of color. The parts that fit me were not itchy. The time has been hard as hell, but it hasn’t felt like sitting in that old coat. I’ve been building something colorful and alive to take the place of the old pieces. Now, in the stillness I find either peace or a storm of feelings that need to be processed. Suddenly I have hope that in the future, I’ll find a time when I’ve shed the old layers completely and while I’ll always have feelings to process and sadnesses to carry, there will be something better ahead.
Best of all, I’m having more and more moments where I love my life again.
I mentioned in Part 1 of this post that my biggest struggle right now is figuring out what this chapter means. Four months ago, I was so certain of the story I was living. Seven months ago, I was ecstatic. Twelve months ago, I thought it was all going one direction: up. But I hadn’t finished shedding that itchy coat yet, that cocoon. I had to take some U-turns on some No Outlet streets. Everything had to fall apart again. And then there are the random blows that life always deals. My instinct is to take the hard times and file them into the oldest stories I’ve got: I’ll always be alone; the people I love will always leave me; if I just do the “right” thing and please everyone and stay quiet, I’ll be okay. I can’t control my life. Nothing is safe.
But I’m aware of the old stories now; I can point them out and give myself a half-step’s distance from them sometimes. My therapist is helping me to see things even more clearly. So are my friends. So I’m fighting the urge to keep building on those stories. It’s REALLY hard. I’m not always winning. But at least I’m aware. I need to make new stories, and that’s where writing helps.
We are creatures built of stories. They are what hold us together and what makes us fall apart. Our stories, when we share them with others, can weave us together into something shining and beautiful. What starting this blog has taught me, more than anything else, is that while we don’t all have the same experiences, we all have the same emotions. We’ve all been at the bottom of the well. And something that I think we need more than ever, especially when we’re at the bottom, is to know we’re not alone. Others are there with us. Some people are climbing out, showing us the way. Some are at the top, offering a hand back down to help others up. One of the simplest ways we can help each other is to share our stories and listen to others’.
My last therapy session helped me get back some faith in the universe. I’m working hard to reclaim the very first story that I ever chose for myself, years ago: that I’ve been through all of these impossible moments, deaths of hope, trauma—not because I’m unlucky, but because I’m made for greater things in the future. Greater happiness because of all that’s come before. A greater sense of self and purpose because the rock-bottom moments force you to find what’s at your very core. A better understanding of what love is and what love isn’t, after years of having it twisted on me. These past few months have been steps on a brighter path, out of the mist. I falter, I zigzag on my course. I want the healing to go faster. I want to already be there. But now, after the aggregate experiences of that trip (and months and years of work before that), I can at least finally say that I’m way less sad.