fuckit if I can't have this thru-hike

might as well die it would make no difference*

[nb that title is a play on a taylor swift song, and no, I’m STILL not in any danger so stand down everyone]

Welcome, new readers!

I’ve gotten several of you in the last couple of weeks. I know Substack is aggressive in its “subscribe also to” checkboxes, and I trust if I am not what you were expecting in your inbox, you know what to do. And still, welcome. And also: I’m probably not what you were expecting in your inbox.

I have been thinking about the psychology of endurance. I even started reading a book about it.

I have been thinking about my upcoming thru-hike.

I have been thinking about salvation, and pain, specifically the pain in my pinky toe from where I sprained it on Sunday, jamming it the wrong way hard on my couch while walking across my apartment packing for said upcoming hike.

10 days out from the most ambitious physical undertaking of my life, to be sidelined by a pinky toe sprain, I thought, horrified.

Catastrophe, catastrophe, catastrophe, screamed my mind.

I am being punished, I thought. I am being punished for wanting something this badly for myself. God is punishing me, I thought. I said this to friends, who said they didn’t believe in God or if they did they didn’t believe in that kind of god, and they were surprised that I did.

I don’t believe in that kind of god either, I said.

But I am a woman who sometimes believes a lot of things she knows she doesn’t believe.

***

My favorite depression scale is the BDI-II. This is the Beck Depression Inventory (version 2), and I first met it when I was 19, in the back of a self-help book a friend had recommended to me, that classic of cognitive behavioral therapy, Feeling Good. There’s probably a whole essay to write about my first encounter with that book, with self-help for depression books and with cognitive behavioral therapy generally, but this is not that essay.

No, I am not a doctor but yes I have favorite depression scales. “Degree or equivalent experience,” as the job listings read. The PDQ-9, the screener I declined to fill out last time I went to my doctor, as I said last newsletter, is not too bad, but nothing beats the BDI for me. Nothing else captures that high screaming thread of delusion at the extreme edge of despair.

BDI-II, question 6:

0 I don't feel I am being punished. 
1 I feel I may be punished. 
2 I expect to be punished. 
3 I feel I am being punished.

Maybe it’s the time of year, maybe it’s the anxiety, maybe it was the purple bruise blooming on my foot. I went from 0 to 3 so fast it was like falling off a cliff. There’s always a cliff nearby, in my head.

Okay, I thought, watching my self flail, the me who was convinced I could actually do this thing, was going to, was nearly ready, was, quote, “durable and competent” — that me faltered, started to disintegrate, break apart, reveal itself to be a mirage. Wile E. Coyote, defeated by a pinky toe and a couch leg.

The grief was overwhelming. This is the one thing I’ve wanted for nearly a year. I’ve worked so hard at so many different parts of it. I had even (foolish, foolish, foolish, I thought to myself, over and over) believed it might be some sort of salvation.

Foolish girl, to still fall for the dream of salvation, foolish girl to love, to want, to dream, to plan, to believe you might get something you’ve wanted so badly. Stupid. Undeserving.

Disaster. Disaster. Disaster.

Okay, I see, said whoever it is who’s kept me alive all this time. I see you can’t feel all this right now. I see, she said, and so I started to drink.

No, this is not an essay about alcohol. But there’s one I’m working on, about Self-Medication and its Discontents. About Vices vs. Addictions vs. Coping Mechanisms vs. Self-Care. Later, though. Not this essay. Another day.

Anyways them’s the facts, whether you like them or not. I felt myself falling and so I decided instead to drink.

I taped my toe and I put my leg up and I iced my foot and I drank, that afternoon and evening, and the next afternoon and evening too, and, yes, the one after that too.

It wasn’t by any means the only thing I did. I also spoke with my therapist, and and I met up with a friend, and I did a photoshoot, because it is boots and bikinis season and I am still, still, unreasonably, inexcusably hot, and most of my trivial-seeming instagram selfies, really, are about this, about dealing with my big feelings by dressing fabulously.

Death? says the girl in the neon yellow bathing suit. Oh yes, I’m looking him straight in the eye right now, says the girl. I’m gonna wear these big fat combat boots and I’m gonna kick death till he begs for mercy (carefully protecting my pinky toe while I’m at it, of course).

While I was drinking and kicking off boots and bikini season with my usual scowl, the piece of me that keeps me alive also started generating plans b - z. ¹

Plan B was for if I needed maybe an extra week before the toe was healed enough — it involves leaving “on time” for the trip but instead of starting at the beginning, getting dropped at a campground near the end of the first leg of my planned hike, for a week of non-hiking Vermont forest bathing, after which I hoped to be able to go on from there, and, if I wanted, later, I could circle back to the beginning of the trail to do those first 15 miles. She’s very good at logistics, that girl. She was working hard to slow the burning fire of madness in her mind, and through the fire, she was booking tent sites and rejiggering itineraries and resetting expectations.

But the grief and panic were large.

My younger child came and spoke kindly to my pinky toe for me. They said my toe was strong and brave and was going to heal and would have so many adventures on the trail.

It’s just a pinky toe, said my mother. You hardly even need it. I sent her a photo. “It’ll be fine,” she said.

My friend Avdi said “it’s just a pinky toe. Don’t psych yourself out over this.”

But I was psyching myself out. I shook and cried, cried and shook. I couldn’t stop hearing the chorus from Down Bad in my head, over and over:

Now I'm down bad, cryin' at the gym
Everything comes out teenage petulance
"Fuck it if I can't have him"
"I might just die, it would make no difference"

***

I’m remembering May of 2017, a very bad time for me. I’m remembering walking to get lunch with my friend Doug, then, who was then also my boss. I was then on a waitlist for ketamine infusions, and the wait was excruciating. “If I do not find something that fixes this,” I said to Doug, “I will be dead in five years.”

Nothing has fixed it, not even the ketamine, but it’s been six years since that day, and here I still am.

The truth is, I have already exceeded expectations, outlived everyone’s predictions. “Hahaha” I said to Carrot, my thru-hiking doula/guide (go sign up for one of her trips!), when she mentioned that thru-hiking, like running a marathon, is an endurance sport. “I would never run a marathon,” I said.

In fact, I’ve been running a marathon my whole life. Breath by ragged, burning breath.

***

Or, as Avdi once wrote, more poetically, I’ve been flying a plane that’s on fire, in stilettos, making it look like nothing at all.

In celebration of that girl who lands that burning plane every day, Avdi commissioned a portrait of me, and then he had a custom Leatherman made with that portrait on the knife blade.² It’s 7 ounces too heavy and a thousand times too precious to me to actually bring along on this hike, but that confidence in me, strong and unwavering — that I can bring.

***

This morning I went to see my physical therapist, who I’d mostly been going to for the last month because of a twinge in my right knee related to overpronation in my right foot, along with weakness in my glutes and quads, apparently. The weakness in my glutes and quads was gone, she said. The exercises she’d prescribed to me worked. I was stronger now.

I showed her my bruised left foot with its leukotaped pinky toe. She carefully examined the foot.

“This is going to be okay,” she said. “You’ve worked hard for this,” she said. “You don’t need a Plan B.” she said.

Her confidence, like Avdi’s, like my mother’s, like my child’s, was strong and unwavering. I started to cry in relief.

“Send us a postcard from the trail,” she said.

***

A side note: other peoples’ unwavering faith in us is an extraordinary source of strength. It is right and good to bless the people in your life who give this to you.

Actually, maybe that’s not the side note, maybe it’s the goddamn Main Idea.

***

I did not start out planning this hike thinking I’d be particularly eager to finish it. Not that I didn’t want to finish it, or hope to finish it, or plan to finish it. I just didn’t want my entire hike to become about finishing it.³

I don’t want to be so goal-oriented, I said. I’m not doing it because hashtag goals, I said. One thing I definitely don’t want is to make stupid, risky, awful choices in service of some made up goal on a made up timeline, I said. I spent my career struggling against things like that, arguing in favor of modest goals and radical realism, against the tyranny of launch dates and Let’s Fucking Go.

Yet here I am, facing my own made up goals and my own made up schedule, screaming I AM IN IT TO WIN IT in a way I can’t remember doing at any job I’ve had since whenever it was that I lost my faith in tech founders and their frenzied moonshot missions.

I live in the real world, I would say, as I simultaneously fought a thousand imaginary apocalypses. I don’t have time or patience for all these tech industry delusions, I said, the mars colonies and the AI revolutions and the imminent utopia of personalized medicine for all. The Blockchain! The Flying Cars! The true and abiding love of an AI assistant who sounds, entirely coincidentally, just like Scarlett Johannson, who in real life turned you down.

But really, I realize now, the problem is not that sometimes tech company founders dream delusionally large dreams.

The problem is also not that I’m unwilling to have audacious goals and dream delusionally large dreams and work hard for those dreams. The problem is just that I stopped finding any of the tech industry’s large dreams compelling enough to scream LETS FUCKING GO and start running toward them. Instead, mostly, I said “Sure, that direction doesn’t actually seem to lead to murdering puppies, I guess we can head over there. Lemme make sure your infrastructure doesn’t fall over on the way, how about. Lemme do some hiring for you. Just don’t make me yell LETS FUCKING GO, because I’m entirely out of go.”

The fact is, I’m a more discerning woman than I used to be. If you want me to follow you on your moonshot, I dunno, maybe shoot for better moons.

***

This dream, though! My own dream, this hike, this goal, this forest, this wild, untamable love I have for the forest, my burning desire for this trail, now. For this dream, yes, I will push at the limits of my own endurance, yes I will, yes I will yes.

And so I will tape up my pinky toe and go, singing, to the forest. “Fuckit if I can’t have us.” What will happen next on that trail through the forest, I don’t know.

But I do know this: the girl who’s kept me alive longer than anyone expected, the one who scowls and stomps at death every day, this girl — she’s the girl who is leading me on this journey, into these wilds, and she is dangerous and determined and fierce, and she is also fucking fearless.

LET’S FUCKING GO! she screams, and she joyfully shoulders her pack.

1. an idea for an exhibition: string bikinis and scowls, a boots and bikini season retrospective

2. no lies this is one of the most extraordinary gifts I’ve ever received

3. I still don’t, really, but it turns out it is very, very important to me to get started on it.