The Great Adventure of Solitude

During lockdown, I became obsessed with hiking documentaries. 

Maybe it was the isolation, and the dream of a cacophonous world gone quiet. What was once a relentless buzzing had at long last faded into bird song and breeze. What did the world look like in our absence?

We had all deceived ourselves at that point. Don’t you remember? Video footage— “It’s real! I swear it’s real!” —of dolphins reclaiming Venetian canals. Half-remembered, uncited studies watching global warming slow to a crawl,  and wildflowers springing up on unkempt verges.

“I knew it,” I remember thinking. “All we had to do to save the world was disappear.” 

Of course, this wasn’t true, and I knew it. But as I sat alone in my condo, I imagined it regardless. I pictured emerging from the chrysalis to a newly healed world. Experiencing a long-awaited call to adventure. A paradigm shift, and the blooming possibility of a world more welcoming than the one we had left. 

As I watched, I could feel the stones crack under thick-soled shoes. My eyes could track the road ahead as it snaked through sun-beaten desert plains toward green mountains. I could walk alongside friendly strangers until we lost one another, look ahead to the shadows of mountains and wonder what lay waiting for me on the other side. 

Here’s what I’ve learned it’s like to hike the PCT, despite never actually having done it: 

You start in a pack. A hundred eyes on a distant horizon. Optimism. Home behind, the world ahead. 

You make your way into the desert. The sun bears down on your shoulders. Your pack is new and heavy. Your shoes stiff and unbroken.

You set up camp surrounded by fifty people. Then twenty-five. Then ten. Then two. Then you’re alone. Those people you started with? Some have abandoned the chase. Others forge ahead going twice your speed. Some linger behind, eyes locked on some different horizon.

Eventually, the desert fades into fields and trees and mountains, water becomes abundant, and you find a new family. Your true soulmates on the journey. You walk together. Camp together. Plan together.

Until, one day, your pace changes. One skips ahead. Another falls behind, takes a different path. You separate. 

Maybe you’ll see old friends again at the northern terminus.

Or maybe you won’t.

You create families on the journey, and the journey breaks them apart. You forge relationships knowing you’ll sunder. And you do it again, and again, and again. 

What does it really mean, to set off on a journey, knowing that you’re doomed to leave or be left behind? Knowing you’ll walk holes in your shoes before the journey is done? That you’ll live through chest colds and blizzards and blisters because the only direction is forward, and slowly, before you realize it, your landscape has changed, and you can’t imagine being anywhere else. 

You already know. Of course you know. You’ve done it. 

I did not emerge from the pandemic to wild rivers, ivy-overgrown highways, and birds that have forgotten fear. Nature did not heal. There were no dolphins in Venice. The milky way doesn’t light up my Pennsylvania sky.

I emerged into the real world. 

But a different one.

Traversing The Desert

Image source: Lummi

It wasn’t just the world. We all changed. 

I entered lockdown burnt out. This was nothing new—although I didn’t know it at the time—but up until then, my life could best be described with a resounding but reluctant “yes.” Yes, I have time for a new project. Yes, I’ll commit every other evening. Yes, I’ll go. Yes, I'll do.

By the time the world shut down, the mental exhaustion had begun to eat into my dreams. My creativity had slowed to a trickle, as if I had unconsciously tied a tourniquet around it to continue functioning. 

Then, the pack—friends, family, work acquaintances—all fell away, and I found myself wandering the desert alone. 

By day, the sun beat down. Insects buzzed, and my feet fell heavy on hard-packed earth. 

By night, the humility of a small camp. A speck of civilization amidst a great wilderness. Overhead, the brightness of stars long-hidden by city lights—and I only saw them because I had finally looked up. 

This is, of course, a metaphor. 

In reality, I was locked in a two-bedroom condo in Pennsylvania, annoying the neighbors with endless pop-punk karaoke sessions.

But when the trail of life finally turned toward the shadows of the mountains, the pandemic began to abate, and I rejoined old friends, it quickly became clear that our paths had diverged more than I had imagined. 

My journey had led me to new appreciation for the word “no,” a new job, and a dog. I had spent a lot of time alone and settled into my skin. 

In my absence, everyone else had turned their eye toward marriage and family. And suddenly, everything was different.

For the first time, I found myself an outsider, despite our close-knit friendship. In an instant, a landscape crumbled, leaving new and unrecognizable features behind.

Like most women, I had borne the relentless pressure to embrace motherhood all my life. I heard it in unconscious heteronomative assumptions, popular media tropes, and parochial school classrooms. From strangers and family alike.

But somehow, seeing it here threw the issue into stark relief, and I realized: I didn’t understand this.

I couldn’t. Maybe I never would.

Surely, I thought, it was my duty to swallow my misgivings. To show up. Be supportive. Be glad for whatever time they can spare, and bear their envy when you go home to a silent house.

It’s a gift, this new stage of life. 

So why did it feel like I was staring down the barrel of a gun?

Matching Pace

Image source: Pexels, Kyle Miller

Let’s get real for a second. 

I love all of the people in my life: the infants and toddlers, new spouses, in-laws, and extended family. I wouldn’t regret or replace them.

But nobody talks about what it’s like to be left behind. About how you stand there in the desert, pink sunset spilling out across the drab earth, watching the pack outpace you, and you ask yourself:

Do I even want to catch up?

Or should I just… keep walking, wherever the path leads?

Of course, in real life, you’re not standing alone in a desert bracketed by mountains. You’re in your bedroom. In your car. In your friend’s backyard, swatting away mosquitos, watching a life unfold that you’ll never experience.

But the truth is the same. When everyone around you changes, the time between partings stretches on until you find a new rhythm of footfalls that can accommodate everyone.  

And until that happens, you are very much alone. You fall silent in conversations you can’t relate to, and your input is not missed.

After all, your life is unchanged. You go to work. You come home. You repair your own appliances, buy your own groceries, walk your own dog, spend your own money. What do you, of all people, have to say about marriage? Parenthood?

At these times, I often found myself longing for those desert-months of meticulously planned Zoom dates, sourdough starter and silence, and thinking, if I must be quiet, why not simply… go back?

But life is not the PCT. You can’t retrace your steps. You can only keep walking.

The Great, Green Valley

Image source: Flickr

Self-pity is a necessary fiend. You have to feed it, indulge it, to know where you stand. But you can’t linger, or it will eat you alive. 

Or, put plainly: If you’re uncomfortable, you find the problem, and you fix it. But first, you have to feel the discomfort.  

The difficult truth is that my loved ones did change more than me—or at least more visibly. Their lives and priorities had shifted. That didn’t mean we weren’t close anymore. 

But it did mean those friendships would look different.

While I was still looking backwards, longing for the desert I had left behind, we had emerged into a green valley. Daisies and columbine burst to life all around us. Cold water streamed down from the tops of mountains. Everything healthy, and vibrant, and alive.

There are plenty of things in this new world to love. A bigger family. Closer friendships. Children who take your care for granted, an undeniable fact of the universe. All waiting for acknowledgment.

When I listen to my fears, whispering in the dark, I hear this: 

“They’ve changed too much for you. They built a new life, and unless you conform, there’s no room for you in it.” 

And underneath it, something else germinates: a gentle, firm refusal. 

I won’t change my path. I’ll keep to this one, even if I have to walk it alone.

Because here’s a secret: I changed, too. Maybe in less obvious ways, but I had. 

They learned to build new families.

I learned to build myself. 

I learned to feel my own needs, explore and advocate for them. I learned that I have fortitude. That I can be content on my own. That, even at my most exhausted, my writing is good enough to carry me forward.

That it’s okay to say no, to embrace the quiet solitude and rest. And that they’ll still want you, when the quiet time is done. 

And from my loved ones, who had all taken paths I couldn’t follow, I learned one more thing: 

That it’s okay to build a life for yourself, even if it’s not what others want. 

You don’t become friends with people because you’re identical. You become friends because you have something to offer one another. Support. Commiseration. Point of view. 

I’ve lately been embracing my new identities: The single auntie. The successful child. The adult friend–a refuge and a glass of wine when motherhood becomes too much. 

The same person I always was, but a little more.

You don’t have to follow the pack onto different paths. You can follow your own into the dark and navigate by the stars, knowing that somewhere, they’re looking up too. You can haul your own gear. Pitch your own tent. Smother your own fire. Gather memories and experiences and look forward to the moment you can finally share them. 

And keep faith that someday, you’ll meet again at the terminus.

Dreaming of the Northern Terminus

Image source: Unsplash

I’m not a thru-hiker. 

I’ve never been on the PCT. I hiked the Appalachian Trail for two hours once, entirely by mistake. 

I don’t have a backpack or a six-month sabbatical or a nonsensical trail name. 

I’ve never been to California. 

When I was watching Elina Osborne’s trail documentary for the first time, I spent hours imagining what it must be like to leave the world behind, never knowing what you’ll find when you return. 

When we entered lockdown, I imagined the whole world bursting into life in our absence. In my mind, we would reemerge from the shadowed woods to a world that looked ineffably different.

Instead, when we emerged, the world hadn’t changed. We had.

Real life is not like hiking. 

Except for the ways it is.

You might start your journey surrounded with people. Parents, siblings, children, friends, cousins, romantic partners, coworkers, all fixed on the same, shared horizon.

But people walk at different paces. And sometimes, you just have to go it alone. 

The question is: when you meet again at the northern terminus, what new things will you have to share?