Tired of Myself

I get so bored, so tired with myself. Like mindlessly changing the channel after fourteen seconds of some cheesy eighties sitcom, I try on different personas. So many parts of me that I don’t like, that I want to change. But I don’t know about that. There are parts I like, parts that feel solid: my Frye boots, tattoos of skulls and flowers and elephants, my excitement and awe of the world, of being a good and present friend, a ride or die partner that has the means to post bail when necessary. But other aspects—the sharp tongue, long anger, this feel and desire of being seen but not feeling like I am, the clawing neediness of someone to love me, someone choosing to hold me—these are the things that drive the need of reinvention, of being dissatisfied in who I am during any year of my life.

When I was twenty-one, I got so lost in who I was and where I was headed. I put my backpack on, took the bus from Hayward, CA to South Lake Tahoe, and started hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. This was in 1999. I had just been spooked from the next phase of my life, what I thought I wanted crashing in on myself, and I was running away. Big emotions in me have often exploded into big actions without thinking through what would happen or what I might irretrievably lose. A few days before I left, I visited the San Francisco REI store, bought new boots, bought backpacking kitchen items, a flashlight, a compass, a guidebook. The guy helping me asked me what I was doing and I told him I was headed for the PCT. “You know, it’s pretty late in the season to be doing that,” he said, eyeing me like a wounded animal caught in barbed wire. I shrugged, told him I’d been camping for almost a decade, knew what I was doing. He just shrugged back at me, raised his eyebrows, and turned away, his body and face silently saying I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing.

I couldn’t tell him that I had these feeling and thoughts inside, and I just could not sit with them. That sitting still equated some kind of death, the monster in my soul would eat me until there was nothing left of me. I had to move, I had to get away, had to feel motion under me. Movement has always soothed me, let the thoughts and emotions run wild across the landscape. As soon as I got my driver’s license at sixteen, I’d take the car out for long, meandering drives across eastern Connecticut and along the shores of Rhode Island, chain smoking Marlboro Reds, Counting Crows Rain King at full volume, windows down. Almost anything would set me off—a flippant comment, rejection from asking someone out. Whatever thing that drew out that internal hating, soul-sucking monster, I was unable to sit with the emotions and feelings. I had no interior distance between the synapses and my skin, between the raw and tender bits. Everything was exposed.

People that know me now, know my backstory, know what I think and feel and my views of the world, talk about my courage and kindness. They tell me how I have this deep well of genuine concern for the world’s inhabitants. How, in spite of how scary something is, I have the fortitude to do the thing regardless of that fear. And I want to scream when I hear these words. It’s not courage when fear and uncertainty is a better feeling than wanting to rip your own emotions and feelings about yourself out of your chest, when being kind to others is your way of paying the toll to just exist in this world, to keep at bay the inherent knowledge that you are unlovable, unworthy. There is no bravery running away. Backpacking in the wrong season, wildly unprepared for such an endeavor, was a little risk. Staying in Hayward, dealing with the feelings and emotions that brought me there? That was BIG risk. No, thank you. I’ll take physical discomfort over emotional shattering, please and thank you very much.

And so, at the beginning of October, I found myself shivering in a dilapidated barn a few miles off the PCT, night and sleet falling, wondering what was going to happen. My left foot was caked in mud, my sock shredded, my leg bruised and bloody. A few hours previously, I was hiking past Tuolumne Meadows. I thought of stopping for the night but I was too high for the coming storm. The gentleman that drove me to the trailhead a few days befo…