Which is the bliss of solitude
how a walk through Cumbria taught me to stop hating myself
I was born in Alaska. Children tend to assume that the way they are raised is the normal way for things to be. I certainly thought it was normal to have grizzly and black bears in the yard every summer, and to encounter moose wandering through town all year round. I thought it was normal to have school-yard trainings on surviving hypothermia, bear attacks, and avalanches (with teachers making us crawl into snow-caves and wait to be rescued). I accepted that it was an inevitable fact of life that PE teachers would drag their classes up ski slopes, and school nurses would conduct their anatomy lectures with moose organs (that you had to eat at the end of the demonstration). I thought ‘dog’ and ‘Husky’ were more or less synonymous. I suppose I assumed that everyone had to learn how to fish and pan for gold, and that everyone got to see the northern lights all winter.
At the same time, I was told that my homeland was special, and I believed it. I loved my northern home, and I was very proud of being an Alaskan. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure if I was very good at it. I mean, I wanted to build forts and snowmen, play capture the flag, and go ice skating on frozen ponds like the other kids. I wanted to know all the legends about Raven, and sled for hours and hours. But I seemed to be just about the only one afraid of the black diamond ski slopes that our parents started shoving us down in preschool. At age seven, I was the very last of my friends to get my training wheels taken off of my bicycle. My hands and feet turned blue in the winter, even when it was only zero degrees Fahrenheit, and recess wasn’t cancelled unless it dropped lower than -10°F (that’s -23°C for you classy metric users). Every form of transport made me instantly and utterly nauseous. And I had recurring nightmares about sliding off mountains and falling from ski lifts (which, for the record, one of my friends did fall from).
I loved my beautiful homeland very much, and didn’t understand why we had to go out and conquer it. Why wasn’t enough to just go out and be in it? I didn’t want to race through the landscape — I wanted to go at my own pace, take time to see the beautiful flora and fauna lurking just beyond the path, the wild flowers and bear cubs that everyone else zoomed and hollered past. I was often shamed for my relative lack of speed or bravery, and my inability to keep up with the pack. By middle school, all of my friends had decided that I wasn’t cool (for this and other adolescent reasons), and there were no other children in our village to befriend. And so, when I was fifteen, and my parents suggested moving the family to Los Angeles, I said I would be glad to go somewhere new. I figured I could run away from my reputation as a square peg, the feeling of being unwanted, of not measuring up. I could start over, find somewhere I would really fit in, find that feeling of belonging and love that I had lost. But when I got to my new high school in suburban SoCal, and saw my new classmates driving to class in the brand new Hummers their parents bought them for their sixteenth birthdays, I realized I was going to be far more out of place than ever.
So I continued to look for somewhere to fit. I saw myself as the tap-dancing bee girl in Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video — one day I would find that field of fellow odd-but-joyous tap dancing bee folk; I just had to keep searching. And I did. I travelled from Death Valley to Darjeeling, from Salt Hill to Sarajevo. I sought camaraderie in universities, clubs, pubs, and offices. I chased professional and romantic leads that I knew in my heart didn’t remotely suit me — on both sides of the Atlantic. I failed to thrive in any social setting, and misplaced the few friends I did make like gloves along the way.
After about a decade of this chasing and fleeing, striving and failing, the wind went out of my sails, and I gave into an absolute despair. I would look at myself and see nothing. I was a void –nothing to offer, and nothing to show for myself. Someone who was neither clever, nor pretty, nor talented, nor even likeable, who was zooming in on 30 with no vocation, passion, dreams, resources, or love. I was all bluster, a noisy outside with a hollow core; a tornado throwing itself this way and that, making messes, moving on.
I now realize that I was wrong to think I could find happiness by running from a problem that was within me. However, I wasn’t wrong to run. I just needed to learn to run away from people altogether, rather than towards new ones.
In a last-ditch effort to escape from my despair, I went on a ‘find myself or die trying’ quest. I decided that I would go to the largest arts festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe, and see what happened. But after ten days I was nothing but exhausted with humans, with their unending need for both spectacle and attention. Their posturing, hollering, fighting, and vomiting in the street. I was tremendously relieved when it was time to head south, out into the well-grazed and much-praised hills of the Lake District.
The Lake District is, above all else, beautiful. But not the wildest of the wild lands. It’s been settled for ages — there’s an ancient stone circle by the road and everything. There are tourists and motorways, and quaint villages comprised of only a few pubs and shops apiece. The only animals you’re likely to encounter are ecstatic dogs and indifferent sheep. And, ever the bookworm, my interest in the area was as much for its poets as the actual terrain they wrote about.
So no, it wasn’t a particularly wild place to venture to; but it was bucolic as fuck. Nothing but rolling hills, fields, woodlands, streams, and (of course) lakes. I walked, and walked, and walked, and still saw only a sliver of it. I had very brief but amiable chats with other walkers — mainly couples, usually seniors, trudging along in their waterproof jackets, orbited by rocketing Collies and Spaniels. But mostly I walked in solitude. I took pictures of ivy-bedecked stone structures and extravagant butterflies. I wrote in my journal. I shelled-out the small fees to tour Dove Cottage (Wordsworth’s old house), and the world’s only pencil museum (it was amazing). I bought tiny volumes full of poems and cake recipes. I wore the same boots and trousers every day, and was perpetually windblown and scruffy. I ate huge breakfasts at my B&B, nibbled apples and oat cakes and sweaty bits of cheddar along the trails, and devoured stews in the pub at night.
I was happy as a clam.
I had lots of time alone with my thoughts on these rambles, yet felt strangely detached from the worries and self-criticism that usually swarmed my conscience; career, cash flow, current events, correspondence, complexion, and cellulite were concerns for humans elsewhere, in other lands. And how much could I do about anything, anywhere, or for anyone, from up on a windy hill? The only relevant concerns out there were heat, hydration, food, good socks, and how soon the sun would set. I felt open and present and calm. I’d arrived in that strange, semi-mythical place called ‘the moment’. And it was joyous.
After a couple of days in this detached, quiet, open state, I had one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I was standing beside Grasmere Lake, just a short jaunt south of Dove Cottage. I stopped to lean against a chest-high stone wall along the water’s edge, and watched the sunlight dance across the lake’s rippling surface. I laid my journal out the wall, and wrote this:
“I feel more myself than I have in ages. Or, at least, I am very conscious of the thought, ‘I feel like myself’, which isn’t one I have very strongly very often. A landscape of trees and water and clouds, a road and a general direction, a pack and a snack, sensible boots with nothing to do except start walking. Light in my eyes, tunes in my head, love in my heart. I feel more like joy, and more like Joy, than I can recall feeling so simply in ages. I feel very much to be that same wee Alaskan girl, clamoring through the leaves, as if she were still in me, unaltered by this quarter century that’s past…”
Suddenly, I saw the girl I was remembering. Not just remembered her, but saw her. Clear as day, I shit you not. There was a version of myself, from a quarter century prior, standing in the puddles along a gravely lane through my hometown. She was tiny, swimming inside her too-big, hand-me-down raincoat. She was peeping out from under her hood and fringe, smiling up at me. She was standing in Girdwood, Alaska, in the late-80s, but was somehow also with me in Grasmere, UK, in 2014.
If you were to look at that journal page now, you would see discolored pockmarks from where I abruptly began weeping at the sight of her. Or me. Little Me. The me from when I last remembered thoroughly liking myself — from before I had any clue that I might ever not like myself, or that anyone might not like me. That funny little girl who was always trampling through the woods with dogs and sticks and books and improvised capes. The girl who was constantly making up games, building forts, drawing, tumbling, baking, writing, and reading, reading, reading. Who didn’t fret about her past, because she had none, and didn’t worry about her future, because of course it would be brilliant. Because she knew that she was brilliant.
Tears of pure love and tremendous relief were streaming down my face, splashing everywhere. It must have been similar to the overwhelming relief of finding a lost child, which of course is what it was — just my inner child, instead of one born to me. My body propped itself up against the stone wall, but in my mind I very clearly saw myself reaching out and down and giving this wee inner me a tremendous hug.
Eventually, the moment passed, and I got back on the trail. But I only went a short ways before I had to stop again. Still overwhelmed by my experience, I sat down on the grassy ground, in a quiet spot called Penny Rock Wood, and wrote this:
“I think, I hope, that we shall be one again, that there will be no doubting our unity, our oneness, going forward. I forsook her so often in the past, only to find that I cannot live without her… She is most of what’s best of me, still — impish and open and fragile as she may be.”
That same summer I re-discovered and fell in love with my inner child, I also re-discovered and fell in love with an old friend. And thank goodness that I found myself just in time, before I got to him. Because I don’t know that I could have loved him without her. Because love is fucking terrifying if you want to do it properly; you have to do it with your entire heart and soul flung wide open. You need to have a sense what you have within you, faith in what is worth offering, and awareness of what is worth altering. You simply can’t swing it if you believe that you are an unlovable void. Which is what I thought I was for a little while there. But now I have seen who is at the core of me, and she is nothing like a void. She is lovely, and I love her enormously. I love her regardless of what she will or won’t achieve, how she measures up to anybody else. I just want to spend time with her, see her smile. That is what real love is like. That is what being in love with my partner is like, when I’m in the moment, and focused on him properly. It’s the same with my cat. Similar with good old friends, or very certain family members. You see them, and you smile. The sight of them fills you with joy, just for the fact of them still being them, and there, when they might not have been.
So now I live with my fellow in Berlin. It’s a serious metropolis; the streets are noisy, smelly, and riddled with construction crews and stag dos. The landscape is flat, the food is flavorless, and day-to-day interactions are rarely very friendly. I frequently have to fight an intense impulse to flee, to head for the hills. To run somewhere green and pretty and calm, somewhere easier to maintain that feeling of myself-ness that I found in Grasmere. Sometimes I cannot fight the impulse, and then I do go running off to greener places, and I do feel more like myself again. But I am trying to teach myself to harness that feeling anywhere. I often stop, and sit down at my desk or on a bench, or run to the nearest bridge or hedge. I close my eyes, and remind myself how it felt to be open and unencumbered along the trails, the smell and sound of the wind through the foliage and dirt. I remember the wistful look my inner child gave me, remember how much love I felt for her, and remind myself that she is actually me. She is not lost. I am not lost. We’re going to be okay.
So the moral of the story is this: if you find yourself struggling, if you feel like you’ll never find a way forward or a place to fit in, like you’ll never even be happy in your own skin, the only thing for it is to get yourself away. Just get the hell away from everyone that you can. Even the people you care about. Don’t wait for the perfect day. You don’t have to run far, or fast, and you don’t need to go for long. You don’t need to have all the best kit, and you don’t need to be super fit. Just walk out into mud, ice, bog, snow, or sand — whatever you can physically and financially manage. You only have to go far enough that high-heeled humanity cannot follow you. And free from their fucked-up filters you should find something truly precious; yourself.
