A substitute for pistol and ball: Why I am walking the Eastern Continental Trail
I’ve been trying to write these words for weeks now. In some ways, I’ve been trying to write them for two years. It’s been a long time coming.
I have Complex PTSD and have been publicly open about it since I published this piece in April of 2016:
Things have been better, SO much better. My relationships are great and I’ve been living more and more in my body, and it’s just good enough for me to slip into thinking I’m in the clear. It’s good to just feel good. I’m greedy for it, and the progress has been real, but past experience has taught me that my danger is when I spend too long thinking it’s all over, when I stop planning for it, at least just in case.
Something inevitably brings me back to the ground. Some sudden loss, or some dissatisfaction that is gnawing a little louder and louder, or some pissyness that manifests in a sharp word toward myself or another person, and that I stop and evaluate.
After realizing again this year that I am too disabled to work full time at a conventional job, I began asking *those* questions: The ones a lot of y’all know personally. The ones about why certain things seem so hard. The ones about my sleep and energy levels. The ones about my stomach. The ones that crater toward self-reproach and unkindness. And, no matter how many times I go through this, it feels like the first time in some ways. Even though it gets easier and easier, I always have to rediscover it.
I always have to remember that I am disabled. Even though I don’t look disabled. Even though I don’t feel disabled many days. Even though I am “further along” than some of my accomplices. Even though it manifests differently from the way many others are disabled. Even though it’s so normal for me to have these abnormal habits that are actually coping mechanisms against chronic fear within a body that is wired to expect attack when it is most vulnerable.
I remember Ishmael from the beginning of Moby Dick:
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
In October 2015, I sat down at my desk at my extremely low-paying dream job where I was being discriminated against on the basis of my diagnosis, opened up a browser tab, and, in a fit of angst, typed “longest hike in America” into the search bar. It was dark and raining outside. The office was dim. Within 15 minutes, I decided I was going to hike the Eastern Continental Trail, a 5400 mile patchwork of seven or eight trails and road walks (depending on how you count them) that includes the entire Appalachian Trail in the middle and stretches from Key West to the northern tip of Belle Isle, Newfoundland, 2km from the only authenticated Norse Viking site in North America. Only a handful of people have ever thru-hiked the entire thing, and even some of them stopped in Quebec. For a northbound hike, you have to leave Key West in January and still keep a ridiculous pace in order to finish before the weather shuts it down.
I began making plans, but I couldn’t make it work that year because I got fired and had to go to the hospital again. The next year, it didn’t happen because I was dead ass broke but investing in my life here and trying to get Other Lives off the ground. After I abruptly lost my apartment due to fire in December of 2016, the restlessness turned way up again. I made my final decision in July.
I’m doing this for two main reasons:
1) As I dig deeper, I find that I am still unwell in subtle but profound ways and that I’ve reached the limit of what I can do in this era of my life.
The urge to walk was there for a long time before I realized this, but the founder of EMDR came to it during a walk of her own. Read the link. It’s about the changes in the brain that can occur during bilateral movement: https://anxietyreleaseapp.com/what-is-bilateral-stimulation/
So, I guess I am going to try to walk it off. If a quick walk through the woods is good, then maybe 5400 miles of it will be better? I say that with a smirk. I’m actually looking forward to sleeping in the bushes while stealth camping in the Keys, slogging waist deep through swamps in Big Cypress, doing 1800 miles of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia to get to the AT, and entering Canada on foot onto the IAT.
I wonder how I’ll sleep when I am spending the better part of a year outside, with nearly every waking moment spent in a different place. I wonder if the hypervigilance as I close my eyes will finally dull when I’m adapted to walking 30+ miles per day. I wonder if being in the sandy armadilloed palm scrub brush of Florida for the first time since I was a kid will help me say goodbye to what I lost.
2) Our trauma community needs to grow, and I am going to be vocal for us along the way. I am going to use this walk as an advocacy campaign for trauma survivors and those living with PTSD and C-PTSD. I’ll probably be writing most days from the trail and will definitely be publishing more. My hope is that, by the end of it, we’ve brought ourselves to more people and figured out a way for me to do this work full time.
For the past few years, I have been increasingly living this part of my life publicly in order to bring awareness, attention, and knowledge about living with the effects of trauma into public view while still being in an active state of healing myself. It’s been interesting, to say the least, but I am not going to stop.
If Other Lives didn’t exist and no one but a handful of friends were listening, I’d still be going. But it wouldn’t mean what it means now. As I wrote in a thread months ago while in a full on flashback: “it only made sense when it became we.”
I have no idea how my legs will do. I have no idea how my heart will do. I know from my 18 day solo bike ride from Boston to Tampa in 2011 that some of it will be hell and that I will literally scream into the sky in rage because I’m hungry, exhausted, and near heat stroke. But I also know that sometimes that tension will release into the most profound kind of joy as fireworks begin literally going off in the distance right as the huge crescendo kicks in on GNR’s “November Rain” in my earbuds and I’ll start laughing out loud like a madman and feeling certain that I could just keep riding forever and feeling silly that I ever thought I was going to die.
The difference between this trip and the bike trip is that my solutions have to be sustainable. There is no faking it for 5400 miles, and I’ll have to either rewire and find the home in my body or quit.
I stayed up way too late last night researching the much less developed part of the International Appalachian Trail (IAT) in PEI, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and then woke up cracked out tired and ashamed that I’d stayed up so late and fucked myself over today. But, in the dream, there was a marker board with “Triple Crown” in one column and “Super Triple Crown” in the other. “Appalachian Trail” and “Eastern Continental Trail” were crossed through, and the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, the Great Western Loop, and the Sea to Sea Route were below.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball, and it is more than that too.
I’m going to invite you to meet up with me along the trail. I’m going to invite you to walk some of it with me if you want to. There’s too many of y’all I either haven’t met yet or haven’t seen face to face in a long damn time.
Maybe I can figure it out.
Maybe we can figure it out.
I hope you will join us in whatever way you can.
There are many ways to support this project, but right now the most simple, direct, and immediately necessary is to sponsor a piece of gear.
Paypal link: https://www.paypal.me/jking443
If you pay for it, you get to name it and I will refer to it by name in videos I create along the way! My only rule is that the name not be scatalogical or otherwise offensive. Inside jokes are fine :)
The organization I founded also recently grew to bring on an Operations Director and Communications Manager and we re-launched our Patreon account. You can read more about our mission and other projects there.
Thank you for reading these past few years, and thank you for your support ❤
Other Lives is a peer-led trauma survivors’ network and advocacy organization.
You can find the main site at otherlives.org and the peer-support forum at forum.otherlives.org.
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