The First White Blaze

This post was inspired by the Out There Podcast episode “In the Name of Love“

“How did this happen?” I ask myself as I finish packing up his things and give his dog a scratch under the chin. “He” is my ex-boyfriend, since last night anyway. Twelve hours ago, around midnight, he came home from work on his night shift lunch break. I was standing by the bed folding laundry when he walked in. I looked at him. He looked at me. “This is it, isn’t it?” he asked calmly. “Yes. Yes it is.” I responded, my voice flat and devoid of any emotion. I hadn’t planned to break up with him, but here it was, happening. He went back to work, and didn’t come home the next morning. I still had his dog and most of his stuff. No, our dog, and our things. We had three dogs. I owned our home. He had a budding career and I was the proud owner of a college degree and a flourishing business. We were HAPPY. So everyone thought, anyway. So I thought.

I met him freshman year of high school – we had horticulture class together. We dated off and on again until we eventually got serious about our relationship after graduation. I think when you meet someone this young, it can be difficult to grow and develop as individuals. Because so much of our early lives were spent together, I never formed friendships or interests that didn’t involve him. We had our friends. Our hobbies. On weekends we’d go to the lake and he would fish while I tanned, or we’d take the dogs to the dog park and chat on a bench while they ran and played. I was so busy trying to fit into his life that I never took the time to create my own.

When we moved in together after college, I seamlessly and naturally fell into the role of homemaker. He worked a lot, so I kept the house up and fed and walked the dogs. He mowed the grass on the weekends and spent most of his Saturday’s on the sofa – he could rarely be convinced to go anywhere or do anything on his days off. I would read or knit while he napped and watched TV, and I was perfectly content to do so. Content being the key word here. We went through these motions and followed this pattern for seven years. For seven years, I neglected my own innate desires so fully that I didn’t even know they existed. I had no idea how unhappy I was, how I was dying inside from boredom and lack of stimulation. A deeply buried feeling of restlessness eventually surfaced as resentment for the man I thought I loved. He never asked me to do any of this – I did it willingly because it felt safe and comfortable and because I thought it was what I was supposed to do.

This is how it came to be that in late 2012 I ended my relationship with the man I believed I would marry. Shortly afterward, I sank into a deep depression. I had never suffered from depression before, so I didn’t know that my days of binge-watching Netflix in bed, my disinterest in talking to close friends and family, and my lack of motivation to promote my business was a side-effect of a mental illness that was getting worse by the day. For 8 months I went through the motions of life, smiling when it was appropriate, checking all of the boxes. I wasn’t wallowing because of the failed relationship, or because I missed him or wanted him back. In fact, the whole thing had very little to do with him. The problem was that once he was gone I realized that I had no idea who I was or what I wanted. I lost most of my friends in the breakup. I said goodbye to one of my dogs. I gave up an entire second family. My financial freedom had depended largely on his contribution to the household. I had no idea what I would do with my free time, or how I would spend my weekends… alone. My entire life, all of my plans and goals for the future, were built around our life together, and the foundation had crumbled beneath my feet. 

Then I found the mountains.

It happened slowly, not all at once, kind of how love happens. You meet, you get to know each other, and then one day you realize that you’ve found something you can’t live without. That is how I fell in love with the Appalachian Trail. During the summer before my first semester of graduate school, I ended up connecting with some locals in the small mountain town of Franklin, NC who invited me to go hiking. I didn’t know much about hiking, but I agreed to go. We only hiked a short distance that day, less than a mile if I recall. I didn’t recognize the full impact of it at the time, but I stood on top of Wayah Bald on a warm, sunny day in July and I found peace in those ancient, rolling layers of blue that spread out before me as far as my eyes could see.

Six months later, in early January of 2014, I remember distinctly saying out loud to no one in particular that I was going to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. From that moment forward, every spare minute was spent in the mountains. I spent hours reading Appalachian Trail books, blogs, and journals. I scoured articles and gear reviews looking for the best equipment. I worked three jobs to save up money for my hike. More than a year later, on April 28, 2015, I finally walked past the first white blaze on my way to Maine. In an instant, I wasn’t just a hiker anymore. I had transformed into a thru-hiker… an aspiring one at least.

This simple act, putting one foot in front of the other on a dirt path through the woods, changed everything. The Appalachian Trail gave me back all the things the breakup had taken from me: friendships, an extended family, a plan. The trail reminded me who I was without him and helped me discover who I wanted to be. It gave me room to grow, to fail, and to thrive on my own. I didn’t find myself on the trail, because I was never lost. Instead, the trail gave me the freedom to remember who I was before society and an unsatisfying relationship told me who I should be.