Out of the Woods
For the past five years, I have attended Wavus Camp for Girls, a wilderness
tripping camp in Maine. I have completed hiking, canoeing, and kayaking trips of
increasing length and difficulty each summer with the same group of six girls who
have become my family. This summer was the grand finale. This year’s trip, Maine
Trails, consisted of twenty days of backpacking in the most mountainous section of
the Appalachian Trail. We hiked 200 miles total, and our days were ten miles long
on average, but they sometimes reached fifteen. We faced mud, mosquitoes, soaked
boots, gale force winds, hypothermia, and torrential downpour. The difficulty of the
trip is summed up in the sheer conviction with which my friend declared, “I’d rather
be in school!”
I cannot describe how spiritual and transformative this experience was. I
thought my life had changed forever. I would no longer timid. I would no longer
strive to meet the expectations of others. I would do what makes me happy. I would
finally be purely my own person, and not who I thought people wanted me to be.
I was wrong.
When I returned to the civilized world after this intense, emotional
experience, reality smacked me in the back of the head with a baseball bat. I woke
up at ten every day, took a nap from two-thirty to five, and then went back to sleep
at ten. My parents almost had me tested for mono. I simply could not adjust to life in
the real world, and I felt cripplingly lonely without my cabin mates.
After a week and a half, I snapped out of my fog, and returned to my normal
self. Herein lies the problem: I became essentially the same person who I was before
the trip. I cared about what other people thought. I worried that people who I
perceived as cool might not like me. I became terrified that everything I was doing
was not enough.
I spent much of my fall chasing release from my burning self-doubt, but it
grew exponentially. The pressures of Upper Mid year combined with a traumatic
shoulder injury and a prolonged absence from classes rendered me a moody,
nervous shadow of my hiking self. My diminished state was especially pronounced
because I knew how confident and strong I had become on the trail.
Finally, when I was hiking again over winter break, I saw this person again.
On those hikes, wearing my worn-in hiking boots, legs scratched by overgrown
grass, and dirt caked beneath my fingernails, I was able to breathe deeply again. It
was the silence that I missed the most. I craved silence from my own thoughts,
silence from the devil on my shoulder that whispers, and sometimes screams, that I
am not good enough. I am able to think clearly because that devil is bound and
gagged.
My life did not change course because of Maine Trails. I have not
permanently become the person who I was on the trip. However, now I have a place
where I can be that person when I have the chance. Now I know how it feels to rid
myself of the insidious, malicious voice in the back of my mind. That voice will
always be there, but at least I can escape for a few hours, or maybe even weeks.
