Sounds relaxing

I could say that it all happened at once, but really it had been a lifetime of decisions that had led to this moment, an avalanche of stress that had inexorably ravaged the mountain, a cascade of water pouring… 

…you get the picture. 

I had been lost for a very long time. And when I say lost, I mean exclusively in my own head. Everything had seemed peachy-keen from the outside. The business, the wife, the house, the kids, the cars, the toys, the dog, the friends, the clubs, the projects… the dream. It was the American Dream. I had it all, and yet, nothing at the same time. Because I wasn’t present for any of it. 

Where was I? Stuck in my own head. 

Anxiety is like that. If you’ve never felt extreme anxiety, imagine your greatest fear. And then imagine experiencing that fear all day. And then imagine that the trigger for that fear is absolutely nothing. That’s right. Nothing. It can happen at any time, and seemingly for no reason. And all you have to do to stop it is… oh wait, you can’t. You can’t? Nope, you can’t. You can try a million different things but it is like trying to throw a snowball at the aforementioned avalanche, or trying to kick the tide and send it back to the sea. You are just wasting your damn time. 

And all the while, in your bouts of anxiety and fear, you are living your life. In my case, I was simply pretending that I was OK. And I was good at it! Very few people ever really saw that there was anything wrong with me at all! Especially my wife. She knew I drank a little too much on Fridays, and had an excessive obsession with golf, fishing, and fantasy football. But she never had any idea that there was a host of acid-spewing ants constantly crawling up every single one of my veins in an ultimately successful attempt to overtake the throne of my brain… She just thought that I had a little trouble sleeping from time to time. I couldn’t tell her. She would just brush it off, like everything else. 

My kids were no help either, not that they should be. My children are wonderful human beings. And I was, and will continue to be, a damn good father. My children are also… children. With everything that comes along with that title. They love their Dad, and do their best to be model young humans, but they are nonetheless no help in dealing with all of the issues going on in my head. I would find myself getting unbearably sad about them leaving for college, or wrecking their first car, while both of them were still in middle school. It didn’t make any sense. The worry consumed me regardless. 

The divorce came suddenly. I caught my wife having sex with another man in our bed. There aren’t words for a moment like that. Adultery has become so common in our culture and society that it is expected that a man should simply… deal with it. But what was running through my head at that moment was murder. Plain and simple. It was the burning of every bridge, every single synapse that had anything to do with social convention, every decent thing about me, gone in an instant. All that was left was hate, pure unadulterated hate. I had never truly experienced it before. I had never let myself. But at that moment, phew. It was everything. I didn’t notice grabbing the shotgun. I didn’t even understand why I was loading it. I had no coherent thought other than hate. Luckily, I paused. A gentle beacon called from the quietest part of my soul. For the first time since I could remember, my anxiety was gone. I told them both to get out and they did. I don’t remember putting the shotgun back in the safe, but when I checked on it the next day, it was back in the safe, where it should be. 

The divorce was messy. There is nothing quite like someone who wants to blame you for their own behavior. In my eyes, I could see why she had done what she had done. But there are no excuses in this world, no matter how badly someone wants to make them. I went through the process though, talking to my children in the gentlest way possible, trying my best to preserve their innocence while refusing to lie to them. In the end, I just started deflecting their questions to other topics. They are smart kids. They knew that it would just have to wait until they were a little older. 

Of course, as these things go, my now ex-wife was awarded custody of the children. She refused visitation rites. I could even see her lawyer pushing and prodding her, trying to cajole her to come back to humanity. I saw the woman that I had loved, had pledged my life to, so wrapped up in guilt that she couldn’t face it; couldn’t do anything but double down and push outwards. If it wasn’t my fault then, well… yeah, she wouldn’t even go that far. In the end, I was awarded the house (great) and I would have to wait six months to appeal for visitation rights. 

I sold my business immediately. I inherently knew that I wasn’t going to recover from this without intense life changes. This was more than a ‘mid-life’ crisis. This was the reckoning of my very soul. Every single thing that I had believed in had been called to question. Every one of my formative ideations was proven utterly false. I couldn’t function. Luckily, my business was a successful one with a brick and mortar location. It sold quickly, to a venture capitalist group in town that couldn’t believe I was willing to sell. It fetched more than a fair price. I put a quarter of the proceeds into a pair of college funds and the rest into savings.

But that didn’t help with the anxiety one bit. I found myself pacing through the hallways of my now empty home, alternately crying and screaming at the top of my lungs. I would hyperventilate frequently. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to immediately get a therapist. What they explained to me is that trauma can lead to triggering events… and I was living in one. It only took two weeks after the kids had moved out to know that I was going to have to get rid of the place. The memories of their smiling faces running up and down the stairs, the moments with my ex-wife at the kitchen table in the evenings, the sunday mornings where we would all watch football in our PJs… all of it dominated my mind, crushing any hope or sense of wellbeing, shaking each and every bone in my ribcage with alarming force, like a feral dog shaking a rat to death in an alley. I couldn’t cope. It was literally killing me. 

So, I put my nose to the grindstone and got rid of the damn thing. It is amazing what you can achieve when you put your mind to it. I hired some kids off Craigslist to help me sell everything online, donate or give away the rest, and then paint everything. I spent my days frantically cleaning, scrubbing, and detailing every corner. Within a week the former bastion of my existence was nearly empty, barren of all of the previous life it held, and ready to be sold. 

And it sold quickly. Even the real estate agent couldn’t believe that I was selling. In this neighborhood? With all you’ve done to it? 

It didn’t matter. I hadn’t slept longer than three hours at a time for months. I couldn’t breathe, ever, like I was constantly chasing the next breath after pushing it too hard on a run. I could see shadows in the corners of my eyes, and when I would quickly flick my head to the side, ostensibly to see some kind of ghost, I would invariably pull some muscle in either my neck or my shoulder. The skin above my right ear constantly twitched, an annoying tic that I was sure was some kind of neurological disease. I was sure that I either had cancer, diabetes, or pneumonia. I started yelling randomly and talking to myself constantly. Something had to give. 

My therapist assured me that I wasn’t crazy; that I was going through intense trauma and that these things were all normal. What he didn’t see were the nights where I would lay down at nine and still be wide awake at 2 am. Where the frustration and exhaustion would combine into a quiet frenzy, leaving me on my knees beside the bed, rocking back and forth, trying to calm the racing thoughts in my head. 

“It’s going to be OK.” I would say. Over, and over, and over, and… Until I caught myself, on the brink of madness, uttering the same syllables, my entire face twitching. Some mornings I would wake, still either on my knees or in the fetal position at the foot of the guest bed. The other bed was in a dumpster somewhere.

I knew that if I didn’t get out soon, I was going to die this way. 

I decided to go camping. It was the very last day in my house. Everything was cleared out aside from the inflatable mattress and a few bags of my belongings. Everything I owned had reminded me of my former life, so away it had gone. I bought new clothes and kept only a large portfolio book of my kid’s art. I couldn’t handle anything else. My friends that had stopped by had urged me to keep more, saying that they would hold onto it for me for a while. They didn’t understand. It had to go. 

Then, I went to the sporting goods store and bought all new gear. This was the fun part. I have always loved and enjoyed spending time in the wilderness. I had gone for dozens of long backpacking trips in my youth. Getting my kids out fishing, hunting, and camping with me has been one of the greatest joys in my world. So naturally, all that gear had to go. But buying new gear, well, that was just one of the perks of living right? Right? Right. 

Before then, living in that house had been like living on coals, eating hellfire for every meal, and burning alive in the heat of everything I made myself aware of simultaneously. I had lived my entire life for others, giving of myself from an empty cup for so long that I couldn’t honestly tell you if there was any liquid left in me. But now, with all of my new gear laid out in front of me, there was a glimmer of something… else. Was it hope? I had no clue. But it was brighter than the dark pit of hopeless despair, and slightly less warm than the hell of constant panic attacks, so I grasped at the thread of light and held tight. 

Within a few days, my truck was packed and I was driving. I can’t really tell you how I got there, exactly. Between the stress, the trauma, and the high intake of coffee, I was able to function with an intense effectiveness that drowned out any semblance of actually being present for any of these events. There were brief windows of course, smatterings of memory that belied small, somewhat memorable events that briefly brought me out of myself. I drove without knowing where I was going. I could see mountains and, ostensibly, trees in the distance. I just drove in that direction. The phone would chime and chirp randomly. I resisted throwing it out of the window. Instead, I simply turned it off. 

It didn’t take long before I found a campsite. It was late Spring, so the weather was still kind of cold and gloomy. I didn’t mind. I had only worried about such things with small children in tow. I could easily handle rainy days spent alone in my tent. In fact, I preferred this. When I pulled into the campground there were only a few occupied sites. It was a small affair, set back into the National Forest I had inadvertently wandered into, up a long, winding road that required a 4x4 vehicle to get to. I would have privacy, at least. I put my money in the envelope, dropped it into the slot, and went to pick a spot. As I set up camp, the sky opened up with thick sheets of rain. For some reason, this seemed really funny to me.

It’s been two weeks since then. For the first few days, I found myself anxiously pacing through the forest around the campsite, jumping from trail to trail and desperately trying to exhaust myself enough so that I could simply sit down and read a book. I furiously engaged in tasks, whether that was cooking, cleaning, or collecting firewood. I disregarded everyone around me and focused only on what needed to be done, and how fast I could do it. 

But then something came over me. I believe it was on Day 4, or maybe it was Day 6… it doesn’t matter. One day, I found myself in my camp chair, drinking instant coffee I had made on my butane stove, staring into the forest and thinking about nothing. Wait, nothing? That’s right. Nothing. I do not believe there had ever been a single second of my life up to that point where that had occurred. It brought about a hurricane of thoughts, all trying to worm their way up to the forefront of my consciousness but I just… let them all go. Wait, WHAT? Let thoughts go?? That’s an OPTION? 

Evidently, it is. 

There had been a slight shift brought about by my complete removal from everyday life. I was hiking at least seven miles a day, but the trails weren’t marked and I certainly wasn’t counting. And when you added in the steps between my site and the bathroom, all of the effort put into collecting wood for my nightly fire, and then cooking, I was definitely getting enough exercise. And somewhere along the way, the confluence of all of these habits and mundane activities had created a ritualized flow, a general pattern that was easy to simply get lost in. So I did. 

I had never meditated before this. I had tried, at the behest of my therapist and several of my friends, but I had never taken it seriously. The best I had ever done was watching my breath for thirty seconds, and then my mind was right back off to the races. Sitting in my campground, I meditated almost constantly. It became second nature to simply breathe and not think. I don’t think I could have possibly learned it if I hadn’t come out here by myself. I found that the answers would come to questions I didn’t even know I had been asking. It was… relaxing. 

It was also lonely. After a week, I realized that I had actively shunned the other campers who had come and gone. I had barely even registered their presence. There were only ten spots in the campground, but there were two RVs there, and I was sure that they had said hello once or twice… so I got up one morning and made sure to walk by and introduce myself. There was a couple in each RV, retirees that traveled the country staying in places like this. They were warm, inviting, and very friendly. I am sure they could tell why a man my age would be camping alone in a place like this. It felt good to talk to other people. I listened to them for quite some time, then went back to my frenzied exercising. 

The rest of the second week went by in a slow flash. Time passed slower, but because it was so unremarkable, it seemed to go by in an instant. I was also catching up on sleep, a small miracle in itself, and regularly found myself taking short naps during the day. I could only stay in the campground for fourteen days, pretty standard for these places, so on the fourteenth day I found myself slowly packing up camp and looking around at the forest I had come to know and love. My RVer friends had both left a few days before. One of them had told me about another campground down the road that was even quieter than this. I thanked them and then went about my hike. 

It struck me then, the folded tarp under my arm, just how much had happened to me while I was doing nothing. I didn’t feel any different. I still felt like I was going to die from grief at every moment. But there was resilience behind it all now. I was removed from the cutting edge; an observer of the turmoil. I laid my head to rest that night thinking about that. 

The next morning I finished putting everything in the car, started it up, then jumped in the door and headed up to the road. I glanced at my phone. I hadn’t turned it on all week. The only human beings I cared about hearing from weren’t allowed to call, at least not until the next court date in a few months. I left it off. There was a campground up the road that was supposed to be even quieter than this and I wanted to go there next. 

It sounded pretty relaxing.