Lately I’ve been working on an essay that is predicated on the premise of my next book: how to enjoy the outdoors with anxiety and bipolar II. The essay has distilled one strand of the book into 2500 words, and I’m thinking about how to expand on that to create a full-length book that follows the narrative through-line about getting outdoors and what it does (or doesn’t do) for mental health.
I conclude in my essay that getting outdoors doesn’t help me in tangible ways, but helps my brain circuitry get rewired instead of rusted shut by depression, and gives me the break I need to do more cognitive heavy lifting. I do enjoy hiking, but I dread the uphills. This seems to be an anxiety thing—I feel like I hyperventilate and gasp for air doing them, but when I did the same trails with Dave I had barely any problem. My hypothesis is that, with Dave, I was distracted by our conversation and not fixated on the hills. I only had to stop once to catch my breath and was good to go in a matter of minutes.
On our trip to the Rockies a few weeks ago, I did some huffing and puffing up the moraine complex at Hilda Glacier, but I just walked steadily and slowly up the hill and down again into the proglacial valley. Again, I was with Dave, and we talked while we walked which made the incline less of a problem.
Which brings me to my next issue, which surfaced while finishing the copy edits on my field book. It ends (not a spoiler, really – besides, you’ll have forgotten about it by the time the book comes out in June lol) with me talking about getting back into the mountains and making them more of our life than they have been in the past 10 years.
After I finished my edits, I felt a bit sad. I’m not living the life I’d proposed at the end of the book, or even the life I’d planned way back when we first got married. I want the mountains to be a bigger part of my life, but the way things are now they’re not. We’ve done the long and tiring journey from Vancouver Island to the Rockies annually for the past three years, getting up at 3 am to catch the first ferry and driving until 7 pm at night. Why not live closer to the mountains and go there regularly, and just make the monumental trip back to the Island once or twice a year? Logically, it’s backwards. Why live far away from what you love and beat yourself up getting there and staying for just five days, when you could live closer and be there in a matter of hours?
It’s something I’m thinking hard about, particularly since my next book is about being outdoors. I get out on Cobble Hill Mountain, but it’s definitely not the same as the Rockies. It’s pleasant, and challenging, but it’s not even a real mountain. I’ll have to think about this more and figure out how we can get it to work.
In the meantime I’ll continue my hikes. I have my eye on a trail run in May that I might try. Lots of time to get fitter and faster.
