What’s Happening?

I’ve been sleepwalking again—something I haven’t done since I was a child. I wake up standing next to the bed at odd hours of the early morning. One night I woke up and I was facing my nightstand, thinking I had to go to the bathroom but I couldn’t figure out how to get there, especially in the dark. Apparently I got there, but I remember very little about it. Thank goodness I didn’t knock over one of two piles of books: on the floor and on the nightstand itself.

I wonder if this is something subterranean bubbling in my subconscious. I haven’t been well lately, and I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe the sleepwalking is a symptom of a larger issue of which I’m entirely unaware.

I’ve been training pretty steadily for the trail run in August. Making sure not to increase my mileage by more than 10% a week. Interspersing fast walks with longer, slower walks. All of these walks have been on the flat trestle trail, to increase my aerobic capacity more effectively than I can on the trail. Has training triggered something in the back of my mind? Something that I can’t identify? I know I’m tired, so I took Thursday to Saturday off. I meant to return to my long walk on Sunday, but have injured my quad muscle. To me this means I’m overtraining.

The August event has been pressing on me: how should I be training, have I trained enough, when will I be ready? On the weekend I decided to hell with it. What do I enjoy? Swimming, and hiking on Cobble Hill Mountain. So I’ll keep swimming and go back to the mountain. The flats at the trestle trail are boring, anyway, with nothing new to see each day and no fun things to take pictures of. The mountain will give me more of that. I’ve decided not to think about the trail run for now. Hurrah for doing what you want, not what you think you need to do.

But there’s more to this unidentified miasma that’s drifting up from below.

Much of it has to do with my book coming out in June. I’m so looking forward to the launch event I’m having at a remote lodge in the Rockies with four of my friends, whom I’ve never met in person (well, I met one ten years ago). We’re going to have a blast—stay tuned for a post about them and what great women they are.

I’ll be signing at Munro’s Books, a downtown Victoria icon, once they come out. I’ll also be signing at my local bookstore, Volume One Books, on July 12^th. I’ll be on the Let’s Talk Memoir podcast with Ronit Plank in June, and perhaps on a Mongabay podcast. I’m excited for these things.

But part of me feels overwhelmed, and I suspect it’s because I keep denying that I have limitations. I’ve seen too many women in the Facebook writing groups I’m part of post pictures of events, in which they’re either solo or in conversation with another writer. They’re comfortable and radiant up there on stage in front of people, talking and laughing about their book. I know that social media is a highlights reel, and doesn’t usually show the bad stuff. But want to have what they have, regardless of my innate knowledge that I’d probably have an anxiety attack in front of a group of people. I used to lecture to 100-student classes and it was no problem, but that comfort deteriorated rapidly once my illness kicked in. Which means I can’t do it now, either. It’s not something you can put in your pocket and then pull out when you need it.

So even though I’ve been trying to book events and failing, I’m working on accepting that I’m doing myself a favour by not doing them.

I also sometimes worry about the book’s content. What if someone doesn’t like how I’ve portrayed them? I’ve used pseudonyms, but anyone who was with me on fieldwork will know who’s who. What if I got something wrong? A fact or a theory or a date? What if people hate it? (Well, that’s unlikely as all of my beta readers liked it. So I can toss that one in the bin.)

Mostly I feel weird that this book is about a “me” who doesn’t exist anymore. I’m no longer the outdoor-focused person who had all the experiences the book describes. I’m a writer who gets to the mountains once a year. And in the meantime hikes a local hill. The person I was ended in 2012. The new “me” has continued to evolve since then, in step with my illness and my life circumstances. Maybe that’s the biggest thing bothering me about everything—the jarring disconnect between who I am/was in the book and who I am in real life.

This all makes sense to me as a reason why I’m feeling off these days. The trail race had been taking up too much space in my mind, and I’m happy to have sorted that out. What I really want is not to finish a run, but to become a stronger mountain hiker. The two are pretty different.

I’m also happy to have identified and tackled most of the book issues. It’s obviously a big deal in more ways than one. I’m glad I wrote it, and am excited to start the next one, but I’ve realized I need to change my life to get closer to the person I used to be. And that’s the hard part. How to make that happen. I understand that life events drive change, but we also have the capability to reimagine ourselves as something or someone we’d prefer to be. It’s just taking that leap, and trusting you’ll figure it out on the other side. Instead of sleepwalking into oblivion.