to not feel something fully is to not feel it at all
About a year and a half ago, I published a piece on my time in New Zealand after the whole experience left me feeling weird and conflicted (but ultimately blessed). It helped me process a lot of what happened in the context of the life I lead. Not long after publishing, I began working on something new that attempted to harness the same processing power, and to capture my feelings about my struggle with holding onto experiences in a fight against a brain that seems to want to make me forget them and makes me feel out of place for doing so.
I don’t write these for self-satisfaction or attention. In fact, the New Zealand piece was almost shelved because of my fear of being clueless. Rather, I write these because they work creative writing muscles that I don’t work often enough, and they help me process parts of life's experience that torment me a little. I used to write creatively a ton in college and high school, even though I had no real-world experience. Now, I have a little bit of experience but don’t write nearly as much.
The saving grace of the “New Zealand thing” was that it was received in a way where the feedback really touched my heart. People who I hadn’t talked to in years or who I thought would be disengaged from this kind of content wrote long comments about how much they appreciated it, how I put to word ethereal shared feelings. This was a boon in the fight against my crushing dislike of being perceived.
The thing is, the New Zealand piece had enough of a “life advice” core to it that it arguably can be read as a general guide to living in a foreign country (or at least NZ) separate from my ramblings, and this smoothed over some of the trepidation I had in publishing it.
This piece I’m about to share with you does not have that core. It is arguably way more self-absorbed. As a result, I’ve sat on this far longer than the New Zealand piece, toying with it and pulling at threads and trying to dislodge some of its focus on the self.
But I don’t think it will ever be disentangled from that, or even if it should be. It does have elements of generally applicable observations, but it is mostly autobiographical and self-therapy.
So I share it with you as it is, as completely unsure of how it will be taken as I was when I published the New Zealand one. I do consider this a spiritual successor to that piece, my Empire Strikes Back to my A New Hope. If you take the time to read it through, just know that I appreciate you and hope something in it is useful or interesting to you. Or maybe not, and it’s just fun to read.
Another amusing quirk of it is that I often felt the motivation to work on it in bulk when I was under the spell of some kind of mire. At times during the writing process, this manifested itself as a grievance hit list, which was an angst I inevitably reeled in with edit passes later once I had calmed down. The relevance is that despite the broader uplifting message of this piece, it’s impossible to divorce it from the Big Sad, which despite my blissless optimism, follows me through life like a sad comedic punch line. Wow, what a sell. Let’s do this.
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The tree
Memories really are the most treasured thing we have in this world, even with the poetic irony that we can sometimes be tortured by them. Even when you’re naked and alone in a dark room, you still have your memories. It’s intriguing the way specific memories can unearth themselves given certain triggers, or the way treasured memories can motivate hope for the future amidst a past that does not exist anymore and a present that callously charges forward.
It’s also curious how hierarchical they are. How some stew and marinate in our brains daily and how some sit there quietly in the catch-all drawer of our minds, waiting to be called upon. I’m convinced that our core memories, which we can carry like metaphorical lockets on our chests, can shape our entire life trajectories. Maybe this is too sentimental, but hey, softness is a virtue these days.
Of course, these kernels of ourselves are nothing without the feelings attached to them, the source of the warmth that we get from them. Reliving a feeling via an old memory induces an almost psychedelic episode. The feeling from a pleasant memory is a warm hug from a setting sun – overpowering and saturated and enchanting and something you want to roll around in forever. Green grass under an oak tree, a swim in an emerald-blue lake in the mountains, falling asleep with her to a C-rate horror movie.
Right? I don’t even know. Because sometimes the Other Kind of memories claw themselves from the depths, and you’re left staring at a wall or spacing out in traffic thinking about the people who are gone from your life and the searing pain of a reality you know you can’t access anymore. She was right there, my hand obsessively tracing the smalls of her back. Now, 2,300 miles, dust and echoes. I open that door. The TV static comes back. I stare at the fire. Don’t linger too long. You can’t linger too long.
at the end of a 5-day backpacking trip, I plunged myself in the surreal colors of Kintla Lake to wash the sweat, dirt, and bruised ego off of myself. on this 80-degree blue bird day, it felt like I was being swallowed by the mountains
Nostalgia is a leech and an unstoppable force. For myself, it’s dusty memories of the ‘90s and crisp fall days in New England back when a lot more people in my life were alive and the world felt bigger. I can see with crystal clarity specific days of my life back then. I’m there – I’m not. I am a specter roaming a buried reality of my own life in the past while in the present. I am a god inside my own head. Green grass under an oak tree. There’s a half-circle rock wall.
But I am cogent enough to know it’s a party trick. Nostalgia trades with delusion and safe space as currencies. Chances are you have a similar set of core vivid memories from youth. Isn’t it weird to access them?
I was at a relatively late age when I began to wonder if my brain processed this stuff in a different manner than others. This sounds self-indulgent. Let me be clear: I don’t think I’m special, but, as the kids say, “lol. lmao even,” and those closest to my heart have shot enough glancing blows about this condition that Something Is Amiss.
The iron grip that self-awareness has had on me my whole life long ago twisted me into thinking that My Brain Isn’t Right. E.g.: Do you ever think about the fact that there are people in this world who have a thought and then immediately act upon it? They’re in a store and a slow cooker is on sale for $10 off and they just buy it. They never wanted a slow cooker before. They barely made rent. But they buy it. Or they’re in the left lane and see a sign for a local attraction and say “oh that looks interesting” and immediately cut right across two lanes to turn off. Are you kidding me? I can’t spend more than $15 without having a battle in my head, and I need to know exactly what I’m getting myself into before going anywhere. There are few aspects of my life where I can just act without triggering a cascade of secondary and tertiary analytical stages. I’ve always been a little envious of people who just “do things.”
Part of my mental gymnastics is replicating this “don’t think” mentality as best I can, but it’s an approximation, not a lived experience. I imitate it, and there are times when it crosses into genuine, but most of the time, it echoes of fraudulence. Masks on masks on masks. And yeah – this is rife with irony considering my lifestyle has me moving across the country every six months. I don’t even know where the truth lands here and I spend a lot of time decoding the “why” of me doing things or making decisions, which ironically is just evidence to the point. The introspection about self-awareness is proof of the self-awareness; the Ouroboros of my mind never chilling the fuck out.
As I relayed previously about my in/ability to cope with a seasonal lifestyle, this shit, in a few words, “takes a lot out of me.” A casualty of this are my memories: a paint splatter on the canvas that is my brain, and woof, it gets messy.
When I’m in those transition phases between seasonal appointments, my mind shifts into change mode, moving around the country and seeing people I may not have seen in years or have never met in person before. Like Johnny Cash, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve passed through tiny Montana towns with populations of less than one hundred. I’ve driven across the Wyoming plains with drifting snow and an hour and a half drive between towns. I’ve also driven through rush hour in Chicago, drank on the subway in New York City, spent countless hours loitering in downtown Orlando for shows. Stuttered basic French in Montreal while seeking poutine. I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of random beers in random bars across the world. I hammer out 15-hour drives like it’s nothing. I’ve lived in half a dozen states and visited almost all of them. But despite all this experience –
How does nothing feel real?
"nothing feels real" manifests itself in the "subway stare," a phenomenon I experience where the anonymous feeling of being one person at a subway stop as heavy machinery drowns out your internal monologue and makes you hyper-focused on the material reality in front of you. and nothing else.
In these transitional phases, I tend to stumble across memories that, for one reason or another, I had filed away relatively quickly. I hold on easily to big memories, obviously. When I climbed one of my first mountains in Montana, I saw a sea of peaks stretching out around me and three glaciers sat below me. The coordinates to that summit are tattooed on me. The feeling I have from that summit, and various other summits throughout the park, is the tealight burning in me all the time in some form or another. When I think of the moments in my life where I’ve felt bursting with the satisfaction of a life lived whole, it’s basking in the Montana sun on top of a craggy peak. It’s where the feeling floods into me, where the intensity of the experience safeguards it against an increasingly blotchy memory.
But the smaller memories are grains of sand falling through my fingers. They’re important to me. Yet I grasp, and I can’t hold onto them. Then they randomly re-emerge months or years later when I find myself retracing my steps in an old haunt or walking down the corridor in my mind that allows the neurons to fire in the way that I can access them. I’ve been to so many corners of this country. My soul has tied knots with people from all over North America.
years back, I broke my brain and tricked it into releasing the death grip it had on my social anxiety, and I've felt free ever since. free to exist fully in the random moments with random strangers that occur all the time. including a red-eye on the Empire Builder in the sightseer lounge trading life stories with people I'll never see again
When you see people or revisit places you’ve been before, it’s like you haven’t skipped a beat. Things rush back. Scrolling through your camera roll, Facebook memories, old internet posts, catching up with friends, talking to mom, the smell of a plant, the sound of a subway, the taste of a Cold Smoke, a song I haven’t heard in years.
Suddenly, the past is so accessible. It’s right there in front of me. I never thought I’d see it again. You can grab it, touch it, flirt with it. I love you. Don’t go away so soon this time. But then it slips away.
Then, it’s the shock to the system. I’m reminded of a version of myself that’s so foreign to who I am now that it’s hard to believe he exists.
Then, another jolt. It’s a rapid falling of dominoes in my mind as every moment that made me who I am today gets replayed and catalogued. It stings a little. There’s a lot of moments in that sequence where life stole a piece of me for itself, and it’s in the replay of those parts where my head starts to feel like TV static. Change is inevitable, I know. We grow and learn. It’s the most annoyingly simple fact of life. But the contrast between who I was and who I am now stun locks me. I dwell on it. I twirl it around my fingers and mourn a loss of innocence that came with the whole sordid affair. There is a trail of sabotaged friendships, burned bridges, and alienation borne out of my ultraviolent feelings that is unrecoverable from this period. Ego is a hell of a trip.
But I’m also a proponent of the Theory of Environmental Therapy for Victims of Cumulative Minor Trauma. The open secret of working in the outdoor industry is that a lot of us are at least a little off in ways that someone with a copy of the DSM might know more about. As the joke goes – “Undiagnosed, but something ain’t right.”
Yeah, it’s not all of us. But well-adjusted people generally pick life paths that don’t have them moving across the country multiple times in a year. You know those life experiences that leave you with just a little bit of shell shock? Breaking down in the middle of nowhere, running into grizzly bears on top of a mountain, white knuckling through unexpected fresh snow on the road? Battling freezing sleet on trail, bedding down in your laundry room while 100 mph winds from a hurricane rip around you? I believe that those moments are vampiric and that you don’t ever come out of the other end of them the same person you were. Immersion in nature helps to massage these little soul cuts, never mind the actual trauma some of us may have accumulated over the course of our lives.
As they say – your body keeps the score. Life often is a run of events that are part of the passing of time: lost loves, death of loved ones, friends moving on, local haunts closing, etc. These are more digestible when you have the stability to process them in the context of the place you’ve lived in for 5, 10, 20 years. But, hey: Do you ever think about people who live their whole lives in one place and never move? I spent years living in a town in Florida that was the definition of a nothingville. Unplanned, sprawling, unable to keep up with a rising population, aging infrastructure, far from the ocean, no culture, run-down grocery stores. There are people who have spent their entire lives here. And are happy with it. Or content?
Or maybe I’m just pretentious, and they don’t even think about it. This has always fascinated me. That town wasn't even small, really. I’ve driven through main streets in the mountain west where the population hasn’t climbed above a couple hundred, and I think about the lives people have built there. I get edgy and restless living in a place longer than five months. It wasn’t always like this. Then the wonder set in.
But what if you just ripped that stability out? What if you had to deal with The Weight Of It All, but add on the feeling of never really having a place to hang your head for longer than six months? You know what it’s like to pack your life into a passenger vehicle twice or more times a year? Constantly rationing what you buy because space is a luxury?
When I close my eyes in the northern Rockies, sometimes I feel the echoes of every loss, every unrequited feeling, every disappointment, every shell shock flash before me. I try to massage the torment of the cumulative loss I experience in this life – every time I leave someone at some random spot in this world, it leaves a soul tear in my body.
Loss follows me up the mountain even if it loses steam at the last 5% before the summit. It tries though. I climb because it isn’t there at the top. I blink, and for rare moments, my mind is clear. Those initial 100 feet climbing down from the summit are like descending into a dank basement. Oh, it’s all here. She’s here. It’s here. The Sunday Scaries are here. The realization that another summer is slipping from my hands is here.
The hyper speed that summer seasonal mountain life runs at certainly doesn't help in retaining memory; every week lasts a second and somehow feels like the most important week of your life. It was the struggle to understand the way time and emotions move in these seasons that inspired this piece.
every trip and every climb comes with the bundled Truth that summer in northwest Montana is one of the most fleeting summers you'll experience. wasting feelings and wasting time will annoy you like mental hangnails.
I have never felt feelings gently. It is maybe the defining trait of my life. They always take over and grind and churn and chew me up.
Days are long, the sun kisses me and loves me but saps my energy, and my head swims from feeling things I can never fully process or understand.
They crush me.
I withdraw for days when the wrong one hits me in the wrong way. They’re on my sleeve, and I know that, but I recoil when people point them out. People watch me deal with them like I'm a show animal. Complete strangers spot it from a mile away. I feel them in my bones.
I wish I could be cavalier and nonchalant. But it’s not in me. I feel drunk on stone cold sober days. I have the thousand-yard stare on happy summer days. The Gate to the other side opens up; it demands a piece of my mind to pay the price for maintaining my connection to reality. Memory is lost in this exchange.
Reality slips through my fingers, time is distorted, I don’t know the meaning of a mile, and I ignore people one day and hyper-fixate on them on another day. It doesn’t help that I live in a place that doesn’t feel real, where I can watch grizzly bears roam through meadows, where the mountains look like hallucinations willed into existence, and where rushing water cascades from the heavens all around you.
Yet, traipsing in the mountains is the dopamine wall that seems to simply stop it all. There’s lots of evidence that shows immersion in natural settings does wonders for mental health. But what if you live and play in one of the most beautiful locations on earth? What if part of your job is being out there? What if almost every aspect of your five to six months in the mountains is geared toward being outside?
The healing power is immense, even as I’m battered, bruised, bleeding, and feeling my legs scream from 21 miles and almost 7,000 feet. I have had spiritual experiences in these mountains. Moments in these mountains have been seared into my brain, branded on my soul. It’s an out-of-body feeling.
Exposure to high emotion like this is a strong drug. After a while, you need more and more to get the same effect. Where I live and play is a vortex because of this; I know so many people who are unable to escape the grip that the northern Rockies have on their soul. But a downstream effect is that other adventures in life lose their edge. It’s humbling and empowering at the same time.
And then you’re ripped from it at the end of the season.
So, this is a total 180 and a silly confession, but I keep a list of every concert I’ve been to in my entire life. Bear with me.
In so many ways, the defining cultural paradigm shift for a lot of people was the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. I call it, like many others do, the “before times.” The onset of Covid-19 coincided with a radical shift in my life, in which it supercharged a period of personal change. I abandoned my job of four years, abandoned live concert photography (since live music ceased to exist), abandoned Florida, and took off to the mountains (it’s a cliché, I know. Maybe my greatest weakness.) Although I had an inkling at that point that natural spaces were therapeutic, I didn’t “know” it in the sense that my heart knew it. However, even before this transition, in the throes of a depression that I knew the cause of but did nothing to address, I knew the price that I paid:
to “Maintain”, you give up some memories.
I was cognizant of this trade as it was happening, and so I cheated it: to safeguard against losing precious memories to the void, I re-built my concert history through photo albums, Facebook memories, and cross-referencing with friends. It’s mostly complete and I feel confident in it, but the headline of the project is that it squarely rests in that “part of another life” feeling. It feels like a bulwark defending against the creeping feeling that I’m destined to only recall the last two or three weeks of my life in perpetuity. I don’t know if other people feel such radical shifts in their life trajectories, but when I reflect on how I got from point A to point B, the whiplash is incredible. The memories and friendships I made in my years of photographing live music and traveling across the country for shows meant everything to me at one point, and they left their mark on me – but again, how do they not feel real? Why does seven years ago feel like a different life, like I'm watching a highlight reel of someone else's existence when I think of those memories?
This has led to a weird contrast in which I tell my park friends about my former life photographing the likes of Vans Warped Tour and the alt scene. And telling my music scene friends about how now I wander the woods and climb mountains for fulfillment.
The contrast and line between the two just makes the obvious reality even more obvious: that we are defined by the experiences that hold weight in our lives, but only in the sense that we can contextualize them with other experiences and people in our lives. And without this, it doesn’t mean anything. This is the true casualty of memory slipping through my fingers – it’s not just the loss of an experience but the loss of the people who were there along the way. The side effect of all this is that the walls close in on either side of the present, so everything lingers less.
I suppose the issue that I’m comically beating around the bush is the cataclysmic weight and Very Obvious Fact that experiences in your life become ethereal the moment they leave the present. Have you ever said goodbye to someone and closed the door behind them knowing you probably won’t ever see them again? The silence after that moment is a flash bang of sorrow. Why are my ears ringing? Why is my head swimming?
For most people with normal brains and normal living conditions, this is kind of the end of it. They reminisce with friends about the last holiday, get drinks every Christmas break with the same people. Consistency breeds some kind of narrative and massages well-built memory muscles. But then there’s people like myself with all sorts of memories tied to scattered locations in the country, waiting to be unlocked. How do you digest and process a life in which you are almost constantly having “once in a lifetime” experiences? Some people go their whole life without leaving their country. Some people will never touch a glacier, see a grizzly bear (heck, hold a bear cub), stand on top of a mountain, witness a historical aurora display.
it's difficult to relate the pure wonder experienced seeing a powerful aurora storm over the continental divide. like many others things - "you don't get it until you've seen it"
I am infinitely blessed to have these experiences. But they beat the shit out of me. The thing they don’t tell you about living like this is all the sobbing you do alone in your car on some random state highway or in a Walmart in Phoenix, barely holding it together in public as 7-year-old feelings break the levee and overtake you. Thousands of miles from people who care and even if you’re in touch with those who do, they might not “get it,” so you circle the existential drain of not being seen for eternity.
It is understood the therapeutic value of having a strong support network. And there are people who will pick up the phone. But it’s just different when you’re out there by yourself for months at a time. It’s just different.
I was over 6,000 miles across the globe when I learned that a friend who had touched my heart in a previous seasonal job was killed on the streets of San Francisco. No one teaches you how to process grief like that in a foreign country that has already tested your emotional bandwidth many times. I’m in front of the Gate again; I know what it wants.
I wander across the country like a ghost when I leave for the season; regaling old friends and new strangers with tales that I don’t think most of them would ever really get. It’s isolating. Some people do get it. But not many. The ones who do are my soul links. The tragedy of these life-changing experiences is that I experience many of them alone, a side effect of many of my character traits converging on a certain lifestyle. I wish I could bottle the feeling up and bring it back for friends down low to sip from in special celebrations. It’s cruel that the only reality you truly have access to is your own and that empathy is such an imperfect way to gently hold onto others. It’s unfair, but the reality is that the hurricane of your current moment is leaving a mark on you.
Not anyone else.
The only way to hold onto it after it passes, even a little, is to drink it fully when it’s happening. To feel the wind at the top, smell the flowers, feel the cold water on your body, the sun bake you on a boulder, the wind rip the snow into your face. What I love about it is how neatly it slots into the Pangea of my brain, the inability to feel lightly. It consumes me; it destroys me; it keeps me alive. I hold onto a moment with a death grip, turn it around, breathe it in, consume it, obsess over it, do all the things to it that people who know me gently remind me are not healthy. And scream internally that I just want to fucking die with the feeling because to die in a moment of ecstasy might just be it sometimes.
Then I close my eyes and release it. I do not cry. I do not mourn. I loved it, and I set it free.
To not is to waste hard work, hard miles, hard climbs, hard feelings to the unforgiving apathy of the static noise of life. If you don’t, it might as well not have happened.
