Self-employment purgatory, the natural edges of things, and grieving the seasons of our lives

little doge with the big mountain

First! Are you interested in my intermediate October Utah guided backpacking trip? I organized this trip pretty last minute (I usually announce my trips many months in advance) so I know this trip may not be viable, and I’ll only go forward with it if the trip fills- I’ll cancel it in a few weeks if it doesn’t fill, so apply now if you’re interested, deets and the application are here. Otherwise, if you need more advance notice, I’ll announce my spring intermediate Utah trips soon :)

Session two of my February Arizona beginner trips have sold out, but there’s one spot left in session three and two spots left in session one- deets are here if you want to register for either of those!  

It’s August, which means that it’s fall in Alaska. The fireweed is blooming or has finished blooming, the tall stuff down lower and the dwarf fireweed in the alpine too. It’s raining most places this week and the all-the-way dark is back, at least for a little while at night, although I haven’t seen the stars yet. Last weekend was sunny for a few days though and I got to take my dogs backpacking again, which is exciting- I’m on a mission to include them in more of my trips, even if it means I’m more limited in the kind of terrain I can do (although they are Sport Utility Chihuahuas they are still pretty low clearance). I met my friend Sarah in Denali State Park and we hiked a new southern extension of the Kesugi Ridge Trail, 28 miles of just-built trail on some low alpine ridges with a view of Denali when it’s clear. Denali is often in the clouds, even when the ridges below it are not- at twenty thousand feet the peak makes its own weather, shrouding itself in a cloak of mystery and refusing to come out for days on end. When I hiked the original Kesugi Ridge Trail a few years ago I didn’t see Denali at all, and it’s been in the clouds every time I’ve driven the Parks highway, except for one. I’ve mostly seen it from Anchorage on a clear day- a small white hump on the far horizon, next to its friend Foraker.

This time, though, Denali was OUT- and I spent a lot of time staring at it, running my eyes over its ridges and glaciers, feeling like I was finally privy to a secret thing, a high, hidden world of snow and ice and craggy rock. I thought a lot about how as humans we have the urge to simplify these elaborate, convoluted shapes in the natural world into “peaks”- as if Denali was just one thing, as if it could be separated from the ridges around it, as if there could ever be such a thing as a single mountain (although I know sometimes, like with the volcanos in Washington and Oregon, there is). I thought too about how as colonizers in North America we ignore the natural edges of things and instead define them with politically constructed boundaries- Denali National Park and Denali State Park instead of, just, the Alaska Range, which both makes up and continues outside of both of these parks. And when we’re unfamiliar with an area and we want to experience the outdoors there and start doing research we find these arbitrary land management agency borders instead of the actual thing itself, and it is only later, after we come to know a place more, that, if we’re lucky, we learn its natural edges. I do appreciate how in Alaska, since this is a more place-based culture than in the lower 48 (the land is pretty much all Alaska has going for it- we don’t live here for the buildings, which are, at best, functional) there is a tendency to call things by the names that make the most geographical sense, instead of breaking them down along arbitrary government borders- the Chugach mountains, not Chugach State Park or Chugach National Park, etc.

Anyway it was sunny and I got to look at Denali a lot!! My phone kept making it small in photos but then I realized that if I zoomed in it wasn’t flattened as much.

My dogs hiked 28 miles. I did have to carry Kinnikinnick for three miles when she got a flat tire at the end of the second day, but she’s fourteen so I think that’s still pretty good. She LOVED being carried. I didn’t love it so much- eleven lbs at the very top of my pack was some uncomfy weight distribution and it tweaked my shoulder a bit, dashing whatever fantasies I still have about taking them on longer trips where I’d have to carry at least one of them more.

It was cute to see them leap over streams and eat berries (everything was berries) and nap sprawled on the tundra in the sun, ignoring the whitesocks that kept biting them on their bellies. The second night Niknik woke in the middle of the night to stare eerily at some distant lights for a full hour- she’s been doing this at home, waking at random hours and staying awake, and the internet says it’s the first signs of doggy dementia :( and I’ve been drugging her at bedtime with gabapentin, which helps, but I didn’t bring her drugs on this hike so I just lay awake with her, petting her and looking out at the dark, until she settled back into her sleeping bag. Aside from this slow loss of marbles she’s been doing amazing- she has energy and is such a happy little doggy, loving her daily walks and runs in the forest at home, loving getting pets and greeting friends and snarfing down her food, totally deaf and lowkey blind but otherwise not seemingly in pain? I just hope that when the time comes, when her quality of life gets too low, that I’m able to see it, and that losing her doesn’t shatter my world to pieces like I’m afraid that it will. There’s nothing like our ability to connect to our dogs- such pure, uncomplicated attachment, like a fantasy of how attachment could be- possibly the only truly secure attachment many of us will experience in this life. It’s heartbreaking that dogs don’t live as long as we do, it’s heartbreaking that staying alive means slowly losing everything and everyone that we love, embodiment is heartbreaking, and there is no dignity in it, but there is often beauty.

August was supposed to be the final month of working on my novel, BETS- it’s ready for a line editor and proofreader and formatter, so I’d planned for August to be the month to hire these professionals and then, I thought, I’d publish it in September! And I was so excited about this- September is my 42^nd birthday, what a cool birthday present to myself, and it also feels right to get it out in the world before the election, because elections are scary and who knows what will happen with that. But of course we can’t plan for everything, and the really wonderful editor I found on Reedsy can’t start working on the novel until September- of course! Because she’s so amazing that she’s booked in advance. I really want to work with her, I’ve put more care into BETS than anything I’ve written previously and I want to continue to hold it to that high standard, and so this means patience! Patience! Even though I want more than anything for the novel to finally exist in the world. I’m not good at being patient but I’m getting better at it- because once the novel is out I can’t take it back, so why not relax into this pre-publication moment for a little longer?     

Another reason I’m anxious for this book to be out is that I have this feeling that it’s going to do really well commercially, and I want the potential financial stability that comes from that, an additional pillar in this writing career that I am slowly, over the course of decades, building. While one can predict when a book will do medium well (If you write a good book in a lucrative genre it’s pretty much guaranteed), whether a book will do really well is not something that anyone, not even the most seasoned industry professionals, can know (and often their guesses are no better than anyone else’s). But I have this feeling- it’s a bit silly and foolhardy to announce that here- because now if the book does just ok I’ll be embarrassed and disappointed, but I dunno- embodiment is just a game, after all, why not risk looking like a fool, it’s sort of fun. I have this feeling that the book will do really well- maybe not initially, it might take time for most people to find it, but eventually- that I’ll look back at this point in my life as the time before BETS was published, and everything that comes after will be different. There, I said it, if the book flops and I look stupid so be it.

I’d set aside August to work on BETS so now I have this month with nothing in it- I should be working but I can’t, and I can’t afford to travel much right now so I’m just sort of… at home, contemplating every choice I’ve ever made in my life and wondering how to feel productive and feeling sort of lonely and uninspired and also tired, because I’ve been dealing with a bit of fatigue, which is limiting. Oh, the self-employment purgatory that is these empty periods between things! The medium place. I finished season three of Bridgerton (I take back what I said before- season three is incredible, I loved it!) and I’ve been making bags- I was successful in turning the bag I deconstructed into a pattern, and here is the dupe, made from 1000 denier Cordura, a fabric I like because it reminds me of the messenger bags we all carried in the early 2000s-

I also made one for my friend Caitlin-

Copying someone else’s design is useful for learning but now I want to tweak it to make it my own design, and maybe create a PDF pattern and video tutorial so other people can make it too? I dunno. It’s been fun to learn more sewing things as I go- how to make and attach bias tape (hard!!), stitch lengths and seam allowances, how to use a fork to put a zipper pull onto a zipper, etc.

I get to listen to so many audiobooks while sewing, which continues to be fun. Most recently I listened to James by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, his slave, and it’s fucking brilliant. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as a classic novel from a certain time in US history, is part of our remembering of that time in US history- and Percival Everett like, reclaims it, filling in the parts of that world that were glossed over or ignored by Mark Twain and even adding a plot twist that would’ve infuriated white people of the time, and maybe some white people now? All while keeping the campy, tongue-in-cheek dark humor of the original novel. It is extremely good! And also heartbreaking.

This fatigue I’ve been dealing with the last few weeks is weird but I just attribute it to perimenopause, like every other thing in my life. How wonderful, to have something to blame things on! Tired? Perimenopause. Joints hurt? Perimenopause. Randomly hot in the middle of the night? Perimenopause! Some aspects of perimenopause are definitely more frustrating though- I’ve been dealing with what I think is some insulin resistance, for example. (Insulin resistance because of perimenopause is unfortunately sometimes a thing.) I’ve been tweaking my diet to deal with that, which makes me feel better but has also made eating sort of stressful and depressing. I don’t like being limited in what I can eat, and having to label foods as “bad” or “good”- it takes over my brain and makes me feel like I have an eating disorder. But the way I was feeling was not good either- constantly thirsty, almost in a panicky way, no matter how much I drank, peeing six times a night. Always feeling like my blood sugar was crashing, no matter how much or how often I ate. Those symptoms went away within 24 hours of starting to limit my carbs, but I hate limiting carbs. And what the fuck am I supposed to eat while backpacking? Luckily, when you exercise all day long your body takes the sugar out of your blood faster so you’re not as affected by carbs, so I can eat more carbs while backpacking without feeling awful. And also, my friend Sarah told me a story about a multi-week trip in the Brooks Range that Roman Dial went on when he was younger, where all he brought was a dromedary of olive oil and some chocolate bars. Maybe I could do a backpacking trip where the bulk of my calories came from olive oil, instead of carbs? No, that’s too depressing to think about. (Please no health or diet advice in the comments unless you, personally, have experienced insulin resistance, thanks.)

All of the annoyances of perimenopause are honestly worth it, though, for the way it’s shifted my mental health or rather, the way my brain works. I just woke up one day and no longer gave a fuck what other people thought of me- and I keep waiting for that to end, for it to be a temporary thing, but it stays and stays. This thing I wanted my whole life, more than anything- to not be so preoccupied with being liked, to not devote so much of my bandwidth to how I was perceived by others- all of the self-help books I read, the instagram therapists whose advice I tried to follow, the workbooks I filled out, the journaling, the affirmations- none of it did a goddam thing and then one day I just woke up and it was over, like I’d left my own brain in the night and settled into someone else’s, the brain of a person who had a rock-hard belief in their own inherent self worth. I used to use at least 50% of my brain cells wondering how I fit into the social fabric that I perceived around me, untangling the webs of social connections until I felt like I understood them, wondering if I had social power, if other people had social power, trying to anticipate when that power might shift, and why, in order to have some misguided sense of control, because I believed that not being liked was the worst thing that could possible happen?! Now my brain has these three thoughts:

-I like myself

-I am likeable

-If other people don’t like me it just means they have bad taste ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And this leaves so much glorious, glorious space in my brain to use for other things, so many things! All the interesting things of the world!

My friend Sarah (who is also in perimenopause) and I came up with a theory around this- when you’re a birthing person of birthing age, through most of human history you functioned as an architect of human social structures- family, community, etc. You were the glue that held people together. To be this architect it helped to be hyper aware of the dynamics of the human social structures around you, and how you and others fit into these structures, and all the small and large disturbances in this fabric. But once you can’t have babies anymore you’re no longer literally creating webs of interconnected humans, and you can finally just fucking… chill. If you survive this long (and humans often did not) then maybe now you’re a wise elder or other kind of community leader, and as a leader it helps to not give a fuck what people think of you- because caring about people is not the same as caring what people think of you.

It's cruel irony that this deep solid love of myself, objectively the most ideal way for my brain to be, comes around just as my body starts its slow decline. But maybe that’s the way life is- we get everything we want, but not all at once- we get one thing for a while, and then another. It’s hard to lean into the seasons of our lives, to be grateful for these new magical gifts while also letting go of the things we used to love. I don’t know if I’ll ever long-distance hike for months at a time like I used to, for example, because my body doesn’t recover the way it once did. I need more downtime! Do I still want to long distance hike for months at a time? Not really, and yet I’m grieving that. I don’t want to feel sad- instead I want to feel in awe of all the cool shit I’ve done, the way I absolutely took advantage of every second of my youth by having years and years of cool adventures (instead of, say, going to college, ha ha). I want to feel grateful. And I am grateful! But it’s still sad.

I thought today’s newsletter would be brief but instead I’ve written you quite a tome. Thanks for reading.

Until next time,

Carrot