In Search of Sanity

I began hiking to take back my sanity. Period. It is as simple and complicated as that.

I had a really angsty adolescence. Like--really. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was ten. By all appearances I was taking everything in stride, but my diagnosis acted as the catalyst for complete destabilization of my mental and emotional health. It took a few years, but eventually the bottom dropped out.

The timing was no coincidence when I started solo hiking in my late teens. The bottom had dropped out by then; I was in the throes of an eating disorder, deeply depressed, and completely paranoid that diabetes was going to kill me...if not tomorrow, then sometime down the road, and I was not equipped to deal with such dark thoughts. I’ve always liked the outdoors; I have artists on one side of my family and scientists on the other, so I was indoctrinated with both a deep appreciation for the beauty of the natural world and the desire to understand its workings. As a kid, I swam in my grandparent’s pristine lake in Northern Wisconsin, and I delighted in weaving my way up the terraced garden paths that my grandfather created with carefully-stacked rocks. Those were the first trails I ever traveled, and I loved winding through the greenery, arriving breathlessly at the top of the bank, only to return to the bottom to begin again. I remember vividly the scent of pine as I ran, crushing needles beneath my feet. There are moments now in New Hampshire when I pass through a stand of fir trees, that I am rocketed back to that time and place. The smell is the same, but I am different. 

When I first started taking off for the woods on my own, it was to escape the helplessness that I felt as a result of my disease. I’d grown up with clinicians and parents stressing how important good diabetes control was, and I constantly felt like I was failing. To this day I maintain that diabetes is one of the few chronic diseases where the onus of treatment lies almost exclusively on the patient, and where the benchmarks of one’s success or failure are both immediately measurable and insidious enough to have dire impact on one's health years down the road.  

When I was diagnosed in 1989, the goal of the medical community was to stress ‘tight’ diabetes control in order to enhance physical health and prolong life, basing this method on the landmark clinical results that came out of the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT). I discovered years later that the results of the study, while promising, were nearly impossible to replicate outside of a clinical setting. Personally, it contributed to a complete derailment of a healthy, well-adjusted emotional life. While I saw much emphasis being put on potential physical diabetes complications--cardiovascular disease, neuropathy, blindness--there was little attention paid to the mental and emotional impact of the disease. In my opinion, these are underreported complications of the immediate sort. Believe me when I say that flooding the cells of the body and brain with excess glucose, only to deprive them of this life-giving fuel a few short hours later (as so often happens to those of us with type 1), has a nasty effect on one’s mood. Not to mention that we can't think or focus and feel like complete garbage physically. It wasn’t a tough sell when my doctors told me that controlling these blood sugar peaks and valleys was beneficial, so I proceeded to make it my mission in life to do so. I found out the hard way that for a type 1 diabetic, achieving perfect blood sugar control is impossible. There is no such thing. But at the time, I not only believed there was, I thought my survival depended on it, so I strove for it every second of every day, and it nearly drove me mad in the process. 

That is when I would take to the woods. Some days it felt like the only thing I could do to find my way back to myself, to quiet the continuous loop of personal berating that was my inner monologue. When my blood sugars were ‘out of control’, I was ‘out of control’--not to mention an idiot and a failure, because somehow I should have known, should have been able to predict the unpredictable, should have been able to outsmart this wily, tricky little disease. I went to the woods to escape, to vent frustration, and to feel mastery over something--anything--in my life, and to exert myself enough physically that my brain got tired and the horrible thoughts slowed. The fact that hiking is both a physical and mental endeavor only enhanced its effectiveness. It gave me the illusion that I was in control of my body, rather than the other way around. If I could get myself up that mountain, one foot in front of the other, conquering something that was ultimately so much bigger than my own existence, then damn it, maybe I could properly balance my insulin with my food at the next meal to control this disease and prevent those pesky complications that I feared so much. Hell, maybe I could live forever while I was at it. Yes…that’s how delusional I was, thinking that if I directed endless amounts of mental energy toward something, if I ceaselessly analyzed and ruminated, or if I deconstructed a problem down to its core, then I could own it, and I could control it.    

There is that word again…control. It is the root of everything that has ever caused distress in my life. At a vulnerable age, I was given the impression that I could have it--must have it--that my survival depended on it--and that I had the ability to exert it over things far greater than myself that are inherently uncontrollable. The futility of this struggle led me down a pretty dark path, but somehow I never lost sight of the fact that when things got bad, I could go into the woods, locate a trail to follow, and find relief.  I realize now that it was the inherent unpredictability of these endeavors--the natural environment (and my body's) refusal to be controlled--that finally broke the illusion I held onto for so long.  The entries to follow recount how my stories of hiking--messy, imperfect, and absolutely unswayed by my attempts at control--became stories of healing.

Sunrise from the summit of Speckled Mountain;
Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness, Maine;
 June 16, 2019