Floating In-between

Ten years ago, I found myself in the backseat of my dad’s pick-up truck as it rumbled up the side of Springer Mountain to drop myself, my friend, and his dad off at the summit. With only minutes left of our time together, I sat in silence staring out the window that matched the silence of both my parents in the front seat, as it would be the last time we would see each other for six months.

At the top of Springer lies the Southern Terminus of The Appalachian Trail (A.T.): a (then) 2,189 mile - or 3,522 kilometers for my European friends - long trail from my home state of Georgia to the home of Katahdin in the wild and gorgeous land of Maine. But my mind wasn’t on the trail, it was wandering through the final checklist of me being sure that I really wanted to do this, and that if I didn’t, that my exit window was quickly disappearing. But I decided it was absolutely right; I had to remind myself that a tumultuous few years in college saw a turnaround right after I promised myself that I could go hike the A.T. if I graduated from college. I even came up with my own slogan to keep myself motivated: “What’s Six Months Out of Eighty Years?”, I’d play in my head over and over again as I spent those two final years of college planning and coordinating every single move I’d make on that old trail. At last, two years of determination and hard work have seen the reward of… me going to live in the woods for six months and try not to die. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

To spare you the details, my friend and I ended up completing The Trail, and with its conquering also followed the innumerous life lessons I had to encounter through the fourteen states we crossed over six months. There were so many challenges and hardships that we had to endure, that not only broke us, but made us stronger people. For me, it was proving to myself that I could do something deemed impossible, and that mantra carried me throughout the next decade of life, and I consider the thru hike to be one of my greatest achievements.

A Decade and Two Lifetimes Later

The 29th of March marks the very first day of the infamous Appalachian Trail Thru Hike, and now I find myself on yet another grand expedition, but the terms of this one are vastly different, and much more dire.

There’s no one joining me on this trip, and the ones from the past don’t accept who I am now.

The reward isn’t from a turnaround of a person down on their luck, but the cost of staying alive and safe.

It cost me my job to be here; I had to choose my life over income because I cannot be who I am in America.

And the list goes on. We could spend the whole blog here, but this isn’t just about moping. That’s for my Patreon subscribers.

What this is about, is framing the best I can out of a very bad situation. When I left to go hike, I had a vision of what the end looked like, and what the next few years of life would be like for myself and my career in its then infancy. It was easy to be able to imagine that because there were guardrails in place that would help manage expectations of what could happen, which then gave a really good smorgasbord of educated guesses of what will happen. Even if it wasn’t always accurate, the ability to use that algorithm of sorts to guesstimate outcomes gave me grounding of what to expect, and to be able to embrace the system at face value.

Now, that system we grew up in, that our parents grew up in, and the one that our grandparents helped build that was the concept of The American Dream no longer exists as I barely have the time to even comprehend the irony of my great-grandparents fleeing an Ottoman-occupied Greece for America, only for me to do the inverse a few one-hundred years after they settled here. The same message at the feet of The Statue of Liberty is the same which kicked me in the gut. I feel like I’m floating through space, as the shuttle I was on exploded and while I’m still alive, it barely feels like I am because I am trying to focus on accepting this new reality that has so quickly fallen onto my lap.

But I don’t have time to process; I have to figure out how to change my trajectory and keep moving in the right direction. I have to keep moving forward.

Hike or Die

Towards the end of the hike, we encountered the 100-Mile Wilderness, which is a 93-mile-long trail (don’t ask) that cuts through some of the most remote woods in all of Maine. In fact, it’s common for people to disappear from this section of the trail and not be found for years, and if you got lost out there then that was it. It wasn’t kind to us, either, as we were greeted by a tropical depression that pelted us with a ludicrous amount of rain that had delayed our arrival to Katahdin by two days, and then three. It doesn’t sound like a problem, until I realized that I was carrying a five-day supply of food for a now eight-day long trip, and I was down to my last pack of ramen noodles. I had spent so many consecutive days boiling noodles over and over and over again that I had it down to a science, until I didn’t, and I watched my last ramen noodles spill out of my pot and into the pond next to my pot.

I was devastated, to say the least. I had nothing left, and we still had a full day of hiking until we were out. That was the first time I came face-to-face with mortality, even if it was a mere 24 hours of fear, I had never been in a situation where I was unprepared and - if not immediately corrected - could see me dead. Thankfully, I hauled ass as fast as I could to the nearest general store twelve miles away and proceeded to eat so many snacks that I got sick from it, so I made it out alive.

Right now, I feel like I’m at the point where I just watched my ramen noodles fall into that pond in Maine. My job was my last piece of grounding that I had from America that at least gave me a feeling of security, but now it’s floating in water getting pecked at by the fish that think they’ve hit the lottery. Wait, that’s too much emphasis on the noodles, let me get back on track.

Much like that time when I sat there starving, feeling so helpless, I feel more helpless than I ever have in my life. After all, this is all from gluing a haphazard plan together in two months and somehow keeping everything together, but there’s no one here to help just like back then. The plan I had envisioned for arriving in Ireland has fantastically imploded, which means one thing:

I have to leave Ireland by the 30th of March, as my stamp expires, and I was not able to secure a visa to stay in the country. The two months I had spent planning this is now out the window, but I don’t have time to grieve the failure, or even what’s happened since November.

I have to keep hiking. If I stop now, I have to go back. I can’t go back. I have to keep going.

Vacation in Crisis

With less than a month to vacate Ireland, I now have to plan my next move, and once again there isn’t a soul that can guide me on this choice, and I have to make it alone. I will have something figured out soon enough, but that’s not for me to share with y’all just yet, and you’ll find out eventually when I get the motivation to shoot photos again.

Speaking of…

Taking photos during a time when you are trying to play a game of never going back home because the country hates your existence as a human being can be really overwhelming. In fact, doing many extracurriculars can be overwhelming since they cost money, of which I don’t have an income for, and the job market over here is incredibly hard to navigate as I am at the bottom of candidate lists due to the hiring structure that’s involved in Europe. I was able to take photos so frequently because I could finally breathe for a bit after two months of scrambling to leave from America, but as the reality of the situation sets in, I find myself getting into a fight-or-flight setting where I need to find that oh-so-crucial grounding that can give me some kind of connection. I need some point of connection, an anchor to tie me down, so I can see where I need to go next.

Photos are great, and I’m glad they bring you comfort, but I can’t deliver when I’m figuring out how to best stay alive. I look forward to when I have the means to create again, but for now I just don’t.

An Adventure to Somewhere

So as I skip posting photos for now, I call upon the faithful blog format that I had used a decade ago to communicate with all of you to provide updates when the time is right, and as a way to let you all know I’m still alive. It gives me some resemblance of connection with people back home, even if we don’t speak to each other, as I don’t know what I would say anyway. This is incredibly hard, and there have also been some wonderful and amazing things happening during this midlife crisis I’m experiencing, but it’s not over yet. For now, I continue drifting onward to the next home with only determination that there will be good days again, where I can finally feel safe again.

It is a steep price to pay, but such is the cost to be authentically me. Onwards and Upwards.

- Lorelei