What if writers are just people who were never listened to? I want to tell him that we, the youngest, are the lymphatic systems of our families. We are still swollen now, protruding from everywhere. We hold all the stories, the secrets, the indulged resentments between one family member and another. All we’re missing is what anyone thinks of us. Does anyone find that a blessing? Teach me how to.
Anyway, this is a language he doesn’t speak, so I talk to people who do, including myself. Is it just a millennial-and-younger perk to be still so in touch with our young selves, or to be easily able to get back in touch? We are childlike parents who pull our children along on adventures in movement, in self-discovery. Everything I’ve done is still right there. I still half-think that stuffed animals are sentient.
Growing up fast means faking it until you make it, as my parents did, so that we didn’t have to. Imposter syndrome, financial stress, untethering from their own parents. Taking the bus. A free-fall, and I could see the fear in their faces as gravity pulled them down. When was the landing, and where? Literally speaking I think it was a balcony overlooking the Kyrenia range, the possessive flag and words stamped into the dirt, Turkey’s idea of a Hollywood sign. I watched my mother pat my father’s back as if to say, Look at you. Look at all this, our tiny rented palace, but also look at you. She should have included herself in that. I will.
There was a rhume in the house—I prefer this word for describing what it felt like to know that for years something was missing, but not know what it was. Fugue works too. A long u suggests something gray and plodding. Cyprus made us well again. So it might have just been the sun that had been missing.
It’s like: God is remembering something that’s never happened. God is trails that feel groomed and treated by unseen hands, they are so soft and so clear, inviting and safe. I take breaths through steel-wool lungs and whimper, privately asking Tim—in this context I’m on a first-name basis with the premier—how long he will preserve these 100,000 acres of lakes, ponds and forests from becoming condos, or lumber to be exported. I was chatting the other week with a manufacturer in China about a product and she told me it was made of Canadian cedar. I wanted to cry thinking about the logistics of that. She shared photos of how painstakingly her employees shape, sand and stain the planks, and it hurt deep in my stomach. I said: Beautiful. She said: Thanks dear.
A few weeks before that, I’d gotten a call from a research firm employed by the provincial government. Did you know Premier Houston has a goal of doubling the population of Nova Scotia by 2050?
No I did not. *Click*
In reality I stayed on the phone, because I was too curious. Okay, but where will everyone go? We don’t have enough housing as it is. But the caller wanted answers, not questions.
Two hours out here is two hours I am not at home being a bad kid. This is the late-’90s part of me I hold on to, and continually forgive, and seem to never admonish. The superlative that the high school yearbook staff wanted to give me was, Most likely to win the London Marathon while smoking a cigarette. The teacher in charge changed it to Most likely to win the London Marathon prior to publication. I am not out here because I am trying to quit my nicotine addiction. I am out here because I have spent all summer subconsciously quitting, or beginning to think about…thinking about quitting.
It started like this: I fed myself many hours of content per day. Like last summer on steroids. Diamond League track meets, Continental Tour track meets, the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, PTO and Ironman triathlons, livestreams of 100- and 200- and 250-mile ultra races—some of which naturally lasted for several days, so that by the end everyone in the YouTube chat felt hilariously like family—and training vlogs from professionals like Lionel Sanders and Paula Findlay and “LCB” as we dorky superfans call her. Sally McRae and Tom Evans and everything FreeTrail puts out. An old documentary about Courtney Dauwalter’s quest to win the Tahoe 200 outright. The sheer number of videos in my YouTube watch history suggests someone who has been bedridden for a year. But the viewers of such content, I have to believe, are all at varying levels of making something happen. When I was not watching, I was running, biking, or swimming (or working, or parenting, or some combination of all five).
But why? Why did I go to the trails, and keep going? I don’t question that. That’s a God thing again, ineffable and best left alone on a high shelf. I had enough lucidity to say to myself and my sober friends that nicotine had built a prison cell around my life, subtly affecting my every decision. Sounds dramatic, but we must have theatrics if we are to beat the gremlins of addiction at their own game.
You also can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it, as the recovery saying goes. To that end, the creator of this pandemic-era habit was exhausted, hurt and sedentary. The breaker of the habit is well-rested, free, on the other side of a year of grieving, and moving. Loosely rooted now to a home and a place, yet moving.
Every activity has had an asterisk attached. I’ve trained at low intensities most days of the week for the past five years, loosely following the zone 2 heart rate training method, or the 80/20 method (80 percent of training at mild intensity, 20 percent at higher intensity), but the reality is that low intensity meant a very slow jog because my blood was spritzed with nicotine and my lungs were lacquered with propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, the “only”—oh, that’s cute—ingredients in the e-liquid. I could get to a zone 4 heart rate with little effort, zone 5 with just a little more. (This is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen.) I’m lucky that nothing worse ever occurred while in motion, deep in a forest or some such place, but I’ve coasted along on such luck. The two or three people on Strava who have been paying attention probably thought: Hmm, she got really slow. I’ve had the same thought every time I’ve looked at Strava, but I’ve forced myself to post everything publicly on there. To hold myself accountable, and to begin the plodding but—I knew, I had to believe—eventual process of getting away from the asterisk, stamping it out with my shoe.
Lungs can be like trees too. Lungs sway and sigh silently and hold fast and do magical work while we’re sitting in front of screens forgetting to take deep breaths. I imagine them repairing themselves like those little shrimp “cleaners” who feed off fishes’ tooth gunk. But they need time and space to repair. They need a two-week all-inclusive vacation, not one night of sleep.
It would end up going like this, repeating the fate of two older women friends. A couple of years apart, they both told me the same exact thing: I ended up quitting cold-turkey because I got sick. One got much more sick than the other; both had been cigarette smokers. But the premonition still held true. My son brought us something from school, bronchitis with a fever. I could feel my lungs bracing against what they were being asked to do. They made twangy bullfrog-like sounds seemingly independent of breaths, my glands puffed up, everything hurt. I had two days alone to get better, so that I didn’t have to subject my kid to my pathetic state, and spent what felt like hours staring at a non-moving ceiling fan. I worked from bed, watched the UTMB livestream under two layers of a blanket even though it was 72 degrees outside. If you’re going to spontaneously withdraw from nicotine, it makes sense to combine it with another pain. Then you can’t tell the psychic pain from the physical one. Then it is just one big storm that you ride out for two weeks, or however long it takes the body to remember that there are other ways to be.
It was the blue moon in Pisces. The window had been left open since late May. But the next morning there was a change. The room was full of crisp and cold air. The lights were still on, but everything looked seaglass-green. Was this life, or home? A purgatorial waiting room? I got up and read about withdrawal symptoms on some website and was amazed that I was actually in that. Finally not just outside looking in, thinking what a privilege it would be to be briefly sweaty, shaky and depressed due to the absence of nicotine. It got better every hour, every day, though each hour had its pitfalls. Nothing was funny. Nothing was cute. Nothing was interesting.
Most days I turned to exercise for distraction, buffered of course by video and audio content about same. Not exercise but the ritual. The Ritual. For me, it is more than just movement and sweat. It is certain music, certain high-carb treats, certain routes or certain virtual ones. Certain gear, a way of packing said gear, the familiarity of the treat pocket on one side of my pack and the shape of the pepper spray canister opposite it—a little possibly-placebo that has given me the courage to run and ride in more remote places by myself. The tart taste of caffeinated cherry cola sports drink, the soothing tint of my sunglasses, the coconut scent of the spray-on sunscreen. I don’t consume, wear, smell, use, or listen to these things all day. They are reserved for specific times, so they have a mystique about them, and become sacred and looked forward to. I don’t see how anyone can stick to an exercise routine without incentives that are short-term, fun, and even indulgent (in addition to longer-term ones). But it took me a couple of decades to figure that out.
Where does the baddie in me go now? Maybe the baddie is just a runner, gravel rider and occasional open water swimmer who risks falling and maybe even breaking things, or being nibbled at by a fellow water-dweller. Who risks showing up for, and therefore losing (or DNFing), more races. The best ones, I know, let themselves lean down mountains, bringing the dreamlike boldness of activities like skiing into arenas that are harder, dirtier, rockier, while wearing gear that sits closer to the bone.
It is even slightly bad of me to say: Quite obviously, I’m no longer doing this as an extracurricular to throw on the college application, a time-management tool and a gift that appeared out of nowhere in ninth grade and lifted all the metaphorical boats in my life. This youngest had to endure statements such as: We’re so glad you found running because we didn’t know what we were going to do with you. It’s very hard for me to even type that out. To acknowledge just how unseen I was, a great student (OK, except in math) who had good friends, hobbies, and never missed curfew except for that one time late in senior year. Yes, it’s a them problem that I’ve turned over and over across the years of my recovery, but it’s one of those tapes I still carry around, play over and over, especially when I’m in one of those, Hey, let’s hurt a little more moments.
Running—and all the other sports I do to support it, to honor it—is mine. They don’t get it, never have. On the other side of this dark fortnight of the soul, free from the goop of e-juice weighing me down like a villain’s slime, I see something powerful there, something timidly rebellious. It is powerful to stop trying to explain something to someone. Powerful to stop trying to get them to see you. Powerful to recognize who’s in the mirror and not need anyone else to. Powerful to grasp the narrative of why another person does what they do—hurt people hurt people, and they do so indiscriminately—even if that person will never begin to understand, will never even attempt to understand, their own actions.
Where I run is the beating heart of our province, where pristine lakes and ponds are transformed into electricity. This happens all over, but there is a particularly vast system here, and the silence around these parts is both eerie and sacred. The silence means: Secret important stuff is happening here, punctuated by chain-link fences and red signs with illustrations of stick figures falling to their deaths. Sometimes the silence means: No trespassing, though I still do, thinking: Surely they don’t mean me.
I also think the silence means that bears, coyotes, bobcats, fishers, et al, are left to do their thing up here (teenagers with four-wheelers, too). But they, like me, might wonder what happened to the quiet stream crossing that leads to a particularly steep single-track that I’ve had my eye on. Now it is a rushing river to get there. It’s rushing down the hill to the power station, two black cylindrical towers that rise from the side of a soon-to-be twinned highway. There is a need for the twinning, if we’re going to meet that absurd population goal. More immediately, there’s a safety need. And the train tracks running alongside it were ripped up long ago, though not long ago enough for climate research not to have bestowed some foresight upon the powers that be, or the powers that were. In any case, now the old train route is for runners, cyclists and four-wheelers, while the highway paralleling it is being doubled in size.
I find these places thanks to other ladies of the trail, and we spend time peering into phone screens looking at Strava’s global heat map, which lets you see where other people have ventured. I tend to look for the faintest purple lines, spider veins that barely stand out against the dark green of the forest—the trails least traveled, in Strava’s estimation—and that’s where I go, or attempt to. Basically I’m looking for vert, which is like a precious and elusive resource around here.
Meanwhile, the lungs haven’t healed overnight. It might take years, and they might never get back to where they were. But there is progress. I run up a 15 percent grade on a treadmill at a 13-minute-per-mile pace and my heart rate doesn’t spike to 168. And alongside their slowly increasing capacity is feels. Tears, for one, come so easily now that the numbing agent is gone. I see Pockwock Lake from the top of a logging road for the first time in my life and weep like I’ve found Narnia.
I weep again on the phone to my child’s father: I just want to be able to do a race again at some point in my life. He said: I want you to too! After all the hurt we have volleyed back and forth for the past two years, hearing this was enough to make me cry harder. I then begged him to quit his habit too, to not wait for a doctor at a walk-in clinic to tell him, There’s definitely fluid in there, or worse. It was a coping mechanism, and we both had (and have) lots to cope with, we youngests. But at some point self-forgiveness is self-indulgence, a leash that’s gotten too long. What I see now is what an intentionally pathetic-sounding word cope seems to be. It wants us to try harder. It sounds like hanging from a cliff edge by three fingertips. It sounds like a voice that can’t wrap itself around the word hope, that keeps just stumbling over it. MP
“What if writers are just people who were never listened to? I want to tell him that we, the youngest, are the lymphatic systems of our families. We are still swollen now, protruding from everywhere. We hold all the stories, the secrets, the indulged resentments between one family member and another.”
Not the youngest, but this got me. I remember being a kid and narrating everything when I went out of the house and alone into the woods. Like I could hold what was happening at arms length if I told myself stories about it. I could reshape it, make it mine, make it less frightening in that ownership. I often wonder if the impulse to write is a trauma response.