“You’re just a kaleidoscope of problems, aren’t you?” 

I was digging through the trash in the high school cafeteria, searching in vain for the retainer I’d thrown away. The second lunch was coming in and the most popular girl in school was addressing me from behind with disdain, “Iveyyy, what are you doooing?” The sneer in her voice was palpable, I could picture it even with my head buried deep in the garbage. Mortification crept over me in the silent and deadly way that it does. I hated her, but I hated me more.    

I was crying on the floor of a deplorable apartment, crying because I believed I’d done something horribly and irrevocably wrong, and I thought I was supposed to feel guilty or sorry or changed, but I felt none of those things. In fact, I felt nothing at all. I was drunk, and all the hateful feelings I suffered from with regularity—the mortification, the shame, the self-loathing, the agonizing desire for control—seemed to have vanished. Alcohol had done that for me. I’d found my medicine. 

I was sitting at a table in a McDonalds with two girls who I believed were my friends; the lighting was awful and yellow, and the smell of fryer grease made my stomach turn. Every part of me ached in this painful and empty way like my body was collapsing in on itself. My throat was sandpaper, my head a drum. There wasn’t enough water in the world to hydrate me, but it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t have been able to swallow it even if there was. I felt like garbage, inside and out; I was garbage, I had decided that with certainty earlier this morning, when I had told my friends that a guy, one they knew, had forced himself on me last night—that he’d had sex with me without my consent—and they had barely stirred. One of them said to me, “You were wasted, you probably asked for it.” I considered the fact that he hadn’t run away afterwards—in fact, he had leisurely strolled into the room at the very moment they were dismissing my rape as nothing more than a casual hookup, and he didn’t bat an eye. If what they said was true, I must be garbage. I decided to believe them.  

I didn’t know how I’d gotten from point A to point B. He had a tattoo of a sailboat on his rib cage; he was putting his shirt on; he was telling me he needed to let his dog out. “I don’t understand,” I said. But it didn’t matter, he was gone before the words had left my lips. 

We were fighting again; I didn’t understand why he needed to stop at the bar on the way to see me. Wasn’t I enough for him? “Why can’t you just choose me, for once?” I yelled into the phone through angry tears. He was already drunk. I wanted to be. 

I was in a room filled with technicolor lights and thumping bass. I was ignoring my boyfriend and that made him mad. He grabbed my arm and jerked me around with vicious force to face him, “Fucking LISTEN TO ME.” His voice was loud enough to stop the music and the crowd; you could’ve heard a pin drop onto the beer-soaked dance floor. Everyone stared. I felt the familiar, ice-cold sensation of shame trickling down my spine and suddenly, I was drowning. How had it found me? Was there no amount of numbing that would keep it at bay anymore?

“You’re just a kaleidoscope of problems, aren’t you?” Turtle remarked.

I heard his words as if they were shouted across a canyon, echoing and chasing one another in looping circles.  

A group of us had just piled out of a shuttle at the trail head near Hiawassee. I’d walked over ninety miles of the Appalachian Trail so far with only my dog for company, beginning from Amicolola Falls State Park, in Georgia, and I barely knew anything about backpacking. I didn’t own hardly any of the gear I was carrying, with the exception of my backpack—a hand-me-down from an ex-boyfriend— and I had walked nearly one hundred miles with only a jar of peanut butter and a summer sausage for food. I was visibly underweight and several people at the hostel had expressed their concern, saying I’d never make it to Katahdin if I didn’t “eat more food”. I knew I would walk every mile of this trail, though, I would walk like my life depended on it because on some level I knew that it did.   

Jill yanked on her leash and pulled me from my revere. She bit the snow and sneezed into the powder, causing a small flurry to land in a pile on my backpack. I’d almost walked away from the van without my trekking poles and was being handed them now by the driver, who gave me a weary smile before shaking his head and driving off. 

I turned to face Turtle, “Yeah, I guess I am a kaleidoscope of problems. And I think you just gave me my trail name.”

“What?” Turtle smirked, “Kaleidoscope of Problems?”

“No, just Kaleidoscope,” I smiled, it seemed fitting. 

I had come to the mountains to escape my life, but I was quickly realizing I couldn’t. I was still the same girl, with all my same problems, no matter how far I walked. 

My past trailed along behind me, leaving ugly footprints in the snow; it curled up in the dead leaves just beyond the walls of my tent each night. I could feel its presence lurking, the icy tendrils of its truth tickling my spine as I walked, reminding me of who I was—of the things I’d done. 

You can walk 2,000 miles, you can walk 5,000! I will follow you like a shadow until the end of time, its whisper penetrated my core like frigid wind. 

Maybe I could turn my problems into something beautiful? Said a different voice. Maybe I was beautiful already?

I shuddered, berating myself for the thought. You are damaged; you are ruined. And you are pathetic for thinking otherwise. 

But I felt something green and fragile and small sprout with in me as I hiked through the snow that day. Perhaps I had planted a tiny seed in the soil of my heart on the summit of Springer; perhaps when my fingertips had brushed the metal placard marking the start of a journey yet inconceivable to me, my heart, emboldened by the impossibility of what I had set out to do, dared to whisper its intention to the Universe, and perhaps, with every step I’d taken since, it sang to the seed promises of a better life, of a better way, of hope. 

My metamorphosis was not a quick one; like any adventure worth having, it was afflicted by trouble, heart ache, and bad decisions, long before it saw any measure of success. And like any good adventurer, I managed to seduce a small entourage of similarly battered souls into joining my expedition. 

Pain is an ugly thing, with a life all of its own, and my pain sensed its demise fast approaching, it caught a whiff of my intentions and it lashed out like a vicious monster, stabbing its tentacles into anything with a beating heart, desperately groping for a partner in its suffering. 

I suppose I knew, on some level, that the road to healing would be long, only then, I could not know just how long.  

Nor could I at once fathom the beautiful significance of my new name, for I had not paused in my hungry work to consider how a kaleidoscope actually worked; I had been living in the dark for so long.

I took a chance on myself by going to the mountains. I chose to risk my significance. And in doing so, I let the first sliver of light into the kaleidoscope. 

Thank you, Eddie, for asking me to tell the story of how I became Kaleidoscope. Sometimes I do not know how badly a story wants to be told until I sit down to write it—this one was long overdue.