Doing Hard Things
My happy place I declared I liked “doing hard things” sometime after I completed my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2017.
What I really meant was, I liked electing to do hard things—I still wanted the final say in which hard things I did.
As the Universe would have it, I had no choice in getting injured in January of this year, and having the subsequent knee surgery to repair my ACL two months later.
I didn’t get to choose that hard thing.
The Universe knew something I didn’t… It was time for me to do the hardest thing of all.
Be still and think.
An amazing thing happened when I danced with stillness—namely, I fell apart.
I found myself drowning in insecurity and self-doubt. I felt helpless and out of control. I nearly succumbed to fear.
Uncertainty has a way of punching us in the gut, taking the wind out of our sails, forcing us to question the unquestionable. It makes us stop and ponder the horrible, “what if?”
“What if this is it? What if this is how it will always be? What if the life I dreamed of having is over? What if all of my plans are now impossible to accomplish?”
“Maybe.” It’s the best we can do when we genuinely don’t have answers to the problems we are facing.
And it sucks.
Uncertainty opens us up to vulnerability, a position of total exposure (1). Uncertainty is raw and uncomfortable—BUT, believe it or not, it has the potential to thrust open the heavy door between us and creativity.
View of the Ruby RangeWhen our lives feel like they are falling apart, our ideas often come together.
We spend a lot of time constructing ideas into sure things—if ‘x’ then ‘y’—in order to make sense of the world and navigate it without totally losing our minds. We categorize our lives and the lives of those around us, and make solid plans for a future we can count on. But we can’t.
When things fall apart—and they will—we are confronted with the daunting reality that nothing is sure, nothing is as we believed it to be (2). Walls crumble when the ground beneath us shakes, and ideas that were safely fenced off from one another begin to mingle.
“What if my life is over?” might morph into, “What if I could create something different?”
Ideas lead to vision, vision leads to innovation, and innovation is the birth place of freedom.
But first we have to sit in the chaos. We have to feel like we are losing our Most Important Thing and then give ourselves permission to rebel against loss.
We have to wrestle with our anger, sorrow, and disbelief before we can make our way towards acceptance (2). And to accept circumstances as they are does not mean passively resigning ourselves to a miserable fate.
Acceptance is, in fact, the gateway to possibility.
By accepting “the way things are”, we grant ourselves the freedom to search for new solutions (3).
I believe uncertain people have the potential to become visionaries, because they ceaselessly question and wonder and search. They ask more of the world because they are driven by the insatiable need to “make sense of it all”, to extract meaning from every confusing, hurtful and surprising detail of life.
They are creators and dreamers and oddballs. They ask the question “what if” from a place of despair, until it lifts them upwards into a place of possibility.
Admitting to ourselves that we don’t know what to do, or what is going to happen, is hugely vulnerable, it’s majorly hard, and it is a brave step towards inspiration.
Every. Single. Person. Is capable of imagining a new way forward from a place of hopelessness and defeat.
Adventures in the backyardWalking hand in hand with the unknown is the epitome of doing hard things.
And it looks different for everyone.
For me, “the unknown” was tearing my ACL and believing I would lose everything I loved; it was feeling alone and wanting to numb-out because of the amount of pressure I had put on myself to live my life a certain way.
When I accepted my injury and my life as it was, vision crept in. Innovation struck. Solutions flowed.
I asked myself “why?” and “what if?” a million times, I broke down my beliefs into their most basic parts to decipher what drove me and what I wanted out of life. I asked myself what was my biggest, boldest dream and what narrative was preventing me from just doing it.
I asked myself the hardest question of all: did I believe I was of value and that my value was unshakeable?
I wrestled with the rawness of my vulnerability for months. I was angry and sad and hopeless and afraid. I went to a dark place and stayed there wrapped in a cloak of uncertainty until inspiration struck and I envisioned—not a way out—but a path forward.
I knew what I had to do, and it was going to be another really hard thing that would draw me out of my comfort zone once more.
The time had come for me to breath life into an idea that I had tucked away in the corner of my mind for the past 3 years. Previously, I wasn’t able to see how my idea could work, how it would grant me the freedom to live my life the way I wanted without massive sacrifice. So I bagged it and tagged it and put it away for future consideration.
Well, my injury cracked everything wide open, and while I was swimming in a physical-therapy-induced-pain-coma, all my ideas erupted out of storage.
Ueli gazing wistfully over her domain, probably looking for ptarmigan An idea was being born, whether I was ready or not, and it was the answer to everything.
In my soul-search, I learned I value connection and the spirit of adventure, deeply.
I realized I want to bring people together in the wilderness and show them a freer space—a space in which they could connect in spite of perceived differences—and guide them through gorgeous landscapes and teach them how to live boldly in the outdoors, with less.
It’s easier to get to know myself when I’m carrying a backpack, wandering through the mountains; the sheer magnitude of nature provides a space big enough for me to deal with all my feelings. And it is time I share what I have found with other people.
And so.
She Treks is born.
(Well, almost, she’s crowning).
The mission of She Treks is to connect, empower and inspire women and gender minorities, through lightweight backcountry travel.
We’re going backpacking ya’ll. I’m building my dream business and it might just be the hardest, most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done.
I’m going to break down barriers with She Treks; I’m going to put myself out there and invite people to meet me in the mountains to do the same.
I hope they come.
And guess what!?
Hope is a place of possibility.
Portrait taken by Logan Greydanus
Portrait taken by Logan GreydanusBibliography
Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. New York, Gotham Books, 2012.
Chödrön, Pema. When Things Fall Apart. Boulder, Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1997.
Zander, Rosamund Stone. Zander, Benjamin. The Art of Possibility. New York, Penguin Group, 2000.
