Sometimes, learning to lean-in to life takes letting a smelly group of strangers coax you up a rock scramble to get a view like this.
I didn’t realize until years later that my first panic attack was, in fact, a panic attack. I clearly remember it happening while I was cramming for an algebra test. I didn’t feel prepared, I thought I knew that I would fail, which was, obviously, the end of the world. My heart started racing. My breaths weren’t deep enough. I was paralyzed and scared and I didn’t know what was happening.
It’s strange how realizing and accepting I have anxiety suddenly put so much of my life, like that day, in perspective. I felt like I understood myself better, like maybe I could love myself a little more knowing this had always been an obstacle for me, even before I could put it into words, before I could quantify and analyze it as any good scientist would.
But it took a series of losses in my life — and a week in the desert — for me to realize that instead of using that understanding to my advantage, I’d grown complacent. Instead of acknowledging my anxiety and challenging its limitations, I just accepted it as part of who I was. I felt myself changing into someone I didn’t really like, but instead of steering the direction of that change, I became a passive participant in my own life, clinging on to whatever and whoever I could to survive the ride. I let my fear of disappointment and pain consume me without a fight.
Although it hurt, and still hurts, it took losing part of my anchor for me to see the icebergs I was headed towards. Over the past few months, I let doors close that I shouldn’t have, and I lost some important things and people I can never get back. Maybe those losses were fated, but my apathy at the time was not. I was timid, and I knew I’d lost my fight, but I still struggled to find the motivation to look for it.
I was at my lowest point when it was time for me to leave for America’s lowest point - in Death Valley National Park. Several months before, I’d applied to go on a service trip there through my university’s Alternative Spring Break program — but by departure day, I was dreading that decision. I wanted comfort and safety. I just wanted to go home, but I’d paid for this trip, and I knew in my heart I could be doing good for myself as well as for the park rangers we would serve. I collected myself as best I could, and I went.
It was awkward and anxiety-provoking at first. I was thrown in with a team of eleven strangers, eating, sleeping, working, and not-showering together for an entire week. We had nightly reflections around the campfire, where we shared our highs and lows and our life stories. When those conversations got strangely intimate, we were encouraged to “lean-in” to the discomfort. My main discomfort was simply the grief I carried for what I had lost. It took a lot of quiet introspection and unexpected connections with others for me to be brave enough to delve into that grief and realize the part I had played in it. I felt like I finally understood what I had done to myself and just how complacent I had become. But I still didn’t know how to pick myself up from that point — at least, not until I got a little perspective from a higher elevation.
About halfway through our trip, I was huffing and puffing my way up a crumbling rock scramble to watch the sun set across the valley, and I still hadn’t figured it out, but I finally felt like I would be okay. Devoting my entire stream of consciousness to the hand, feet, and eye movements that would most likely keep me from falling forced me to be present at a time when my thoughts were entirely in the past. It also proved to me that I could literally climb mountains with nothing more than my bare hands, a decent pair of hiking boots, and the support of a few strangers who didn’t stay strangers for long. I felt confident, and I briefly wore that confidence as a shield against my anxiety. I felt happy.
We all have parts of ourselves we wish we didn’t. Sometimes they’re physical - we wish we were taller, or had clearer skin, or different body proportions. And sometimes they aren’t visible, but you feel like there’s a neon sign on your forehead letting everyone else know - you’re awkward, you’re anxious about everything, or you’re depressed more often than not. How can you love yourself if you aren’t the person you wish you were? I’m still trying to figure that out myself, but I think it’s a balance of showing yourself mercy for your flaws, and challenging yourself to be the best human you can be, in spite of them.
While I couldn’t stay in the desert, I have tried to take a bit of what I learned there back home with me. It would be cliché to say I found myself out there, and I don’t think I truly did. But allowing myself to be calm and quiet and present for a week gave me a unique perspective on myself, and I saw ways I could be better and happier. I realized that my life is changing whether I want it to or not, and I need to lean-in to it.