Little Adventures in a Big World: Reflections on Fear

This is where I grew up:

Specifically, in this house, which my dad built before I was born:

(House-proud, I feel compelled to mention we had quite a bit more shrubbery when we lived there.)

My hometown, Lorain, is situated near the shores of Lake Erie in northern Ohio. And, while there may be adventure to be had in Lorain, it is not easy to find. Before the age of twenty, I had never seen a mountain. Or been on an airplane. I had visited my cousins in Florida when I was twelve, so I may have seen the ocean around that time. But when I was little, my idea of adventure involved pedaling furiously on my Huffy ten-speed to make it home before the streetlights came on … completely. (Of course, I didn't even mount up until they'd at least started to flicker on. A rebel, even way back then.)

When I graduated college, I moved -- alone -- to my new job in Indiana. My family thought that was adventurous enough. -- Indiana. Adventurous. Hmm. --  I did, admittedly, find ways to find adventure in the flats of what has got to be one of the least perilous states of the nation.

Wolves notwithstanding, Indiana soon bored me, and so I made my way north to Wisconsin, which made up for what it lacked in adventure by providing six years of solid graduate and professional education. In my senior year, I contemplated a move to Alaska, where a good friend was living. So, yes, it's adventurous to move, but at least I knew someone once I got there, right? Nevertheless, my family was dismayed. "Alaska?!?" By the end of the year, the decision was made, and within ten days of graduation, I had made my way -- a solo 3000-mile drive with my two dogs as my only companions -- to my new home state.

I've now been in Alaska for seventeen years, and there's no shortage of opportunity here to have, find or make as many adventures as your heart desires. Pretty much any land that isn't claimed by private residence or the military is free and open to explore, play or lose yourself in. These are just a few of the adventures I've had while here:

Learning to scuba dive... in January:

Even the instructor looks grumpy.

Kayaking Prince William Sound's Harriman glacier:

Hiking Crow Pass, a 26-mile mountain pass, replete with hornets, moose and bears:

Skiing across a frozen lake to the foot of Portage Glacier:

Cycling through Denali National Park overnight on Summer Solstice:

Cold at 3am on June 21? You bet.

Running the Klondike Road Relay, a 120-mile relay about half of which legs are run in total darkness:

Learning to ski the backcountry (for the uninitiated, that means hiking up a mountain just to ski back down it):

Hiking Kesugi Ridge, along the majestic Denali (the mountain -- not the dog, whose name was Spook):

Participating in a spay/neuter clinic in "bush" (remote) Alaska, with no gas anesthetic:

Finishing a Marathon:

Skiing the twelve miles to Tolovana Hot Springs, which is north of (i.e., colder than) Fairbanks:

Yeah, the little white line in the distance is the trail.

The shelter at the top of the wind-whipped dome (note the poor scrawny tree)

And there are, of course, the everyday adventures. Here are just a few:

Weekly autumn run (fewer bears in autumn)

Wolverine Peak, once a summer, at least

Mountain Yoga

The locals, in my side yard

And travels abroad have provided their own adventures, as well:

The Costa Rican jungle -- snakes, heat stroke, no water… what's not to love?

Taranaki, New Zealand

The trail is on the side of that cliff face somewhere -- Oh, I see it!

Hiking the French countryside -- FYI, they do not chain up their guard dogs.

Cappadoccia, Central Turkish steppes

Taksim Square, Istanbul, a mere four months after the city riots

Toto, I don't think we're in Lorain anymore.

Lest you think this is starting to read too much like a "Look How Awesome I Am!" post, allow me to get to the point: It's not enough.

Not that *I* feel dissatisfied with what I've accomplished in my life, but … Let's just say that the yardstick in Alaska can be a bugger.

No matter how bad-ass you think you are, here in Alaska, there's someone who's doing it higher or deeper or longer than you. As an example, the kayak picture above, with the glacier? This is the picture  I took when I felt like I was close enough to that big wall of ice, thank you very much, … and yet my friends went on ahead, to get closer:

See the tiny black dots mid-photo? That's them.

After a while, I couldn't even see them anymore:

Similarly, the marathon I ran was flat. Meanwhile, my friend John in Fairbanks runs the Equinox Marathon every year -- every year. The course profile (elevation gain at the left):

And the Klondike Road Relay? As if it isn't tough enough that it's a run through a mountain pass at night (one year a black bear ran along with the runners for a stretch -- not joking), some guys gotta show off by dressing up to run their sixteen-mile leg, in feathers no less:

Closer to home, this was my own personal challenge: whenever my ex-husband said he wanted to go for a hike, he usually meant either straight up a mountain, or, to compromise & go flat, maybe something like this:

What trail?

Or, in Dominica, heaven forbid we should stagger off the cruise ship to go lie on a beach somewhere. No, no, let's rent Vespas from a sketchy guy who takes us to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere and go drive around until we find a trail no one's ever been on before:

Met some nice locals, though. Very friendly.

The discrepancy between what I considered an adventure and what constituted "adventure" for my ex-husband was a chasm of epic proportions. 

Which brings me to Fear. 

I am a very fearful person. My mother was strong but timid in her own way. Bees, traffic, crowded places… these were all valid reasons why she might might be busying her hands nervously shredding a Kleenex or even making an excuse not to go out on any given day. Her youngest daughter, I made her fears my own, even while I could sense my father's displeasure in creating a fearful child. He did his best to inspire confidence in risk-taking, and lack of shame in what others might consider failure. And so I was -- and, to some degree, remain -- trapped between these two viewpoints, forcing myself to do things I fear, but remaining fearful all the while.

Of course, some of the extreme adventures listed above have more to do with strength and stamina than with fear, but, underlying it all is a fear of shame or social embarrassment if a feat is attempted and not successfully accomplished. Perhaps this is especially true if the valuation of a loved one is perceived dependent on performance or outcome. And maybe this valuation is real -- and maybe it is imaginary, its own fear.

It holds us back, Fear does. We sometimes live our lives less fully because of it. But all of the photos above are from my own albums, my own experiences, and so I am determined not to allow my life to be limited, by anything, if I can help it. And certainly not by fear. 

And so, in spite of my fear -- and sometimes even because of it -- I forge ahead, into unknown territories. And sometimes, I have discovered an embarrassment… of riches.

The Husbandectomy: My Summer Research Project of Why?

I am a scientist.

When I experience an event that I do not understand, I turn first and foremost to books to explain it. Research is my friend. Look hard enough, and you'll find the Answer. Science is my religion -- I believe in it with all of my heart.

So this summer, when my husband of sixteen years announced abruptly that he was leaving me, with no good reason ("I don't love you and never have" is unacceptable as an answer; furthermore its source proved to be highly unreliable in the weeks and months to come), I hit the books. I worked very hard all summer and I think I am finally ready to wrap it up. Since there is no local campus for the College of Divorce, Infidelity and Abandonment, I have nowhere but here on my blog to present my thesis, gleaned after a summer of research.

I confess, I began my project by polling real live human beings: friends, relatives, therapists, doctors. Any little bit of information that blew my way I gathered up more frantically than a squirrel preparing for an Alaskan winter.  "Is there another woman?" "Who else knows?" "Did he talk to anyone first?" "What am I supposed to do now?" "How could he do this to me?" "What did he know, and when did he know it?"

 And most importantly, "Why?"

Ah yes, that's the big one: "Why?"

But humans, being human, always bring their own experiences and histories to whatever opinion they offer. And so most of my people-opinions were based less on hard scientific data than, say, on something that happened to a friend's sister, or a column they read once in the New York Times. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to these people for listening to my story, drying my tears, refilling my wine glass. But I needed more data. Hard-core data with an "N>1."

Let's hit the books!

In case you've never looked, let me tell you, there are a lot of self-help books out there, and it's very very hard to decide which ones are going to provide any sort of useful information, not to mention writing style, which can be a bugger to bear if it's terrible (as you know from reading my blog -- rimshot!). -- So. Where to start?

I started with an "Idiot's" book because, here I was, suddenly getting a divorce. I didn't know diddley about what papers to file and how lawyers are involved and who gets the house…. If ever I felt like an "Idiot," it was at the very beginning. I was also an Idiot who wasn't eating or sleeping, so I needed a step-by-step handbook to guide me along.

Then it seemed a number of web searches consistently recommended this book, "Getting Past Your Break-Up," by Susan Elliott.

The author also has a website and Facebook page -- even some YouTube videos, but some of those suggest she's kind of a kook, so I stuck to the printed word.

In any case, GPYB (its self-designated moniker) stresses the importance of accepting the cruel hand fate (or your ex) has dealt to you and focusing instead on yourself and your own future. If you've never been through a serious break-up of an intense or longterm relationship, you may not realize this is much harder than it sounds. Everything must have a reason, after all, and it's a cruel trick to have the trauma committed by the one person in the world you most thought had your back. It's easy to think there are ways to reconcile or reason with him/her and change their mind. "If Only"s pollute your thinking and fill your mind from dawn to dusk -- or I should say dusk to dawn, as the midnight hours can be the hardest to bear.

The end project of GPYB is to draw up a Relationship Inventory, in which you take a cold hard look at your relationship, the good and bad, of the relationship itself and then of each of you. You weigh in with the red flags you now think maybe you should've seen way back at the beginning that might've warned you this breakup was, eventually, maybe, in the cards. It's not about blame; it's just about trying to achieve closure with something that maybe ended abruptly and without sensible reason.

I did the homework, I did the Relationship Inventory. I wrote the letter to my ex, which, as per the author's instructions, I did not send. The other mainstay of GPYB is NC, which stands for No Contact. If ever there was a single good idea for getting stuck in breakup hell, it's maintaining the steady trickle of emails and texts and phone message that keep you connected to your Ex.

For me, it wasn't until I committed to NC that I made any progress at all.

The next book I read was "The Grief Recovery Handbook," by John James & Russell Friedman.  Whether it's divorce or death (I have a whole separate post discussing which is worse, but so far I can't make it read as anything less than insulting to one or other or both camps, so let's just say it's a toss-up), the loss of a life partner is just that: a loss. Explicable or not, justified or not, expected or not, that person who was in your home and heart and mind every single day for sixteen years, is gone. Poof. Like a magic trick, but less entertaining.

I am no longer supposed to think about my ex. His life and his thoughts and feelings and problems are none of my business anymore. And that's a lot to deal with. I do have another blogpost about Grief, but suffice it to say it's a process, and a lot of that has to deal with things left unsaid. The Handbook focused on helping resolve those bits of unfinished business to assist the reader in moving along.

Of course, none of this even begins to address the big "Why?"  For those answers, I happened upon a couple of truly amazing resources. The first was "The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists," by Eleanor Payson.

For those who don't remember their mythology, Narcissus was a Greek god who was so in love with himself that he fell into his own reflection in a pond and drowned.

Narcissism is a recognized personality disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. It's a complicated condition, but in a nutshell those afflicted are most concerned with their own self-image, and those who cease to be a positive adoring "mirror" are resented and not infrequently rejected and supplanted by a "better mirror," frequently a younger partner or perhaps an employee of the same workplace. -- I'm not diagnosing my ex as a narcissist (though my therapist did imply as much), but there were many uncanny similarities to my own situation, and finally some explanations were becoming evident, illuminating a few of the darker corners of my bewilderment.

Next up on the hit parade was "Runaway Husbands," by Vikki Stark.

Herself a marital counselor, Ms Stark was surprised to find herself on the receiving end of an abrupt departure notice from her own husband of twenty years. "I just can't do this anymore," he told her, as he abruptly left their marital home and moved in with another (younger) woman. (Ms Stark also provides the amusing anecdote that she initially thought he meant the fish she had prepared for dinner that night, that was the "thing" he couldn't "do anymore.") 

In the book, Ms Stark discusses Wife Abandonment Syndrome, and not surprisingly, a fair number of the perpetrators fall under the classification of Narcissist Personality Disorder, but not all of them. Her study is not all-encompassing, but it tells enough stories of other women (and a few men) who were left abruptly and unexpectedly, as I was. The book also addresses peripheral collateral damage, not the least of whom are the children -- a topic I feel utterly unqualified to offer any opinions about, having no children of my own, other than to say the word "heinous" is all I can say about a parent who would abandon his own children.

But beyond the spouse and the children, there are also friends and relatives, a surprising number of whom seem to feel the condition is contagious, and any sympathy directed toward the abandoned partner will "infect" the friends' own marriage. After all, if it truly can happen out of the blue, what's to say it won't happen to them next? And here's the hard truth: the answer is Nothing.

But the book also goes a long way to explain how, though it follows a certain pattern, it was almost always completely unpredictable and once the decision had been made to flee, neither hell nor high water was going to get in the way of that guy leaving!

However. If you're looking for a winner in the Abandoned Spouse's Comfort Resource sweepstakes, you need look no farther than Chumplady.com.

"ChumpLady" is Traci Schorn, a blogger and writer, who discovered her husband had been cheating on her during their eighteen year marriage, thus making her, in her own words, a "chump." Her online blog is not about reconciliation, and it is not for the faint of heart. She uses profanity as liberally as a hypochondriac uses disinfectant, and her biting acerbic wit permeates every line of every post she writes, skewering the adulterous Cheaters and eviscerating their self-aggrandizing justifications for their behavior. Peppered with phrases like "Untanging the Skein of Fuckupedness" and "Narcissist Ego Chow" and "Genuine Imitation Naugahyde Remorse," her blog is a haven for those of us on the receiving end of lies and embellishments and the general morass in which one finds oneself after being abandoned by a cheating spouse. Laughing with the other chumps was some of the earliest laughter (amid tears) I had during the recovery process. I still log on every day to see if sharing my own story will help give some other poor chump the support they need today, and to even take a few pats on the back when I'm having a down day myself.

 

Of course, there are plenty more resources available. Some of them were terrible, either suggesting I just get over it already, or, worse, implying my Ex had no choice but to run for his life because I have a dominant personality, so he had no choice except to cheat! (I confess, even in that book, however, I found some clues as to how he might be feeling, since I think that book was meant for his comfort, not mine.)

And some of the books I still haven't gotten to, though I find I am less and less interested in reading them.

For, you see, I think I'm finally getting where I need to be. I'm glad I had the chance to be married to him, to share a life and do some of the things together I might not have otherwise done on my own. I'm sorry it ended, especially how it ended. But, to channel Yoda for a moment, End it did.

So after a summer spent with my nose buried in every book and website I could find, after charting my Relationship Timeline and Life Inventory Timeline, and smudging the house, and drinking Walnut Extract oil for purity, and infusing my house with Lavender (for calmness) and Lemon (for clarity),...

 … After all that, I think I'm finally putting the "why" to rest. And the answer is: I don't really know and probably never will. There are theories of Narcissism and Sociopathy, genetics and childhood development. But in the end, it doesn't really matter.

Of course, in an actual thesis defense, this would never fly as the final statement. But this is the Thesis Defense of Life. And so, having done the reading, done the research, polled and questioned and queried as many friends and strangers as I could pin down and interrogate, I'm satisfied that I did my due diligence. And I am free.