Upwards

I spent my 33rd birthday alone, hiking up a 14,000-foot mountain, with very little solo hiking experience and even less mountain experience. I made the decision to do so this past May, which for the last few years has been an incredibly difficult month for me, as it leads up to the anniversary of the worst day of my life. In years past, my body has reacted violently in the weeks ramping up to June, even if I have been in solid standing, mentally and emotionally. I have a hard time keeping food down and sleep becomes entirely unattainable. I elected to partake in the common trope: Woman Goes on Nature Walk to Heal from Trauma.

I’ve been doing things in the last year that help me feel like I am living in my own body rather than apart from it and watching it move of its own volition. Last spring, I moved into my own apartment after living with friends or partners for most of my adult life. Inhabiting my own space made my body feel freer. I started dancing all the time–while getting ready for work, while baking, while cleaning. I was moving my body and it felt like it was me moving my body. Last fall, I hunted a deer for the first time. My hands released the arrow that killed it, my hands tore through its hide and removed organs and blood, and I used its body to feed my body. At the beginning of this year, I started a workout routine for the first time in a long time. A friend from my teenage years put together a weightlifting routine for me, and I felt my muscles stretch and grow and my body became leaner but stronger. I started running in March and surprised myself with how consistently I kept up with it after many failed attempts over the last decade to get back into it. Then May arrived and the usual physical reaction to the trauma anniversary hit me, though not quite as hard as it had in previous years. I only had one week where I really wasn’t eating anything rather than two or three. I don’t know how or why Pikes Peak got into my head, but I somehow got stuck on the idea of hiking up the mountain in the fall. Part of this past year of doing physical things to ground myself in my body has led me to want to do something big. Something bigger than me, bigger than what happened to me. And there are few things bigger than a mountain.

As of this past June, it has been five years since I was raped in a public bathroom by a stranger in the middle of the day. I no longer mince my words when I tell people about what happened. I have stopped softening the language I use; I’ve stopped saying assaulted or attacked and I call it what it was. The people closest to me know what happened (as well as a few thousand social media followers), but there are people who are new to my life in the past few years who might be reading about this for the first time. Sorry you had to find out this way. Six months after I was raped, my boyfriend died. Six months before I was raped, my dad died. 2018 was an unthinkably impossible year and it has only been in the past year that I have felt myself emerging from the rubble for more than just brief peeks above the surface. Only in the past year have I begun to regain a genuine sense of ownership over my own body.

I did endless research on different routes up to the summit, how physically demanding it would be, the best time of year to make the trek, how many people got eaten by bears on the mountain every year, and if it was safe to be a solo woman hiker on the trail. I decided that this was an attainable, statistically bear-free goal, even though I had never done anything like that before. My running and weightlifting became more focused on endurance, as I had decided Barr Trail was the way I wanted to get up Pikes Peak. It is a 13-mile trail that has nearly 8,000 feet in elevation gain. Everything I read urged people to be sure they were in the right shape to attempt this trail, as it was not for beginners. I looked at my work schedule and decided I was going to try and be at the summit on my birthday on September 26th. I had less than 150 days to get in shape.

I was pretty public on social media about my newfound workout regimen and the reason behind it and I adopted the phrase “for the mountain” anytime I made a moderately healthy choice, either physically, in regards to diet, or even when it came to dropping people from my romantic life. People were overwhelmingly supportive and anytime my coworkers saw me eating a healthy lunch instead of an indulgent BBQ sandwich, they would cheer, “For the mountain!” Runner friends gave me advice, as did friends who had hiked Barr Trail before. Almost everyone was excited for me, save for a few friends and acquaintances who tried to talk me out of it, or at least out of going alone. It should be noted that they were all men. One, back from a recent family trip to Pikes Peak, in which they drove up, told me it was going to be harder than I thought and that I should just drive up because the altitude affected him when he was at the top and he was tired just walking around. I had run 14 miles that morning before work. I had started before the sun was up. I had run 100 miles in the previous month. His warnings only made me want to prove that I was so much stronger than him. 

I started therapy immediately after I was raped. The first year was covered by the state, and I decided it was a worthwhile expense after that period ended. The first two therapists I tried out broke up with me after just a few sessions and referred me elsewhere, as they didn’t feel qualified to deal with the severity of my trauma. That felt like evidence that I was beyond repair. I was stage four and my chances of getting out of this alive were slim. After a few more therapists that I chose to move on from, I finally met my current doctor, who I have now been with for over three years. She’s only a couple years older than me, and while she is incredibly professional, she feels more like a qualified peer than an authority figure, so I don’t have to watch what I say. I can walk in, plop down on her couch, and tell her how much I felt like wanting to die that week without fearing she will lock me up in a padded cell, because she knows me well enough to see the difference between me wanting to die and me being in danger of harming myself. I told her about my mountain plans, and she was elated. She had seen how setting physical goals for myself changed my entire view of myself and positively impacted my mental health. We’ve gone from two sessions a week to one every other week in the last year and a half.

September arrived and passed more quickly than I thought it would. Before I knew it, I was making the eight hour drive from Kansas City to Colorado Springs. I saw the first hint of a mountain in the distance and as I kept driving and it kept growing larger, I realized I was looking at my mountain. I arrived at my hotel Sunday evening and my room had a perfect view of Pikes Peak. It was so much bigger than I remembered from my last trip out west. Monday, I took a horseback tour of Garden of the Gods, then went through the Royal Gorge by train and went to sleep as early as I could possibly muster.

The morning of my birthday, I drove from my hotel to the trailhead in the dark, and I set out at the first hint of light. I stared down the trailhead, the trees shrouding the path in darkness and I felt pure fear shoot down my spine. Anytime I have felt fear in the last five years, I have been instantly transported back into that bathroom, where the fear I felt was primal, guttural, all-consuming. At the dark trailhead, it felt like I was right back there, the moment that man entered that bathroom. The second my gaze met his, I recognized the look in his eyes. He looked at me and he hated me. It is a look I, and most women, are familiar with. It is a look that more men contain than most men would admit. I looked back at the trailhead, and it did not hate me. It was just a trailhead. I remembered what I am capable of, what I have already survived, and I knew I could do this. The wild part of me took over and I entered the woods. 

What I became in that bathroom, what I had to become, was something wild and untenable and I have spent years trying to coax her back into my ribcage, because she has no place in the softness of my life. She is a creature who fought with everything she had. She was an animal backed into a corner and she acted accordingly. She tore with her hands, ripped with her teeth. She broke her own bones to try and get away. She snapped finger bones, swiped nails across eyes, drew blood. She took as much as she could from him. She saved my life, but if I do not tamp her down, her rage will make the cityscape of my life, which I have rebuilt brick by brick, crumble into smoking rubble. I will never be able to make her disappear completely–she will always be at the center of me, pacing like a caged lion, white hot with justified anger. I am soft and tender and warm and I will not apologize for that, but I will also not apologize for what I had to become and what still lives in me, and I will forever struggle to balance the two. 

I made it thirty minutes into my trek without any incidents, but that streak ended swiftly. I saw a rustling in the woods ahead of me and froze to see what was about to emerge. A black bear ambled out of the trees onto the trail and didn’t seem to notice me. Before I could make myself big and loud, like I had read in all the panicked research about bears I had done, the bear suddenly noticed my presence and emitted a sound I could only interpret as surprise and started running away from me. I made a similar noise and he glanced back at me and looked genuinely offended, as though I had just threatened the lives of his entire family. He ran without looking back, and I paused and reconsidered this entire journey. I still had hours and hours and miles and miles to go, but I eventually decided that I’d be okay, even if more bears shot me dirty looks on the way.

The first three miles of the trail were incredibly steep with a lot of elevation gain and a ton of switchbacks. It was already more strenuous than I thought it would be, and several of the other hikers on the trail gave up that early on. If I had attempted to do this hike back in May when I first got the idea in my head, I would have turned around by mile two, but I felt the muscles I had never really paid that much attention to until this year do what I had been training them to do, and I persevered. If there’s one thing I have become good at in recent years, it is persevering. 

I didn’t tell anyone for weeks after I was raped. I wasn’t afraid of not being believed or slut-shamed or anything that too many victims of sexual assault have to deal with. I just didn’t want to be the girl who got raped in a bathroom. The first person I told outside of group therapy, Andrew, was someone I met and fell in love with immediately. I then told a couple friends, then my mom, then everyone all at once.If I had to re-do the days and weeks after that afternoon, it would look very different. I would bring people with me to the hospital to hold my hand while my body was invaded a second time that day, this time with swabs and medical instruments and cameras and evidence bags. I would not go to work 36 hours later. I would admit myself to some sort of mental wellness retreat or program and tell everyone I love that I was there. They would line up to come see me, one by one, some in groups. They would bring my favorite snacks and drawings they made and trinkets that made them think of me and place them at my bedside and tell me that they were sorry something so terrible happened to me but that they would help me carry it. I would respect our friendships enough to know I was not burdening them. I would respect myself enough to know that this is not something I should do alone. I would let my friends curl up around me like a pile of kittens while we napped in the sun. I would take time off from everything. I would tamp nothing down and let it all spill out of me until I was empty. Maybe then I would have refilled faster with the good stuff.

A bit over six miles in, I reached Barr Camp and took a break. I had made a reservation to stay the night there, just in case, because I had no idea how I would be feeling, or if the weather was going to suddenly turn on me, as it is liable to do in the mountains. Running 14 miles in one go or hiking for eight hours straight certainly helped my endurance, but that was all at sea level. I was thousands of feet higher up by the time I reached the camp, and my emotions were all over the place. I sat and had some food and rested for a little bit, chatted with some fellow hikers. There were a couple of other solo hikers that were women, and we instantly bonded at the camp. We talked about how “conquering the mountain” was such a male way of viewing this hike and how there was no violence in what we were doing–only a very strenuous peace. There is no defeating a mountain. That isn’t what we came there to do.

A friend warned me that I was probably going to spontaneously cry at some point during my upwards trek, and not just at the summit. What I didn’t tell her is that in the last year, I have been spontaneously crying all the time because I have been overwhelmed by the depth of feeling that has returned. I am feeling everything, so much, all the time now and it is overwhelming. There was a numbness that took over me after I was raped, and the intensity of my relationship with Andrew helped stave that off for six months, but the night he died, something flipped in me. 

The night a drunk driver hit his vehicle, I walked into the hospital room and saw Andrew’s body, chest mechanically rising up and down, tubes and wires coming out of everywhere, and dread filled me as I reached out to touch his hand. I frequently sit with people as they pass as part of the No One Dies Alone program, and after they pass, there’s a neutrality that fills the air. There is a distinct before and after when it comes to death that I appreciate and respect. I touched his hand and the air felt wrong. It didn’t feel neutral, it felt like nothing, which is the worst thing for someone who is everything to you to feel like. I was suddenly sure that Andrew was trapped somewhere in between life and death in some void of nothingness, a vacuum in which he could not come back from or move on from. I dropped his hand and sprinted out of that room, but it was too late. That great black swirling Nothing had crept inside of my own chest, where it would remain for a long time. 

I begged his doctors to unplug him, to take all the organs they could as fast as they could, and to let him go. His family agreed. They asked if I wanted to say goodbye, but I couldn’t stand to be in that room with that looming nothing for even another second. I asked if I could see him afterwards, and they let me. I was led into a room with his body after they sewed him back up and delicately covered him with blankets, as though he would get cold. I touched his hand, which had mere hours ago been the only hand that could touch me without my skin getting a burning, crawling feeling, and it felt like he was gone. It didn’t feel wrong or vacuous when I touched him again, but nothing felt right inside of me. 

The night that Andrew died, the load-bearing wall of my psyche, which had mostly been held up with crude temporary fixes, fully collapsed. I came undone and didn’t even care enough to tell anyone. I carried on, a facsimile of myself, and felt nothing. I tried to be angry at the driver, at my rapist, at god, at anything, but everything was so muted. I tried to be sad. I forced myself to cry, to try and break through whatever barrier had solidified, but it didn’t help. My therapist, concerned with this new development, put me on antidepressants, but if anything, that made the numbness worse. We tinkered with my dosage, but I could have stuck my hand in a blender and still felt nothing. After almost a year of trying, we decided the best course was to wean me off of them. My feelings started to come back with time, but only in the last year have I really been capable of consistently feeling things. 

I felt everything on the mountain. The culmination of my last five years of healing rose to the surface of myself. I raged, I cried, I laughed, I felt pride and shame. I hated my dad, I missed my dad. I missed Andrew more intensely than I ever had, I was mad that he died, I was jealous that he did it without me. I missed my family, I missed my friends. I was homesick while simultaneously entertaining the idea of disappearing and starting over. I was mad that I missed out on five years of life, I was shocked that only five years later I was able to put my life back together so well. I felt fear, not of the bears and mountain lions I was still vaguely convinced were following me, but that I was finally able to look ahead more than a few weeks or months at a time and realize that I still had an entire life to live. There are still countless versions of myself that I have yet to uncover and I am still carrying every version of my past self inside of me. I carried every version, past and future, to the top of that damn mountain. 

There is no room for solitude at the summit of Pikes Peak, as people arrive literally by the trainload to take pictures and eat donuts from the visitors center. As soon as I set foot on the platform to take a selfie at the summit sign, I burst into laughter because only in that moment did it dawn on me that I did it. I hiked up a mountain by myself, and I had picked the most difficult class one 14er in Colorado. I was thrilled. I was exhausted. I wanted a donut. 

I spent 45 minutes at the summit, resting and eating and taking it all in. Several hikers I had talked to and passed on my way up caught up with me and we hugged and jumped up and down and exchanged social media contact info. I told them that I had to get going if I was going to make it back down at a reasonable hour. They told me I was insane and that everyone who does Barr gets a ride back down. I told them I wanted to try Crags Trail, too, and that a local friend would meet me at the trailhead when I got down there to bring me back to my car. I teased them for not being able to handle a downhill walk and we parted ways. 

Part of the reason I wanted to go down the other side of the mountain is that Crags Trail offers gorgeous views of the Continental Divide. While I appreciated the beauty going up, I was far more focused on the task of hiking up a mountain than taking in the sights. Going down, though way harder on my knees and shins, was a lot more leisurely. I had gone 13.1 miles up, but I only had to go about seven miles down to get to the trailhead. As soon as I hit treeline, I became hypervigilant. I had been reading the trail conditions and knew that for the past couple weeks, a moose and her calf had been hanging around the trail, and she was known for being aggressive with hikers, even trampling a couple. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that my odds of running into her were slim, because my odds rarely work in my favor, especially when it comes to animal encounters.

I only had maybe an hour left of hiking when I saw the baby moose, which is not the preferred order of seeing a moose family. I froze and furiously scanned the area looking for the mama moose and spotted her before she spotted me. Once again relying on my vigorous research, I slowly backed away. The baby started trotting towards me and I started swearing, but in a calm tone of voice, as advised by the internet. The mom finally noticed me, which was my intention, as the last thing I wanted to do was surprise her, and she started huffing and puffing. Fuck. It seemed like she was getting ready to charge, so I prepared myself to run while still backing away slowly. Her baby ambled back towards her and I backed into the woods. She stared me down a while longer, and I avoided eye contact. It felt a little like I was running into some old forest god that I had to show appropriate deference and reverence for so as not to offend. She seemed satisfied with my distance and must not have thought I was a threat anymore, because she and her calf grazed around a while longer before finally moving along. I practically sprinted the last hour to the trailhead and jumped in my friend’s car and told him to step on it. He didn’t ask questions until we hit highway and I burst into laughter so overwhelming that it turned into tears and I managed to stutter out, “I thought I was going to get hoofed by a goddamn moose and a bear saw me as a threat.” He just patted my shoulder and took me to my car. I took perhaps the best shower of my life, ate a delicious four-course dinner, and slept harder than I’ve ever slept in my life.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as being entirely healed from trauma. This is something that I will carry with me forever. No matter how many years pass, I will never be able to simply put it down. I carried it up the mountain and back down. I’ll carry it home to Kansas City. It gets lighter every year, but that’s only because I am getting steadily stronger. There used to be days where I wanted to run backwards through time and shrug all these years off of me and return to a time when I felt small and new. Sometimes it felt as if I just looked hard enough, I could find the glimmering spot where time is the weakest and push my thumb against it like a piece of rotten fruit until there was space enough for me to climb through. Going backwards no longer interests me. It didn’t really occur to me until this year that my life has the potential to keep getting better. I have been so focused on keeping myself alive that I didn’t really consider what to do with all this time I have been given, or that the best parts of my life have yet to happen. This is not my epilogue that I am living in. The book isn’t even halfway over. There are so many more mountains I want to get to the top of, and I can’t do that by going backwards. I can only go onwards and upwards.