Are You In The Wilderness Season?
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Self, Relationships, Writing

If we held quiet, we could hear the bears, the crunch of leaves and branches underfoot. The soft sounds the cubs made. We watched them streak black through the trees. We didn’t expect to see them. My pop and I took a cabin in Vermont — ages ago, it seems — and the closest we’d ever come to a wild animal were the thoroughbred yearlings he broke. We lived in New York, after all.

But there they were, not a mile from our cabin nestled deep in the woods, and we crouched down low and didn’t dare breathe. I wondered if they could smell us, how we sweated through layers of clothes in terror, awe, and fear. I held my pepper spray, ready. As if a little tube could protect me from a mother charging. My pop rolled his eyes, but asked if I had an extra. By then, we were shaking because they were close. Is it strange to say we could fear their weight in the distance, their hulk? We pressed our stiff bodies into the earth. The ground was cold and yielding, like a grave.

I could taste the dirt, it stained my lips black. I remember the salt in my teeth.

We lay like that for a few minutes and then they were gone. Disoriented, we got lost on the way back, and by the time we could collapse onto the rugs on the wood floors, the day had folded into black.

On the drive back, we kept retelling the story, adding color and contouring the details as my pop and I were prone to do, but a part of me didn’t feel the story belonged to me. We didn’t belong in the woods. We didn’t know its language, couldn’t navigate the terrain. We were tourists, and it wasn’t until we got back to Long Island did I understand the depth of our foreignness.

While we had our guides, maps, and compasses, we could still get lost. There will always be places where our discomfort snuffs out that which is warm and familiar. I couldn’t shake the cold or the bears out of my bones, and I remember a few weeks later riding the subway all day because this was what I knew. I knew every stop on every train from Brooklyn and Queens to Manhattan and the Bronx. Stations that had remnants of 70s and 80s grit and grime, and stops that were bleached clean and whitewashed new.

This is my country.

Sometimes, it seems there’s nothing more monstrous than forcing someone to stew in sadness. We’re desperate to flee the unknown and the possibility of a pain or loss that has no end. We anesthetize and dull the edges. Quiet unnerves us so we switch on televisions, fans — any form of white noise. We’d rather be uncomfortably comfortable than walk through the wild. We embrace noise and constant velocity because should we pause we face our reckoning. We have to deal with all that we’ve been dodging.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, everything felt quiet. I had no subways or distractions or friends. Nothing was familiar, and the bears became expensive cars careening down the 10 or 405. Every day I woke to open-heart surgery. My skin felt like a graft that didn’t take. I had no tube of pepper spray to protect me from the grief of having lost my estranged mother to cancer. A constant sadness that threatened to swallow me whole.

Then, the tsunami of questions. What was I doing here? What did I leave the comfort of New York? Why did I have to start over? What if I lost everything? What if I failed? What if I had to slouch my way back east in defeat?

And then another layer deep: Should I have said goodbye to my mother before she died? What kind of woman had I become, and did I like this version of me? What life was I living and is what I wanted or intended? Should I go on when I can’t go on?

I used to think of depression as a dark country. Those who suffered from it had a visa that would permit you entry, and we had no instruments to navigate our way through and out. We were never promised a return ticket. That country being the imperialist motherfucker it is, began to encompass moments of fear, uncertainty, unrest, anxiety, and despair. I realized I didn’t have to leave my house to find sadness. The unknown is always just beyond my reach.

I didn’t need a foreign country or stamps on my passport — I could easily get lost in spaces that once felt familiar. I could lose my way coming home.

So, this put me to thinking of my pop and I in the woods in Vermont. How the terror we felt from having gotten lost was never as long as we thought it was or could be. The pain is always temporary, even when we’re convinced we’ll never claw our way out. This year, I tumbled into the wilderness season knowing pepper spray (or a simple solution) wasn’t going to save me. There exists no simple or easy way out — but the road, cabin, or clearing does exist. This much I know to be true.

I would be lying if I told you the following months don’t make me anxious. I have plans — like I had for 2020— but there are so many unknowns, wild cards, characters resurrected from the dead, and plot twists. Will I ever be able to leave this country? Will I finally have semblance of financial security? Will I get a German shepherd? What sustains me, what stops me from jumping out of open windows, is the clearing. Knowing every wilderness has its season. Every shape we take is temporary.

And if we hold still and breathe, maybe the bears won’t make a feast of us. Maybe they’ll move on and disappear in the wild, through the trees.