Date: 2010-03-17
To: Impossible Goals
Miles today: 0.0

¢Is there an odyssey the female longs to make-one that has been blurred and lost within a culture awesomely alienated from the soul? If so, what sort of journey would that be? Where would it take me?¢ (-Sue Monk Kidd from her book ¢Traveling with Pomegranates¢)It would take me to the east coast to attempt something that seemed nearly impossible to me a year ago, hiking 2,175 miles. This is one of the main reason I am leaving to hike this trail. I feel like living a life with the amount of noise, pollution, accessibility to everything via metal devices that travel tens of hundreds of miles per hour and ease in which we can readily consume leads to a lack of responsibility to the environment, the people around us and to ourselves. And ultimately leads to all of the horrors we witness in American society today. Alcoholic family members, abusive relationships, general lack of trust in your fellow man, theft, murder, mental illness, depression, addictions, corporate greed above all else. People are not meant to be in cages and our society has built one big one around all of us with debt, societal expectations, the need for bigger and better junk that we never really need and the undeniable need for the cycle to continue to support just a few. I say all of these things like I¢m not included in this, but I AM. It¢s impossible to not be if you are alive in America today. So going through the motions of selling everything that I own and embarking on a journey to walk a seemingly impossible distance with just a backpack, I hope will shake something loose in me that has been dormant potentially all of my life. I hope that this experience will humble me enough to stop being inherently narcissistic and rather, start directing that energy towards caring for the environment and more importantly, the people around me. And, furthermore, to teach myself that I can do anything that seems impossible¢¦ I just have to keep directing time and energy into these things until I reach my goal.   In the last three years, I have accomplished four goals that I thought were impossible. Just little more than three years ago I was engaged to be married to a man that I had been entangled in a physically abusive relationship with for three years! The first time I ever tell people that, they usually tell me ¢you don¢t seem like the type that would put up with that.¢   To which I reply, ¢I didn¢t think so either.¢ It¢s a vicious cycle that begins in domestic violence that is fueled by both the abuser and the abused. I now think back to where I was three years ago and where I am now. Three years ago I was a shadow of the person that I used to be. There was nothing left, it had been taken from me by betrayal by the person I loved the most over the span of a three year relationship. After realizing how bad I had gotten, I started to fight for myself again by teaching myself that I am worth all the things that I want in this life. What was the first thing I accomplished that I thought was impossible? Getting out of that relationship. I then continued on with community college and applied for admittance at the University of Washington at the age of 26. It was a terribly difficult school for me to get into. I was denied admittance twice due to a bad GPA from a previous AAS degree I finished back in Chicago. So I completed a year at North Seattle Community College to prove that I could make the grades and again I was denied admittance even though my GPA was now 3.7.   The feat seemed impossible to me. But on one rainy walk home from work at night when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, I decided to get mad instead. So, as I walked I wrote a very honest and passionate letter to the UW admissions appeal board in my head and repeated it in the whole way home instead. Once I got home, it was perfected and I just needed to type it and send it out. Two months later, I found out that I had won my appeal and that I was going to attend the UW and that it would be paid for by the UW and the U.S. government. This is the second time in the last three years that I accomplished something that seemed impossible. The third seemingly impossible goal then was actually getting the degree, which anyone who has gone to University knows, is years of constant dedication of all of your time and energy. This past December I earned my BA in Environmental Studies with a minor in Urban Planning. And the fourth goal involves climbing mountains. When I moved to Seattle five years ago, I was a novice hiker/backpacker. I had only done a few backpacking trips in the summers. And the big mountains that I climbed in New York, New Mexico, Colorado, Maine ect. I thought were going to kill me by the time I finished hiking them. So starring up at Mt Rainier and imagining climbing it seemed pretty dang impossible given I had no idea what was involved in climbing something like that, nor did I know anyone who knew how to do something like that. So I kept starring at that mountain and continued hiking and backpacking and going to school instead. Then, about a year and half ago I heard about an organization here in Seattle called the Mountaineers that has a coarse that teaches people how to mountaineer. So I signed up and started the coarse in January 2009. I remember showing up for the second meeting and being really embarrassed that I didn¢t know how to put on a harness or tie into a rope. Most of the people in my group were already rock climbers or some other sorts of outdoor badasses. I was just a novice from flat land Chicago and for all I knew, I had no business being on a glacier tied in with these folks. But I continued on and made the effort for four months and when my climb leader offered up any climbs I signed up immediately. So in May 2009 I successfully completed my first three climbs, Whitehorse Mountain, Mt Hood and The Tooth. All three kicked my ass and challenged me to the point of giving up but I did it. It was about that time that I decided that I needed to attempt a thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail in 2010. So here I am, less than two weeks to my first day on trail and anxious as hell! So I started thinking about all the things that I thought were impossible in the last few years that I accomplished to remind myself, that hiking 2,175 miles is not impossible, you just have to take one step at a time until you reach Maine.