Something I Never Needed To

Years on from that driveway, the one where I'd waved him off with a joke that wasn't one, I was over for dinner. I'm first-generation, born here. His wife, half-teasing, asked if I spoke the language. I said no. She laughed, something like, what kind of [ethnicity] doesn't know how to speak it.

There was nothing in it that was meant to land the way it did. It was a me problem, not hers. Something just cracked open and before I knew it, I was laying out pieces of my childhood. In a kind of specificity I'd never spoken to in thirty-five years of friendship. Not composed, barely edited, mostly just out there, on the table.

Partway through, I looked over at his face. We didn't really discuss it, didn't have to. I saw the wheels turning, over three decades of me making a little more sense. Why I move through the world the way I do. Why I am the way I am.

My first thought wasn't relief, it was guilt. I've only shared highly contained and managed bits and pieces before. This wasn't that, I'd dropped him into the deep end without warning. I never wanted to make him deal with that. And for sure, not like that.

He didn't need managing. Later as I was leaving, he hugged me, hard, and told me he loved me. We're not shy about saying that, or about real hugs. This was another level.

Next time, a dinner at the new house, he'd invited a friend I didn't know. Someone carrying his own version of an early hard start.

He didn't have to do anything after that first dinner. He could've just filed it away and moved on. Instead he put me in a room with another person, someone he thought I might recognize something in.

He's that guy. Whether it mattered to him or not, if it was a thing for you, he was looking out, all in.

This was just the deepest expression of that.

I've spent most of my life believing I had to protect people from my reality: managing and performing so steady that nobody had to carry the darkness of that weight, let alone see it.

That belief got tested not by decision, but by accident, by a comment I couldn't let past me. He didn't break or flinch. He got it, all at once, and stayed. Then he came back a second time and did something with it.

Thirty-five years of shielding him from something I never needed to.

G is a prime mover in why the blog and YT channel exist. He's seen me broken down at death's door, literally. He drove me to the hospital. He saw how I clawed my way back to something that looks halfway functional.

The last few years he's been nudging me to start a YouTube or a podcast about health and nutrition. He saw what I’d managed as inspiring. I never saw it like that. The grind wasn’t so much of a choice, it's how I'm wired. I tend to do the thing, whatever the thing is, fully aware of the odds and costs.

I was resistant, partly because I didn't want to be on camera, let alone speak into one. Also, I'm not a nutritionist or any kind of medical expert. Though I can read and I have a knack for sorting signal from noise. IRL a big part of my job is research, parsing, skills development, and application.

Beyond that, being seen as inspiring hinted at something that felt like duty.

That felt kind of heavy, and far bigger than me. 

The reality was, I was barely hanging on. Aiming for higher quality of life, at least for as long as I could manage. Furiously trying to pump the brakes on the impending future that's accumulating. If you've been following the arc, you know I'm still it the middle of it on some level.

One day on trail, early last summer, it hit me hard. A short steep hill, maybe seventy-five yards. Right after cresting a ridge almost as steep but three-quarters of a mile long with a 35-pound load out.

The gratitude was overwhelming and deeply emotional. I hadn’t thought even a fraction of that was remotely possible when I started hiking again in 2024. Let alone grinding out 5-6 miles like that almost every day.

After that day I started thinking about how I got there. That’s when the blog idea took shape. A way to honor all the support I’d had around me, from everyone.

The blog and my YouTube aren’t quite what he might have envisioned. The ASMR-adjacent content is meaningful to me, I love being there in that moment then coming back and trying to reflect to others what it's like. It's also a way to practice camera handling and editing for future projects.

I'm still just trying to find my way and build something that feels like it could be a kind of resource. Not to resolve anything for anyone, but to connect and maybe offer enough light for others to chart their own path. While I'm still charting mine in real-time.

I’m warming to speaking on camera, but that capacity is variable from moment to moment. Sometimes I can speak and sometimes I can’t. Autoimmunity and Barrett’s esophagus create ongoing vocal cord and throat issues. Speaking sometimes depends on how much pain I’m willing to push past. I push a lot on the regular, probably not smart, but it's what I do...

My peeps say stubborn, I say determined.

I'm still considering and evaluating the way through on that.

Until then, practical application resources and frameworks are here:

→ Trail Provisions
→ Adaptive Trailcraft

→ Share this if it stayed with you, gave you words you didn’t have before, or made something clearer. Someone else may recognize something here.

More on the way → Subscribe free for new posts delivered by email.

Connective Tissue:

→ Defended
→ What Regulation Made Possible
→ Close Enough to Be In Them

Related:

→ Fieldcraft for the Feral Generation
→ Your Body Isn't Broken, It's Adapted
→ Stone and Weather

Also:

→ And It Stoned Me
→ Sleeping On Childhood Cortisol
→ Competence Mask

← Back to Inner Trailcraft

* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *