Time Since Then

My life imploded exactly three years ago!!

Three years ago today my life fell apart in a way I hadn’t even imagined was possible.

Three years ago today, I woke up in a green room. The apricot tree outside was blooming. So many bees hung off the blooms that the branches were heavy, dipping towards the ground. The fig tree outside my window was just starting to green. The day before I’d sat by the little heater wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea reading and watched the sun dip behind the volcano.

I’d gotten used to watching the purple mountains outlined in bright orange. I’d gotten used to speaking a language I wasn’t born into, and used to the wonderful family I lived with. In the mornings I had coffee and homemade bread and honey on it, then walked to school. I co-taught second through sixth grade English. After school I had an English club, a group of dedicated elementary schoolers who would come and play games and learn simple, conversational English. On March 12th, we started to move club outside because the weather was so nice. In the evenings I’d eat dinner with my host family, then go for a long run in the desert hills just before the sun set. It took me a really long time to truly love it there, the only American for miles, a young blond woman standing out like a target, but by March 2020 I truly did.

Mount Ararat, Armenia

I woke up in the green room. I didn’t sleep for three days, but I went to bed in Michigan.

It was three years ago today that I left Armenia, and I try not to think about it that much, but I remember that feeling— freshly 24 and freshly confident, to back in the United States overnight and feeling like I’d lost everything. I can remember it like it is happening right now, so a lot of the time I try not to remember.

The Thursday before March 17th, 2020 it was hard to teach. It was warm out, mid-60s, and the students were restless. Throughout the day teacher’s phones buzzed. Parents began to arrive at classrooms, taking their children home. By the end of the day there were only half the students left. Only three students showed up for my English club; I sent them home early.

That’s the day I remember most. The next few days were filled with uncertainty, but I never really believed we were being sent home until it happened. Somehow, I woke up in the green room and went to bed in Michigan, slept in my sister’s empty bedroom since she had her own apartment.

I stayed there for just a few weeks and then I left to stay with my grandparents. I never liked the suburbs. There was still snow up near Traverse City, and I went from the beautiful early Armenian spring to the disgusting, mealy slush of April in Northern Michigan. We watched the news every day. I didn’t have a job, and didn’t even know what I could do if not teach English Abroad.

Spring came in earnest and from the window grandma and I watched the birds come back North. We went out canoeing on the lake in the afternoons. I kept writing, but it was half-hearted. I didn’t want to write about anything that hurt, but that spring it felt like everything hurt. Instead I leaned back into photography for the first time in years, starting with the birds outside the windows.

A bluejay in early April

Eventually I lined up a sea kayak guiding gig in the Apostle Islands, a place I had worked as a guide before Armenia. I moved back to Bayfield, and spent the summer of 2020 guiding and spending nights cooking for my new coworkers & housemates. At the time I think I was still hoping to go back abroad, but to be honest I didn’t really know what was next. I met Andy here, and we became fast friends. We were the oldest of the guides on staff and some of the more experienced, and had similar experiences with havoc the pandemic had wreaked on our life plans.

From Isle Royale

Actually, I think a lot of people who experienced the pandemic and lockdowns who were just a year or two out of college just starting their careers have that in common. We all had just found our footing in the world; first hired, first fired. And in the pandemic landscape it was (and still is) really, really hard to get back on your feet.

Neither of us had a good plan anymore, so we made a bad one together. When the season was over, we were going to sea kayak out to (yes, to) Isle Royale and circumnavigate. It went poorly, but was also sort of awesome.

I moved back to Michigan again, again with no plan. I started applying to jobs. It was starting to seem like moving overseas again was going to be difficult in the next few years, and to be honest the more time I put between me and Armenia the less I wanted another completely fresh start. I applied to work in a school in a small town in Northern Minnesota just an hour from Andy, the only friend I had in the same boat as me (metaphorically; we paddle separate boats and don’t canoe well. Apparently I have control issues and make a bad bowman. Imagine!).

I heard back from Grand Marais that I had the job within the week, and miraculously found housing just as quickly and headed to Grand Marais. My apartment was empty and white and clean and close to the school. I walked in to work. There was already a dusting of October snow when I moved up, everything stiff and frozen. I worked in-person for only two weeks before we were all online again. It was nearly impossible to get kids to log on for their one-on-one sessions with me remotely.

I went hiking as often as I could but it was cold and icy. I didn’t know anyone. With nothing to do in the evenings, I started writing a book detailing all of the places I’d guided and been hiking throughout college to fill my time and feel productive. Moving there, alone, before the winter felt like a big mistake.

It wasn’t. Andy found a job in Grand Marais and moved up, filling my white and empty apartment with skis and shoes. I made friends through Instagram, something I would’ve scoffed at before. It took about two months, but we soon had people over in the evenings for pasta bakes, and people to hike with.

Coffee in the BWCA

Grand Marais is a strange and beautiful and achingly lonely place. In the summer it is filled to the brim with strangers, people from the cities up to enjoy the best weekend of their year. You try and plan your grocery trips for Tuesdays. In the summer everyone works at least two jobs— it’s both so expensive to live that you need two jobs, and everywhere is so desperate for staffing it’s hard not to work two jobs. You end up working so long and so often that you hardly have a chance to appreciate all the beautiful outdoor places you moved there for to begin with.

But the summer season winds down, and you chat with the stragglers, the last groups of people to head into the Boundary Waters, the trail-dirtied thru hikers tackling the SHT, and there really is something incredible about the people you meet in the last days of summer in a mountain town.

Like the group of girls headed out to Isle Royale to backpack the Greenstone Ridge, asking me if I thought one can of backpacking fuel would be enough. I laughed and said “probably, but don’t get stuck out there”. They came back to tell me that it had lasted.

Or the thru-hiker I picked up and drove up to the Pincushion Mountain Trailhead so she wouldn’t have to climb the hill who told me about her experience southbound on the SHT, and how different it was from the Appalachian Trail. “Harder,” she told me. “Definitely harder. More ups and downs. The AT is set up for this, it’s easier to resupply. The path is just walked more”. I gave her my number and told her to give me a call if she needed anything, I’m happy to help. It’s something strangers have done for me on long paddling trips— it felt good to return the favor. I never heard from her again, which means she made it.

Snowstorm in Grand Marais

In the winter season Grand Marais is either a ghost town or a fairytale, depends on the light. We stayed two winters, but by the end of our second all of the friend group we had patched together had started to leave— housing wasn’t working out, jobs weren’t working out, it’s just not quite hospitable enough for people in their 20s to stay easily.

So we left too, and headed out west to paddle for the summer— that was last year.

British Columbia

We finished up our 70 day paddle trip and came back to Minnesota. I’ve spent the winter freelancing, something I’d been doing on and off since moving to Grand Marais but only this winter started to feel more steady, and working in a local coffee shop. This summer we’re headed out west to paddle again, this time to work as guides in the San Juan Islands.

Three years have passed since I left Armenia and woke up in Michigan with my entire life plan in shambles. It feels like a long time ago and it feels like no time at all, and I still don’t have a plan.

A lot of days my life still feels like a disaster. I’m 27, and still working as a paddling guide and cobbling together freelancing projects, and even though I love it from the bottom of my heart and it makes me happy, and I feel like I’m living my life to the absolute fullest while I can, and I know that is such a gift that many people don’t have, there’s a voice inside my head that says you’re doing it wrong.

I think the secret is that everybody has that voice.

Everybody feels like they’re doing it wrong, like the person next to you isn’t experiencing the same doubt that you are. We don’t talk about the dissatisfaction we experience in our careers, our relationships, our lives because admitting that dissatisfaction feels like a failure in itself. When no one talks about it, it’s easy to assume that everyone around you is perfectly happy with their lives and experiencing win after win, and you are the odd man out alone in your dissatisfaction. In other words, we feel more dissatisfaction because we assume everyone around us is perfectly satisfied.

Some nights I can’t sleep, thinking in circles about how I am a failure, a girl who experienced one rough patch and never really recovered. Everyone around me is doing fine, why can’t I?

I’ll finally fall asleep and wake up in the morning feeling tired and make my coffee and ask myself if I really feel that way, like I’m a failure, or if I just found contentedness in where I didn’t expect to find it, and have a hard time reconciling what I want for me and what other people want for me.

For all of the days I feel like a failure, there are days like today:

Today I woke up late and it didn’t matter. I made two cups of coffee, and finished up writing this. I can send out this essay knowing that someone, somewhere who is feeling alone in their dissatisfaction will read it and see themself in my words.

For you and for me— we are exactly where we’re supposed to be, but it’s okay to feel like we’re not.

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