I turn 37 in seventeen days.
Which feels fake, first of all.
Thirty-seven sounds like an age where you should have a signature dinner recipe (okay – I do), a respectable retirement account (I do not) and very strong opinions on backsplash (also – do not).
I do have very strong opinions about trailhead parking. So, ya know, close enough.
This isn’t what I thought my life would look like at almost 37. I don’t know what I pictured, I just know it wasn’t this.
I didn’t picture hiking boots living permanently by the door. I didn’t picture an entire wall dedicated to outdoor gear. I didn’t picture waking up at hours previously reserved exclusively for airport departures and catastrophic life choices because I decided I needed to watch the sun come up from the side of a mountain.
I definitely didn’t picture spending my free time staring at topo maps like a tiny, unhinged cartographer, calculating elevation gain and wondering how much water I can reasonably carry on my back.
And lately, I’ve been looking into kayaks. So things are clearly escalating.
I call it escapism. I say it all the time.
I need to escape.
I need to get into the woods.
I need a mountain.
Usually this is followed by me switching between two apps and three websites and selecting some objectively unreasonable way to spend a Saturday.
And for a while, maybe it was escapism.
There have been plenty of things in my life worth escaping from. There have been entire versions of my life I wanted to crawl out of. Some I did. There were years when survival took up so much space there wasn’t room left for actually living. Years when getting through the day was the accomplishment. Years when the future wasn’t somewhere I was excited to go; it was just somewhere I hoped I’d make it.
So, yes – I learned to escape.
But lately, I’m wondering if I’m still using the right word. Because what exactly am I escaping from?
You see, there’s a particular feeling I get when I’m driving towards the mountains before sunrise. It’s dark. My car is packed with entirely too much shit. There’s probably an electrolyte drink rolling around in the passenger seat and enough supplies in the back to survive a minor apocalypse.
I’m tired.
I’m excited.
And I’m unmistakably alive.
Then I get to the trail. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s fucking miserable. Sometimes I’m standing on a summit thinking there cannot possibly be a better place on Earth. Sometimes I’m halfway up and wondering which of my ancestors pissed off a witch badly enough for their bloodlines to end up here.
I’ve gotten stronger.
I’ve gotten smarter.
I’ve learned when to push and when to turn around.
I’ve learned mountains don’t give a shit about my ego.
I’ve learned that I really like learning what I’m capable of.
That’s the part I wasn’t expecting. I thought I was going into the woods because I needed to get away from everything. Instead, somewhere along the way, the woods started giving me pieces of myself back.
There is something deeply funny about accidentally becoming a person.
You make one tiny decision. Then hundreds more. Suddenly your house is physical proof that transformation has occurred. I don’t remember deciding to become this version of myself. I just kept following things that made me feel alive.
Maybe that’s how it happens. Maybe we spend too much time waiting for these enormous moments of transformation. We think changing our lives should feel cinematic. There should be a dramatic decision, swelling music and a clear dividing line between before and after.
But very few moments of my life changed abruptly.
This version certainly didn’t. It changed quietly.
One boundary.
One choice.
One Saturday morning.
One mountain.
One fuck it, let’s see what happens.
Then another.
And another.
Until eventually I looked around and realized I wasn’t visiting a new life anymore.
I live here.
There’s grief in admitting that because when I say this isn’t the life I imagined at 37, some of that is beautiful. And some of it isn’t.
There are things I thought I’d have by now. Things I thought would last. Things I thought I could count on.
Versions of myself I spent years trying to become because I genuinely believed that if I could just get everything arranged correctly, life would finally feel safe. I don’t want to rewrite that history into some inspirational story where every terrible thing happened for a reason.
Some things were just terrible.
Some losses were just losses.
Some chapters deserved better endings.
I can love the woman I’ve become without being grateful for everything it took to become her. Those things can exist together.
Maybe that’s one of the strangest things about getting older. You stop needing your life to make perfect sense. You stop demanding that every wound turn into wisdom. Sometimes you can acknowledge what happened, carry what belongs to you and leave the rest on the side of the road.
Then you keep going.