Sanctuary

While I would hardly classify my life - both past and present - as easy, there can be no doubt that I have lived a sheltered life, and a bit too much so.  I grew up with two older sisters with I the youngest and only boy.  We were all spaced out two years apart, and with my father finally getting a boy to carry on the family name (the irony), the family building halted and the deterioration was free to begin.

To be clear, my family always loved each other. We fought a lot, sure... but always made up.  We didn't - and don't - socialize a whole lot and have little in common, but we try to be there for each other when it counts and pull together in family emergencies.  Having seen some other families of my peers growing up, I learned to appreciate my family even as I kept them mostly at arm's length as I do everyone else. Social anxiety is a blast, folks!

But we're all as frail and fucked up as any other human can be, with mental illnesses of various sorts peppered into our DNA from both ends.

As I entered my early teens I'd already learned about sanctuary - a safe place or places of my own, free of other people and full of my own distractions to lose myself in.  My charging dock, if you will. If anything, any time, got too overwhelming... I'd head to my sanctuary if possible. 

If I was at school I'd sometimes even fake being sick so I could go home to my sanctuary.  I wasn't aware of my anxiety disorders until my college years, but I can retroactively diagnose numerous panic attacks and grinding anxiety nausea and insomnia that would all have aided me in looking the part of an actual sick student needing to go home.

This idea of sanctuary stuck through my adulthood, even into my marriage.  After a few months of trying to share a bedroom, my inability to sleep or relax at all resulted in us having our own rooms, and really if we're honest - separate lives. 

But the obvious failed marriage was easy to ignore as long as there was that sanctuary, safe and unchallenged.  Content to stay in a dead marriage and co-exist as roommates as to not disrupt the status quo we'd set up for ourselves.

My sanctuaries have allowed me to ignore and procrastinate in addition to recharging my psychic batteries.

Out on the Appalachian Trail, sanctuary is on my back. I have to carry it with me, and this is a lesson I need to learn for myself.  I have to be somewhere where I cannot run home. There is no home. There's my tent, my sanctuary for fleeting moments - and I have to dismantle it every day and bear it with me until it's time to pitch again.

The metaphor is not lost on me.

Still yet, this is just part of the reasoning behind my plans to hike the Appalachian Trail, which is why it's so hard to answer the common Why question with a satisfying sound bite. The reasons are many, and stewed in unrelated context. I don't know that I'll ever stop trying to answer it for myself, truthfully.