It’s been about six years since my diagnosis of depression and anxiety disorder. Before that, I thought I was worthless and nuisance to the world. After a few years of therapy, medication, and studying of eastern religion, I finally figured out how to live normally. Normal is a subjective word, but this is the best I’ve ever felt. With the current state of the world and social media, the line between “feeling anxious” and clinical anxiety have blurred more than a Monet painting.
To help explain how clinical anxiety and depression feels for me: whenever there is a situation where I am at fault, in fear of something, or both; I physically become fatigued. My body takes away 10 to 50% of my power. Things like going to a skatepark can become a mental battlefield for me. I can barely look at strangers or focus on getting any task done. During this, my anxiety is rattling up the worst case scenario in my head of what happens next. An extreme example of this could be: I forget to hit up a friend the next time I want to go on a bike ride. This leads me to fear that they saw me doing this activity on social media and have been counting up times I don’t invite them. Soon enough, they hold resentment and tell other people that I dislike them.
Ridiculous, right? That’s what I know in the back of my head the entire time. It’s simply a subconscious collection of thoughts trying to push their way into the forefront. Luckily, I can curb these behaviors and stick to reality now. Regardless, this is something that is a constant poke in the side from my brain, even after I’ve rationalized and gotten over it.
It’s so easy to be suffocated by city living. People are angry at their lives, and some for good reason. All of us have issues in our lives and specific hindrances related to the cards we’ve been dealt. The most important thing is how we react to these things. For me, taking an uninterrupted time in nature is the quickest way to change my perspective. Cutting out noise of cities, advertisements, or anything with a human touch is a crucial part of it.
I’ve found that gravel biking has been some of the most meditative healing for my soul because of this. Mountain biking is typically parking at a trailhead, road biking is well….on the road, but gravel is completely up to the rider what experience they want to have visually. I’ll drive an hour out just to ride gravel in places with the most remote nature, farm roads, and country towns with slower living.
Before riding bikes, I had a deep connection to backpacking and rock climbing. Tennessee has so much amazing land that is well maintained and doesn’t have the “trailhead effect” . It feels and looks like it’s been there since the Earth shaped it. There’s something beautiful about finding climbs from something that sat there for thousands of years. Climbers are also very aware of leaving no trace and will notice if you make a mess of the place. Outdoor climbing is a fully analog experience at heart. Many of the best climbs aren’t on apps like Mountain Project. They’re in books written by local guides and give you a physical map of the trail system. After years of going to my hometown crag, I could navigate it without a book and felt like I was truly a part of this tiny chunk of wilderness.
One of the many crags found right outside of the Chattanooga city limits with my best friend Tofu.
We are all just animals living on a tiny rock. There is a massive world around us with a running ecosystem. Learning about it and seeing nature act despite the chaos of humanity is humbling. It is a blessing that humans have not burned the planet to a crisp yet, so it is our duty to keep what is there. Hell, we need to repair a lot too.
Next time you’re going through something, take a walk through a nature sanctuary, go camping, or just find somewhere that doesn’t have a big billboard telling you you’re going to hell for existing.
Fuck cars, fuck western industrialization, nobody is illegal on stolen land.
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