For a brief spell in my twenties, I hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail, stretching 3500km along the United States’s east coast mountain spine. I was fortunate to spend a few months dawdling through the woods from Georgia to Virginia, and again from Vermont to Maine. A good adventure.
Throughout that first leg, I stood out from my fellow hikers: I visibly lacked a key bit of distance-hiking kit – walking poles.
Up and down mountains and over ridges, I passed bemused looks and probing questions almost daily. “Why not?”
Folks fired the stats and anecdotes at me, but I didn’t care. “Walking poles reduce the load on your knees by 25%” they said. “It’s a lot safer, faster and more fun on steep descents,” they told me.
Being the fit, strong 25-year-old who was always right about everything, I told them gently but firmly that I simply didn’t need them. I had some well-rehearsed lines to help laugh off the looks. Like that “(famed US explorers) Lewis and Clark didn’t have walking poles” and “if the good Lord wanted me to have long arms, I would have been made a spider”. Hilarious I know.
After 1000km, three states and countless soaring peaks, a friend made me take her poles for a short evening leg into town – just for a try. I relented.
I sailed that walk. Gliding all the way to town, into a cab and through the doors of the local sports store to buy a pair. My trademark trudge saw its last metre there and then.
What an ignorant buffoon I had been. I had missed out on something great, and done wholly unnecessary damage to myself, by doggedly holding on to some delusion about my own toughness.
I had outright refused to hear the facts and stories so many people had told me about the other, better way. And for what?
A decade, a wedding and a child later I had another opportunity to learn the lesson of the hiking poles. This one was much harder.
A few years ago, cancer found my young family. In the shock of diagnosis and whirlwind of my wife’s surgery, chemo and radiation I was generally okay.
Then the problems started. I’ve never been a particularly angry person, so I noticed when I started becoming the kind of husband and dad I didn’t want to be – an angry one. I got frustrated too fast. Was too slow to calm down. I started to shout.
I’m someone who needs to feel in control. So I went about doggedly trying to get things back under control. I would try harder to breathe through the anger, exercise harder to moderate my mood and work harder to get my lost focus back at work. After all, I was tough.
I defaulted to the ignorant buffoon again. But with the lesson of the hiking poles replaying in my mind, I relented and acknowledged the problems. I listened to the experts and the advice of loved ones. I decided to put my wellbeing and the needs of my family above my egotistical ideas of toughness. I went to therapy.
The results were as predictably positive as the walking poles. In my case, I was helped to recognise that my anger was the result of trying to control-away the fear and sadness of our health battle.
I did several sessions with homework – a little daily emotional check-in journal. It helped me realise that all emotions pass. That in general I was pretty happy. That the toughness my family actually needed was for me to be a dad and husband mature enough to cry in front of them when the moment called for it.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have waited for some acute crisis to go. Like recalling the mountains and ridges I trudged over, I look back with embarrassment on the relationships that suffered and people I unnecessarily hurt with my toughness-control reflex.
I write this article now, because I feel like we’re close to the next step on our collective mental wellbeing journey. Most people are now aware that this stuff matters. But at some point, awareness must turn into action. Having been so helped by therapy, I feel duty bound to publicly call out the main excuse – the well-rehearsed line I hid behind and hear regularly from others.
It’s this idea that some people need therapy and some don’t. Frankly, that’s bullshit. It’s like saying some cars need servicing and others don’t. Often that’s tied up with something like “I’ve got mates I can talk to” – as if Friday night beers can stand in for the technical expertise, experience and patience of a professional.
I’m proud that I dropped the excuses and made the decision to go to therapy. I was brave when my family needed me to be.
