ICEolated.

You never can trust what you see on the internet.

See, it was a few years ago that I first became acquainted with Byron on social media. Browsing about, I was taken with how striking and beautiful Byron was, and I wanted nothing more than to meet him for myself and see if the photos lived up to the real thing.

On my first attempt at meeting him, I couldn’t find him. I blamed it on the time of year and my inexperience in the area in which he was waiting, but I didn’t let that persuade me from attempting to meet up with him again.

So yesterday, I gave it a second try.

And this time, the weather literally prohibited me.

I got close, mind you, and I knew he was just a short distance away but when forceful winds and the potential of being pummeled by avalanches on all sides dare you to tempt fate, you go no further.

And for the second time, I was denied a chance go meet Byron Glacier.

Ayyyyy did I have you fooled?

But this story today isn’t about Byron. It’s about getting outside.

Clocking in at week week 4 of the social distancing mandate that spread through Alaska like last year’s Swan Lake Wildfire (and the rest of the world, come to think of it), I’ve become a little too comfortable with developing some bad habits, as I’m sure we all have.

Snacking, napping, Netflix, and repeat. Lack of motivation to exercise or go outside, increased screen time (this is the first time in my life that I’ve retired at the end of the night with red battery), and the multitude of feelings that permeate my subconscious on the daily: unease, uncertainty, stress, worry.

Though I can’t change the circumstances of this thing as it continues to hog the headlines, I can do something about how it’s making me feel.

We have over 101 million acres of land to explore here in Alaska, and even with the cut travel restrictions, it still leaves an awful lot of acres for us to get out and enjoy in the meantime. So how do I practice social distancing and isolation without continuing to stay cooped up at home? I get outside and explore a glacier.

As you read above, I did not in fact get to see Byron’s brilliant blue cavernous ice caves, FOR THE SECOND TIME, but what mattered more to me was being able to go outdoors and forget about the world for a little while.

Alaska is vast, it’s expansive, it’s raw and striking and one of the benefits of living in this sensational state is having opportunities like this to explore for miles without running into anyone else.

It’s being able to stand in a valley where a glacier once roamed as wind tears through my hair and threatens avalanches at any moment. It’s taking in the magnitude of where I’m blessed to live and appreciating the beauty that lies all around, unfazed by the madness we’re all going through.

It’s easy to forget about these things when our whole lives are so profoundly impacted by this pandemic, but I’ve found relief in appreciating what we still have and for what still surrounds us, despite what the world is going through.

And even though I still haven’t met Byron face to face, and even though I doubt whether those ice caves I see on social media really exist at all, I thank him for getting me outside and into the brilliant landscape that is Alaska, where hiking out to a glacier is still considered practicing isolation.

Or should I say, ICEolation?

Then & Now.

There’s nothing like running into a guy from your past that you once had a bad date with.

Granted, he probably doesn’t remember, me, or the date for that matter, but I seldom forget such things.

Trying to retell the bad date story to my family one night, I discovered that the best and only way to tell the story properly, was to hear it from the horse’s mouth, from my very own words from that very same night.

So with that, I made a visit down to the shrine of all things holy and precious to me: my old journals.

Tucked away in a safe room, these journals stand side by side upon a bookshelf (taking op three or four shelves), all colorfully bound and carefully dated. There are approximately 50+ journals (give and take a few for various other topics, like my travel, food, and work journal), and each one contains all the emotions and feelings, observations and experiences of my life since I first started writing some 15 years ago.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what year me and this guy last hung out and it was by lucky chance that the second journal I plucked from the shelf happened to be the correct one.

2013: the year of my 18th birthday.

As I brought up this fragile document that contained my expressive feelings of my 18th year, I sat with the family over breakfast and began the fun process of combing through my entries, reading aloud the many humorous bits I thought prudent at the time to write down, like who was grumpy that day and why I was (once again) crying in my room.

I laughed aloud at the dramatic outbursts about how I was feeling low, hurt, angry, and sad all the time, but the more I read, the more I couldn’t tell the difference between entries written in 2013 and now.

And I found that nothing much has changed.

Nothing much has changed.

I let that sink in a little. Rereading old entries that expressed the same reactions, emotions, and struggles that I still deal with to this day, I realized that despite my perceived growth I thought I had made since I wrote about this bad date, I was still the same person on the inside.

Somewhat taken aback that I was essentially rewriting the same topics, I opened up conversation with my mom to process that maybe all this writing wasn’t, in fact, doing much to make real change happen within me.

What I found was that there’s history within my family of behavior just like mine, and that I come from a long line of women (and men) that suffer through struggles with mental health. And where my great grandparents were unfortunate enough to be treated with outdated practices like shock therapy, I have the opportunity to get some real help; which for me, is a professional person to talk to, someone who will respond to how I’m feeling, where my journal can’t.

There’s no doubt that writing does offer relief and therapy, don’t get me wrong, but it’s temporary. If I’m still falling prey to my emotions and fighting through the same problems that are simply disguised differently but all contain the same underlying similarity, that means I need to take the next step.

I’ll still write, don’t you worry. Writing is in my soul, runs through my fingertips and onto my keyboard and by opening up about difficult topics, I hope to maybe inspire others who are struggling to do the same and who also want to make sense of their feelings.

(plus I simply adore storytelling)

I never knew that a trip down memory lane could open my eyes and inspire change, and I won’t ever knock writing as a source of healing because look how my words from 2013 made an impression on me today. Visually seeing my problems then and how they compare to my life now has made me want to seek out someone who can get to the root of my problems, and not just put a band aid over a bullet hole…