Episode Details

People are often taken aback when I talk about my time at The Mountain School. I don’t really blame them; if I met me, I would probably be surprised that I’d spent four months on a farm in Vermont when I was 16, too.

But I did. And I loved it.

I loved seeing the stars at night. I loved the community that my semester formed. I even grew to love the animals that horrified me at first. (I still don’t get too close to cows, goats, or chickens. I give them their space - we respect each other.)

I found out somewhat quickly that I have a knack for bushwhacking, which the dictionary defines as “cutting or pushing one's way through vegetation or across rough country, not following an established trail.”*

Put more simply, bushwhacking is when you grab a stick and use that stick to make a path for yourself in the woods.

This song has absolutely nothing to do with the essay, but it was in my head the whole time that I was writing it, and Frozen II is profoundly underrated.

Bushwhacking made me feel powerful. In a diary entry written during my time at The Mountain School, I compared bushwhacking to walking down the streets of Manhattan with a bunch of shopping bags, trying to make it through a sea of tourists on 5th Avenue. I stand by that metaphor. It truly fits the quintessential “city girl gone country” image that I had going for me at The Mountain School.

One of our first assessments during my semester involved identifying the trees we’d been studying in environmental science. Nature was quite literally our classroom. For our quiz, my small class of 10 or so walked outside the schoolhouse building with paper and pen and were instructed to write down the names of the trees that our teacher pointed at.

I don’t remember what grade I got on that quiz. Probably a B- honestly. The only tree species I remember, and can still identify today, is a paper birch. The trunk of the tree looks kind of like it’s wrapped in rough, jagged sheets of white paper that you could peel off easily.

What I do remember is the enormity and sturdiness of all those trees. I probably got distracted during the quiz because I was daydreaming and feeling philosophical about it all.

I surprisingly created a lot of nature metaphors and imagery during sessions with my life coach a few years ago. One of the metaphors we frequently came back to was the cave where I picture my "wisest self." I used to picture her hiding away from the rest of the world in a cave.

I once told my former coach that I pictured that cave as the same one where Katniss nourished Peeta to health in the Hunger Games. I pictured a similar cave while reading Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. (The one where Achilles and Patroclus lived, when they were training with Chiron.)

(Both excellent books. I feel like Katniss and Achilles would be at each other’s throats, but Peeta and Patroclus would get along just fine.)

There’s a coziness and warmth about my cave, even though it’s nestled in the heart of the wilderness.

The wilderness in my metaphor represents the outside world. The cave is where my real self took shelter while I reconciled my outer world with my inner world. A reconciliation that was only possible (and necessary) after realizing how much pretending I had been doing in everyday life.

Since creating that cave metaphor, I have ventured out more and more to explore the ‘wilderness.’ I have started pretending less. And I actively think about how to exist out here in the wild, and show up as my real, ‘wisest’ self that I picture in that cave, without a) actually retreating back into that cave or b) staying in the wild and pretending.

More plainly, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can be myself out in the world, instead of just performing all day and becoming myself again once I’m cozy on the co