The disconnect from self and society stemming from my thru-hike is rather difficult to verbalize. Ask me details about how to successfully backpack 2600+ miles and I can talk your ear off. Ask me how I am handling being back and how the experience changed me, and I stumble to find the right words. Hours and hours have been wasted trying to write it down with it never becoming sufficiently coherent enough for posting.
Thankfully, I have Amelia both as my best friend and a fellow thru-hiker. She captured perfectly many of my feelings and difficulties in reintegrating to society.
Friends have asked me if I am depressed. I cannot say for sure, but I do not feel like I am suffering from depression. Getting up every morning, going to work, eating healthy, daily exercise, sleeping reasonably well, and starting to make plans for the coming year. Instead of a lack of energy, I feel an overwhelming surplus of it. And time, so much time. How do you people handle weekends? And nights? TV and drinking are fun in small doses, but as a post-work ritual it has the misfortune of being rather unproductive. I have developed a previously atypical habit of going for long walks in the evening.
The denial is the oddest part of the whole shebang. I can understand the disconnection, listlessness, and feeling that I am a stranger in my own life. But, my mind is having a hard time accepting that the trail even happened. I have vivid memories of the highs and lows, the pains and joys; they come back every time I stare out a coffee shop window or log into Facebook to see a fellow thru-hiker's photos. And yet, I cannot accept that I finished. A sense of incompleteness surrounds the entire affair, as if I just woke up from a fragmentary dream with no ending. That proverbial other shoe has not dropped. There is more yet to do. I need to fall asleep again and figure out how it all ends!
Amelia proposes the idea of "dosing" ourselves with these adventures. And that is EXACTLY right. Fun Size, Cuddles, Hermes and Lotus, G-Bird, Goodall, and myself are all on Facebook planting the seeds for our next trips. Appalachian Trail? Continental Divide Trail? Antarctica? Himalayan Pass Tour? Just get us back there. We need to go back.