You're Too Old to Believe You're a Fraud for Having Down Times

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

Photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash

A fellow writer calls me out and here’s my response

One of my fave Substackers,

Kristi Keller

, mentioned me in a story this past week. What a terrific chance to respond, because what she writes about hits home for so many. Here’s her piece:

How To Cleanse Your Life With Unemployed Holy Water

Kristi lightly poked me in the side for exhorting people to go out and adventure. She’s been through some rough waters- forgive the river analogy but I did just spend four days on the restless and magnificent Rogue River in southern Oregon. I will be using those analogies for a reason.

If you’ve ever rafted, and this was my third (the last was 2015 when I rafted the Class V rapids of the headwaters of the Nile in Jinja, Uganda), you’ll get my drift. Kristi went over some seriously nasty rapids and got tossed out of life’s paddle boat.

Many of us have. Kristi was an editor of mine over on Medium so we’ve been connected for a while. We both have a treasure trove of stories from our past. When we’re in the ripples, especially flat waters where not a damned thing is happening, it can feel like a ripe failure to not have an epic highlight reel to share with our audiences.

First, it’s impossible and exhausting to live like that. Second, Shit Happens.

I worked for a crappy little bank in racist, rural South Carolina, was having horrific migraines nearly daily which were disabling. I was home on disability and I, too, got fired.

I, too, filed an EEOC complaint, won it. It took too long. As a result, the proceeds only helped pay off the bankruptcy which followed because of the firing, the move to get out of that awful place, and the inability to get hired again after 600 resumes, three job interviews and three “we’ve decided to go in another direction.”

Kristi’s story reads like a chapter out of my book as well.

One of the great lies of writing online, led proudly by (fake) influencers, is that their lives NEVER have shit rained on them. They NEVER have issues or money problems and life is just one long highlight reel…so

WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?

As if, right?

After I began my adventure career, I was indeed sharing the highlight reels. I also wrote about the utter flops and screwups which are inevitable. Still am. They’re my best comedy material.

More recently on my other blog, Walkaboutsaga.com, since moving to Eugene in 2020, I’ve been writing about the long litany of shit we wish didn’t happen to us but does. My surgeries began with a rotator cuff in 2018. A few more trips and a lot more was going wrong, from kidney issues to horses standing on my feet.

But the worst of it began with this:

After emergency kidney stone surgery in 2020, just days before I signed the sale of my house to new owners and penned my John Hancock to purchase the one I’m in now, I was driving just outside Twin Falls, Idaho. My Honda was crammed with the last of my things, I was going 65 mph in the passing lane.It was late afternoon, about 4 pm, and another kidney stone decided to “come down the river,” as it were.

I flipped my car, landed perpendicular to oncoming traffic, pushed out the window, crawled out of the car and located my Daytimer because, well, cops.

It has been hell on wheels for my body ever since. Remarkably, this accident was the least of it. I was 67, still in terrific shape. I had no clue at the time but I was about to embark on a long journey over nasty sharp “rocks” consisting of some twelve surgeries in total, the loss of my company to the vagaries of the Silicon Valley Gods who needed more yachts, and the temporary loss of a beloved identity as an adventure traveler…at least at the level I was accustomed to.

I nearly lost my house, nearly ended up moving to Colombia to survive financially. What trips I did around the various surgeries were a shadow of what I was used to. It’s very, very easy to feel like a failure.

Truth, it’s just life.

It’s just effing LIFE.

The lessons for me have been in having a sense of humor every time I ask “what could possibly go wrong” and getting an immediate answer. Learning to simply do the PT, do the work, slog along and keep at it.

Kristi talks about the weight, the extra twenty. Well, I went from this:

to this:

Now some of it has come off. But one of the tradeoffs we make when we are in recovery is just this: the body needs to heal, the body uses fat, an essential organ, in many of its functions, and it doesn’t give a flying crap about our ego. It needs to heal.

Four hand surgeries, two foot surgeries, one ovary surgery, kidney stones, three shoulder repairs, all the complications from multiple surgeries and pain medications and the stresses of constant pain….look, for ANYONE that is one hell of a burden in just five years.

Last summer just as I got out of the boot and started walking again, I broke my hip because I couldn’t feel my feet. I did a header off my porch. More months down, more months in PT, more months in recovery.

Then when I did do the PT and started training, I over-trained, developed sesamoiditis and arthritis in my right big toe joint and went back in a boot for another six weeks.

You cannot make this shit up.

Time on the sand bar, the gravel bar. Time on the rocks, stuck. Time not lost at all, but in the kinds of highlight reels that nobody wants. But we all have those times.

The lie from online writers is when they don’t share this stuff. When you don’t hear about the lean months, buying markdown produce, not turning the heat high enough for comfort, the other coping techniques that we engage in when we have to start all over again and money is scarce while inflation is rampant.

Many of you can relate. That’s why it’s so important to call crap on most influencers whose carefully-curated material doesn’t reveal the real. Real doesn’t sell products. They’re being paid to pitch perfection which simply doesn’t exist. Ass-pirational lives, if you will.

What I love about Kristi’s piece are two things: one, she dug into her treasure trove of terrific stories about her previous life as a Jamaican location expert and all the great material that all of us want to read about. Legit adventure experience, needing to be shared.

Two, she found

Donna McArthur

. As have many. Community helps us heal, helps us cope, helps us redirect.

Many of us who travel and who are for whatever reason grounded (usually our bodies or money or both) find ourselves feeling useless when our badassery either takes a hike (because we can’t) or we’re faced with a phase that doesn’t fit a previous identity.

That doesn’t mean we’re down forever. It does mean, for now.

I’m just coming back to adventure travel. At 71 I’ve no clue how many more years I have left in me. Truth, my body, most especially those parts which have metal and other bits in them in lieu of bone, doesn’t work the same.

In some cases, I can’t yet trust some body parts. In others, my trip down the Rogue was a pleasant reminder that while I may not be 100% according to my 64 yo self (orange dress, above), I am still running at about 90+%. That will allow me to return to horse riding, more rafting, more adventures….

…but not at the previous level.

Why is this perfect?

Because those people who are hiring me now want me to address the over-fifty cohort who are getting knee and ankle and shoulder replacements. People who still want to go out and play but whose bodies are no longer young.

Is life over?

Not at all. As I will write more about in coming weeks (we had someone with two knee replacements on this trip), it’s only over if we quit. We do have to choose differently, work with more thoughtful vendors who cater to the aging client and pay more attention to the body we have, not the one our overheated imaginations believe we have.

Kristi’s article inspired me to share more of my story because I am often accused by others of exhorting people to do what I do. People make the patently unfair assumption that nothing bad has ever happened and that somehow this writer lives a charmed life. That somehow I have oodles of money or a trust fund.

If I do I sure haven’t gotten the memo.

That’s insulting both to this writer and to the reader who makes such a breathtakingly unfair assumption.

I want all of us to find what inspires us and to go do it. We may not be able to do it right now. I just hope that fear isn’t the excuse.

That’s not a life lived.

That’s a life lived in apology.

Right now, with a brand-new puppy in my house, there are strict limitations to my schedule and how long I can travel. The costs of dog ownership, boarding and training mean that a lot of other things aren’t possible.

However. Ask Kristi if it’s worth it. Nuff said.

Then there’s this from Kristi’s article:

And before you know it, it’s November and you’re a twenty-pounds-heavier shell of a human being sitting on your couch reading

JULIA HUBBEL

stories that tell you to get off your couch and go be adventurous. All the while, you’re feeling like a complete fraud for trying to help other people go chase their WILD. (author bolded)

I take gentle but very powerful issue with the last sentence. People who have gone wild have stories to tell about how to go do it. That we can’t do it right this moment is just like rafting the Rogue: wait a while.

You and I can’t see what’s coming. There will be rapids, the perfect campground, a night so full of stars you could die.

If you risk living, there will be ugly rocks, busted bones, bad food, a stuck boat, lost gear or worse.

What’s fraudulent is not owning the rough stuff, the failures. What’s fraudulent is not caring enough about ourselves to file a lawsuit when we’ve been wrongfully terminated at our most vulnerable.

What’s fraudulent is to present to the world that we NEVER have shit sandwiches, that somehow life is an unending lineup of pretty wo/men, gorgeous beaches, lovely hotel rooms and fabulous food that somehow all just magically appear.

As. If.

On this trip, right after the Blossom Bar rapids, I got to stand up, unstrapped, balancing on the front of the equipment boat over the lower rapids. I fell, twice, lightly, on the pads. Leapt back up, all aching 71 years of myself, bent my knees to the surfing position and did it again.

And stayed up as the boat bounced over the rocks and the ripples.

That’s after months on a BOSU ball doing stuff like this:

I'm much better at this now. When I started I looked like a drunk camel.

What’s fraudulent, to my mind, is not admitting how crappy we are as beginners, and how funny.

What’s fraudulent is to carefully curate one’s life to edit out what we all deal with, from financial woes to physical ailments to terrible losses.

Those are what make us interesting. Those are what make us legitimate.

That neither Kristi nor I are or have been for a time off the road and not living an epic life doesn’t make us failures any more than such events make you or anyone else a failure.

Just speaking for myself, what’s an epic failure is when we fail to own- and enjoy and maximise- the times we aren’t being epic.

I salute every single one of us who is willing to be frank about our flops, our terrible losses, own the down times and let our readers into those parts of ourselves we find the least attractive.

Likely truth, those are what make us the most believable.

That’s what’s epic.

Let’s play.

Courtesy Flickr

Thanks to Kristi for the kind mention and for the inspiration. I am about to take my pupper for a good long walk (a tired dog is a happy dog) and remind my feet that they need to bend. Like the river.

If this article appealed, please consider

If you know someone who is berating themselves for not being on top of the world, please also consider

Either way, I hope you find a way to go out and play.