Back to Earth — Suzey Ingold

In the days that followed my ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro, when I had returned to sea level and to functioning plumbing, as my body struggled through its readjustment, I didn’t speak much. This was, to an extent, by design: I had booked myself into a quiet lodge on the island of Zanzibar, a wooden structure on stilts steps away from the turquoise blue waters of Menai Bay, for a few days of sleep and sunshine before I returned to the bleak midwinter that awaited me up north.

I slept a lot, at least initially, barely able to keep my eyes open past sunset, my body so accustomed to rising and retiring with the course of the sun. Once the monkeys started breaking in at night and I lay, frozen still in my bed, listening to them scrabble around in my room and pilfer medicine, the sleep waned some.

There were a handful of other people around the lodge, in those in-between days that spanned Christmas to the new year. A girl, a little younger than me, who seemed to spend her days babysitting a local child, whether intentionally or not, it wasn’t clear. An older couple who kept to themselves when they weren’t dragging dead fish out of the water and trying to convince the chef to cook them up. A bearded man who disappeared out snorkelling for hours at a time only to come back progressively more sunburnt with each day that passed. A group of French women who told me they’d been coming here for a decade. Heavy sleepers, I guess.

These were my few days of grace, in which I could still live in the shadow of the mountain. For months, I had set my other stressors aside, to focus only on the task of getting up (and down) safely. Between all the physical training, and gathering of gear together, I’d had little time for anything else in the period that led up to my departure.

Certainly not time to start thinking too long or hard on the looming elephant of, right, I’m moving again next year. That I knew I was doing it was enough, and everything else had to wait.

Because I had time. I had time to figure that out when I returned to Canada, I had a month or two, even, to catch my breath before I started sorting that all out. Except that I returned to Canada, with my left foot still out of sorts and my lung capacity maintaining at a stubborn 75% of normal, and suddenly became aware that everything had to change right now, and fast.

I got through a month, a hectic month of organising and planning and seeing friends and recounting my climb over and over and a brief trip to New York, before I fell apart. Before I woke up on a Friday morning feeling like everything had been taken from me, that there was no air left to even breathe. A morning where the world felt too much.

It was a bad day, in hindsight, to call my mother and have her yell at me for 20 minutes. She only worries, and I know that. My life now, at nearly 30 years old, was not what she had envisioned it would be.

It seems no consolation to her that it’s not what I had envisioned, either.

Somewhere between where I am and where I thought I’d be by now is where I’d actually like to be. Where I’d like to be is just a little less full of existential dread, less like my life is held together by pieces of sellotape that routinely peel and fall off, only for me to have to try and stick it back together again.

I’ve cycled through various ideas of, what’s next. There was that fleeting period of time in which I was determined to apply for a Masters in New York, primarily so I could have a sense of purpose for a couple of years in which I wasn’t responsible for any major life decisions, until the dread of the amount of debt that would put me in was worse than the dread of having to make more decisions.

More nights spent eating warm cookies in Manhattan is *almost* worth the debt, but not quite.

I think, all in all, this is what you call a quarter-life crisis. I thought I’d already had that but, apparently not. Or it’s still ongoing. Or it’s a third-life crisis?

There’s a lot of change coming this year. There’s a lot of change that has already begun, changes that feel exhausting and weighty and like three steps back each time. They’re the right changes for me, but that doesn’t make them easy.

For a brief, blissful moment, I was allowed to think about climbing a mountain (in the most literal sense), and only climbing a mountain. Especially for those eight days themselves of the climb, it was something I had spoken to looking forward to.

For that time, I didn’t have to think about anything else, because I couldn’t do anything else. All that would be asked of me for eight days was to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.

But life down on the ground just isn’t so simple.