My Sister Shrunk My Cape
It’s adventure time! Donned in my Icelandic wool cloak and mushroom hat. (January 2025)
My sister shrunk my cape.
More specifically, she shrunk my hand crocheted, Icelandic wool cloak.
To be even more specific, she shrunk a hand-crochet cloak—seven pounds of yarn I carried across Iceland and the Appalachian trail. A tapestry of mountains, woods, a river, and stars.
The devastation didn’t fully hit me until a week after she told me. (I infuriatingly have significant delayed emotional processing.)
I woke from a fever dream at 5am thinking of all the ways I could have prevented the shrinkage and what it meant. It would have been so impracticable for me to have brought it with me to Spain… but I kept telling myself, if it was that important, wouldn’t I have brought it? It just feels like such a heavy loss. Not just since I got the wool in Iceland but because I carried all that additional weight on the trail. I had dreams around it.
I thought I’d be able to hug and smell it and remember the woods a decade later.
So I never thought about washing it and it never occurred to me she’d try.
To be fair, her closet was under siege—
San Francisco’s infamous mold was at it again.
When I sent it back home, while on the trail (without instructions—que facepalm), my sister immediately positioned it on the couch and let my 4-year-old nephew, Onyx, run around in it. And, while I’m happy he’s got to enjoy it—he’s 4. He doesn’t understand what it means to carry seven pounds of yarn in a 60 pound backpack. He doesn’t understand what it feels like to make something like that and to discover seemingly magic pendants along the way. What’s more, I never got to be there to give it to him. Or to even give it to my own child, at an age they’d start to understand how special it is to dream of adventure and now, maybe, I don’t get to.
Things have been really hard and lonely. Really, really lonely. Backpacking Europe and getting sick in Berlin on New Years is lonely. The trail was lonely. The amount of times I thought I was ok and then called a friend or my sister only to immediately start sobbing—countless. Living in Spain, trying to learn a new language, trying to build a new life—lonely. I have not dated in about 3 years.
When you read adventure novels, the steadfast adventurer always brings something back. It’s this magical moment of awe and triumph when you share your spoils and you imagine looking at it in the future, remembering your grand adventures. Like when Bilbo shares his tales and gives Frodo, his nephew and adopted child, his sword and chainmail… but so much of my stuff is scattered with friends or sold or given away in order to make Spain a reality. I’ve been feeling like I don’t get to have that dream either. I don’t even have my backpacking gear and I’ve been feeling so naked and unprotected without it. It’s amazing how much living in the woods, even for four months, changes you.
With this, I feel like it’s one more dream, desire, expectation, I’ve had to throw out the window. Another lesson of letting go of everything and I’m not even sure if that is even the lesson or if we—me—feels the need of turning everything into a lesson so the whole thing—of feeling the pain—will somehow be worth it.
After all, Onyx has enjoyed it. That’s something present. Something real.
But I wasn’t there when he saw it, when my sister and him cuddled up in it’s woodsy scent, and I likely won’t be there when he’s imagining running around pretending to be an adventurous, mischievous hobbit stepping into a world too big for him.
I can’t be there.
I’m grieving because I couldn’t be there to see it happen. Choosing adventure means missing bedtime stories. I’m not there to see him grow another half-inch. I won’t be there to watch the unfolding of all the hopes I had for the wonderful, whimsical adventures shared by the cloak.
I have to make this—being away—work.
I’ve always longed for adventure. I never had a solid thing I wanted to be growing up. I just imagined myself in a study amassed with books, maps, and curious curiosities while I stroked my beard, smoked a cigar, and enjoyed a whiskey while debating philosophy with friends. It was a confusing dream being born with the incapacity to chemically grow a beard—now it seems, genetically too.
Suddenly, I was forced into it and I see the brutality of it too. Because that’s what happens when your country targets you. Travel and adventure no longer becomes a whimsical choice. Travel becomes survival. A heavy imperative. And your heart gets left behind as your feet take one more heavy step—one after the other. Your head screams you’ve forgotten something and you try to ignore it, drown it out, push on but you know— it’s your heart.
The Appalachian Trail was always a massive dream but I imagined myself finishing, returning, or even continuing. Continuing to the Pacific Coast Trail and then maybe even the Continental Divide Trail—a triple crown. A tattoo for each accomplishment. Maybe even carry on and get a masters in forestry to become a ranger. And the truth? Chasing those dreams would mean even more time away from Onyx and my sister. Every path leads away from somewhere else.
But plans change. The ever so iconic fist pump, an election winning worthy photo. An abismal campaign. A decision to get off trail, regroup, sell everything and move. Day 1, an executive order to remove your demographic’s work protections and your decision finalizes. A different story unfolds.
So you have to grieve it and feel it—so your heart doesn’t get left behind.
So you can fall in love and be present with what you have in front of you.
So you don’t get left behind.
I think it can be easy to say this is exactly why we must try to remove expectations—to detach ourselves from physical things and to not hold tightly to an expected future. Because when we hold these things so tight, we have a tendency to try to shove whatever comes along into that shape and it’s almost impossible to not feel wrecked when it shatters. I was wrecked. I am still wrecked for not completing the trail. I wish I still had dirt under my fingernails.
Loneliness for me, tends to suddenly hit like a brick wall—knocking me back all at once. I’m finally meeting people and making friends and a part of me, wants to squeeze a someone into something more than a friend. It’s been so long since I’ve had a good hug or cuddled up on the couch with someone. It’s tempting to try to make anyone fit, even though I know they don’t— and I really need friends right now.
When living alone for extended periods,
you have to make conscious efforts—
Change your energy.
Change the narrative.
Surviving isn’t just about fulfilling needs.
Surviving is more about order of operations.
To build something that will last long enough,
Be study enough, to breathe again.
To give enough relief to have the clarity to move forward.
Sometimes, not every need is met and that’s ok.
But which ones in which order—
Matters.
Which is why you follow your tools,
Just as much as you follow your dreams.
It’s why we have to follow our hearts,
As much as our tools—
To take a leap of faith.
Else,
When we abandon our hearts,
We become stagnant,
Melt into a puddle of fear and doubt.
We must remember—
We know how to make tools.
Many times, we must leave the tools we’ve built to help us move towards our dreams. It’s why I’m nostalgic for researching in libraries and stupid phones instead of the immediacy corporations create carving a narrative of the feeling of need—to carve our dreams, our life, around a tool (e.g. AI).
I’m tired of this feeling of desperation to center life around a tool. I know I can not just survive, but save, using the tools I’ve acquired in a life that feels a million miles away. But, I think it would mean leaving my heart behind or, at the very least, sacrificing a part of it. Everything is a trade off.
Everything is balancing an equation.
So, order of operations. Everything has a time and a place. Last Friday, I rushed it. I committed to too many opportunities to hang out and meet people. I did way too much. I ended up coming home at 2am and managed a 16-mile day on top of yoga.
Whenever your head says “this would be a great end to this day”
—Take it.
Or the equivalent, “man, I should really stop here and rest or even camp here.”
—Don’t ignore that.
Instead, I fell into the trap, again. I’ve gone and hiked 8 more miles, slipped the next day in the mud and injured myself from exhaustion. Backpacking really does give you life lessons and, once again, I find myself needing a repeated lecture.
The thing is, when we don’t find the time
To slow down, breathe, and recognize there is a time and a place—
An order of operations,
Anxiety has a perplexing way of taking the wheel,
Accelerating into a hard left turn.
Festering questions. What will my career look like now? How can I keep living abroad? Visas, paperwork, etc? Will I ever become fluent in Spanish? Am I in the right country? Will I find my people? Will I ever find a partner who challenges me, shares adventures with me, and let’s me be me—where it counts? Will I pass along dreams and tales to a child and watch them run around, cloaked, wooden sword in hand, ready to slay their dragons? Too many possibilities. Too many unknowns. Instead of taking one problem at a time and solving for X, now I’m on 4D infinite planes and man, Calc 3 and differential equations were a nightmare for me.
At the end of the day, it’s not the cloak that matters.
It’s the people and the dreams created in the moment.
And right now, I only have my imagination to warm me.
It reminds me of how cold I am.
I could drown it out. Binge watch shows and reels or move onto yet another project… maybe a pair of cozy socks. Maybe, I tell myself to let go of the expectation of a partner, a family, things we are told we’re supposed to do.
Or today, right now, my imagination is enough and tomorrow, slowly, deliberately, I will move towards warmth.
I am blessed I have my imagination to warm me.
But I remember how to build a fire…
P.S. I know you can soak wool and then pin it and hopefully the fibers stretch out. But I’ve never tried… finger’s crossed it can be saved.
Want to help me or someone like me?
Below is a link to helpful donation websites: