from wet sticks to warm fire

on writing a book (and being the world's smartest person)

The wet dirt is beginning to soak through the knees of my rain pants while I crane my neck over a tiny pile of wet twigs, blowing so hard I might pass out. 

Fat drops of rain are starting to accumulate on my forehead, and there are only a few precious rays of daylight filtering their way through the tall pine trees to reach my campsite. It’s nearly nightfall and I can’t get the fire started. The temperature is dropping rapidly.

Everything is wet. My clothes, my backpack, even the cooking things I’ve spread under a poorly hung tarp to make my dinner. Some of the rain pools on the tarp but most of it billows in sideways, skittering underneath and straight onto my lap. I have to get this fire started. The last of the embers are dying and the kindling I split this afternoon isn’t catching yet. 

That’s when I remember—birch bark! I saw it in Camper Christina’s backcountry camping class. It’s supposed to be super flammable. Not bothering to grab my headlamp, I run at full speed into the woods toward a dead birch tree I saw earlier, stripping off bits of bark and hauling ass back to the firepit where, miracle of miracles, it explodes into a miniature fireworks display and the kindling finally catches. 

I am the world’s smartest! The boss of camping! Not even a horizontal downpour of torrential rain can stop me!

Except for the rest of the evening I watch the crackling fire from twelve feet away, underneath my tarp in the pouring rain. World’s smartest not so much.

I can’t even believe how much I love camping. I spent three days at Algonquin Park in non-stop rain, the weather hovering just above freezing temperature. Nothing went according to plan. I started getting sick not five minutes after parking my car at the access point, and didn’t sleep a wink because I was up blowing my nose and tossing and turning the whole night long. My sleeping pad malfunctioned and wouldn’t inflate. It wasn’t much more than a thin strip of fabric separating me from the earth. 

There was too much wind to do anything close to the three lakes and four portages I had planned. I could take my canoe out for no more than an hour or two at a time. The winds were monstrous. I worried my boat would blow away at night and I would be stranded on some backcountry island with no name and only bears for company. My fingers got so cold I had to blow on them before I could tie or untie any knots, which, in case you don't camp, is an all-day activity when camping. 

And yet.

Every twenty-five minutes or so I would look up from whatever I was doing and think to myself, “I fckn love camping so much.”

I headed back toward the access point a day early, sick and menstruating and going on 72 straight hours without sleep. I almost turned around about six times as I paddled back to my car. It was Friday afternoon. Groups of men both young and old were paddling out to the backcountry, their boats laden with dogs, guitars and bright blue bear-proof bins. Every fibre in my body shouted, “Turn the boat around! Paddle back! Look, the sun is getting ready to peek out! You could stay just one more night.” 

My limbs were near collapse the last time I clumsily threw my canoe over my head and hoisted it onto my car. I hadn’t even taken off my wool baselayers, hadn’t even reached the perimeter of Algonquin Park before the camping FOMO set in. The sun made a brief appearance for the first hour of my drive home, and I wondered if I’d made the wrong choice. I hadn’t even left yet and already I wanted to go back. 

The next day I went to Outdoors Oriented and spent $979 on camping supplies. “I can tell you’ve got the bug,” the sales guy said, watching me ogle the camp coffee makers and water filtration kits. 

He was right. I drove straight to my bestie’s house and gave her a live demo of my new side-sleeper goose down sleeping bag with matching sleeping quilt, sprawled out on her kitchen floor writhing with ecstasy. 

A few weeks later I bought a canoe.

There are hundreds of future stories that I am going to tell about this canoe. I’m crazy in love with camping and it is one of very few things in my life that are simple and uncomplicated, over which I can obsess in a healthy way. 

This week I chose a story about camping because I needed to give my nervous system some relief. I’ve been struggling with the backlash of telling these stories, whether it's hearing criticism or accepting other people’s silence. Even gentle feedback can feel like an attack when my nervous system is so activated. And my sympathetic nervous system is already on high alert. It lights up like a 5-alarm fire every time my phone dings with a new message or there’s a knock at my door. I’ve been scrambling for comfort and safety and finding very little to grab on to. A lemon meringue pie here. An audio book there. My weighted blanket. The warm little bodies of my sweet children as we snuggle each other sleep. 

There is nothing I was so badly as peace right now. The safety of anonymity and quiet.

I also want to make room in my life to tell some really hard stories—stories about religious trauma, spiritual abuse and healing from coercive control. Those stories will not land lightly in the lives of the characters in them. I need to make sure that they are told with care and context because something I worked out with my writing coach is that context can create a level of safety for both me and the characters in my story. Sharing without context, on the other hand, is bad for everyone. Those stories need more than punchy hooks and tidy endings; They belong in a book.

But between weekly Substack stories and my emails about business, I’m already on a rigorous publishing schedule. I’m publishing the email equivalent of two books a year, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for an actual book.

…and I really want to write an actual book.

I want to share what is hard and beautiful and terrifying and magnificent about recovery from cults, and give my story a forever home. With that in mind, I’m scaling back my Substack publishing schedule to once per month, in service to the book that is asking to be written. I hope you’ll stick around and not forget me between these missives, and I’m choosing to trust that when the words are ready the readers will be there.

Thanks for being here. I’m so glad to have you as a reader.

See you in December 👋🏼

XOT