On Being Someone Else
Some Notes on Walking and Not Drinking
“I could not run without having to run forever” - Sylvia Plath
It is a great irony in my life, I think, that I am not a runner. In my youth, I liked to run away, climb out the first-story bedroom window, skin my knees down the brick as I shimmied my way out and took off for the hills. Walked not ran. My sister would sometimes try to stop me, chase me down the hill—running—with the Chesapeake to bring me back home. I don’t know what I was running away from. I was seven-, eight- years old. I had a very happy childhood spent mostly outdoors, which is why I often grew frustrated trying to explain to my mother that I had actually run away and was not out playing in the hills per usual.
“Stop,” my sister would plead.
But I would not stop, and I would continue on down the street until it turned to sand, carrying a bandana tied to a stick, harboring Goldfish and a fruit roll-up. I’d always wiggle free from her grasp.
And then one time, I turned around and hit her. She did not stop me after that. Many years later, she drove me to the airport and did not get out of the car when I said goodbye. I had intended it to be forever. It was not.
I am not a runner. I walk. I am a walker. Sometimes 5, 10, 15 miles a day. On the outskirts of Boston, I made loops around Medford, making excuses to go for a walk by sometimes just going to the grocery store to pick up a single zucchini. In LA, I walked the park near my apartment in Chinatown, around and around the track like one of those Christmas Village figurines pulled along on a magnetic loop. I walk with purpose. I walk most when I am anxious or upset or when something is not going my way. These are also the times I walk quickly, or perhaps it is more of a strut. This is also how I walk when I am forced to go shopping for clothes, an activity that might outstrip my distain for running.
A few days ago, I begrudgingly switched back to my iPhone because I am about to go on a Very Long Walk across Spain and I need it for work. So, I am training for the Camino de Santiago. Make sure you train, I was told, but what I thought: All I need is a little heartbreak, a soft rejection, some hope. Then you’ll see me walk. I can walk to the end of the world without stopping. Tell me no.
“This is lesbian culture,” my best friend tells me, “gay culture is camp; we have longing.”
Indeed.
I can’t remember where I first heard about the Camino but I do know that I first intended to walk it back in 2014. I had just quit my dream internship citing poor mental health, which was true but I also couldn’t stop drinking a bottle or two of wine every night and my grandma, a woman who lived half the year with us for as long as I could remember, was dying and everything was rapidly falling apart. So much, in fact, that I did not walk that year. It took me six more years before I finally quit drinking, and at that point everything was falling apart in a different way. There was the pandemic, my dog died, and I’d broken up with someone I was at one point certain I’d marry, and these were all things that my friends knew how to ask about. Not many people, however, knew how to talk about the drinking, a loss which eclipsed everything else. Quitting was the hardest thing I have ever done. Nothing else even comes close.
At some point last year, I went to an AA meeting because I wanted to make some friends not because I thought I was in danger of drinking again. I’d been to one meeting once before, which is a story for another time, but AA has not been part of my recovery. At that one meeting a year ago, however, someone asked how I’d done it, and I laughed and said I spent a month crying in a bathtub. But really, the answer is that I read. I joined an online community. And I ran.
Sometime in the summer of 2020, I steeled myself away in my uncle’s cabin and waited for the electric hum of mild withdrawal to run its course. Everything was bright and my brain felt twitchy. Grey static on an old television. I played Stevie Nicks and TV on the Radio on repeat, and I’d reach out to touch the silver-tongued thistles and marvel at the blood where they bit me. Sometimes, I ask people who they were in high school, not because I think it says much about them—or perhaps it does—but because I want to know how people change. It’s very much a first date question. When I first got sober, I knew I needed to be someone I was not, and I became obsessed with the idea of going back in time. They say addicts are perpetually the age they are when they first start using heavily, and by this metric I was a 24-year old stuck in a 30-year old body. It was a time of a certain magical thinking. I did what old-Katrin would do: I listened to Grizzly Bear, cut my hair with kitchen scissors, went backpacking in the Sawtooths, moved to Boston, wore black heels and red lipstick. I did whatever not-Katrin would do: read self-help, meditate, eat kale, drink Diet Coke.
Because I needed to do something with my body and because running seemed antithetical to my core, I downloaded the Couch-to-5k app and ran alongside the river. I know some people use running as a time to think or work out a certain problem, like a plot point in their novel-in-progress, but this does not make much sense to me because the only thing I can think of while jogging a 12-min mile is how much I’d rather be eaten by a bear. Walking is for thinking. Running is for hating yourself.
But I ran anyway because I needed to be someone else, and I could not fathom a life that did not include alcohol. Believe me when I say that I have a wild imagination but I absolutely could not imagine a life for myself that didn’t include a drink. What would I drink on my wedding day? Sparkling cider? What was even the point. Not that it mattered because now dating was out the window because who was ever going to love me? I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to write the same way. Ridiculous, isn’t it? It was not ridiculous at the time. I obsessively read blogs and addiction memoirs and if anyone had looked at my Goodreads during this time they would have known I was really going through it. I read Holly Whitaker’s old Hip Sobriety blog so many times I could practically recite certain posts. I was looking for some sort of roadmap for how my life was going to change and when. I spent that winter baking an insane number of cookies because it turns out that alcohol has a lot of sugar.1 At a certain point, change cannot be willed, and the best you can do is distract yourself until the pieces fall into place. I go for a walk for no other reason that I like it. I go kicking and screaming. I walk the same trail I’ve walked for more than twenty years, pass the tree with nails in its head and wait for the creek to fill back up. I try to tell the truth even if it says the worst things about me. When I say we are running away, I mean we are going nowhere but back home.
You can read Holly’s Substack here:
And let me tell you: if you come across someone who knows how to work with sugar, they either grew up in the church or they’re in recovery. Always go for their cookies.
I love your writing. I quit drinking last year and also walked the Camino (Frances). I hope you enjoy the experience. And that you write about it! ❤