SOFIA HUSTON

A few weeks ago, I moved to Peru to learn Spanish. I have several hours of lessons each weekday with my professor, Marta. Seeing as we’d be seeing a lot of each other in the following months, she and I spent the first day just getting to know each other. She asked why I came here, why for so long, why Spanish. 

Marta doesn’t speak English, so I explained to her – in the roundabout way you explain things when your vocabulary in a language is extremely limited – that I had spent my entire adulthood doing what I thought was all I ever wanted, until it wasn’t. I told her how burnt out I’d become, yet how hard it was to walk away. I told her how I was terrified that at 24 y/o the most exciting thing I’d ever do was behind me and that I had no clue what to do next… Sooooo in the meantime, might as well learn another language.  

I finished my choppy explanation, feeling like I was all over the place, just like I am in English. She just stared at me. Great, she didn’t understand any of that, I thought.  

“Te voy a contar una historia”, she said. I’m going to tell you a story.  

The story, from what I understood, went like this:

One day, a teacher and his disciple were walking through the countryside. They came across a small shack, in which lived a large family. The teacher asked the father of the family what they did to make a living, as there were seemingly no industries in the area. The father showed them to the yard, where a skinny cow was tied up. “This cow gives us a few liters of milk each day”, he said. “Some of it we drink, and the rest we exchange for flour and eggs to make bread”. The disciple was dumbfounded as to how they managed to survive this way.  

They visited for a while and slept on the floor of the family’s home. Before dawn, as the family was still sleeping, the teacher and his disciple woke up and went to the yard where the cow was tied up. To the disciple’s horror, his teacher pulled out a knife and slit the cow’s throat. They continued home.

A few years later, the disciple returned to the countryside in search of the family. The shack was no longer there, but in its place stood a beautiful home with a garden and a car parked out front. He knocked, and to his surprise, the same man he’d met years ago opened the door. He and his family wore clean clothes and appeared very happy. He told the disciple that (coincidentally) the day after they’d visited years ago, he woke to find his cow dead in the yard.  

The man went on to explain that the death of this skinny cow forced them to think of other possibilities. With no money to purchase a new one, they began planting seeds in their yard. At first, they barely grew enough crops to feed themselves. However, with practice and patience they began to harvest more than enough. They sold the excess crops and bought more seeds, expanding their business and building a life for themselves that they had only dreamed of.  

The disciple listened in amazement as he finally realized the lesson his teacher had set out to teach (why he slit its throat). That cow, in addition to being their only possession, was the ball and chain that kept them stuck in the same mode of existence year after year.

Martha finished the story, looked at me and said, “Chica, tienes que matar a la vaca” (you have to kill the cow). My throat got real tight.

******

Around the same time that fire season in the U.S. kicked off this year, I moved to South America. My friends are being dispatched to incidents around the country, cutting line in the sweltering heat, hiking ‘til their legs shake, eating MREs, sleeping in the dirt… and I’m not. I’m in South America – unemployed, uncertain, learning a new language, trying to plant some sort of seed. 

The end of the 2021 fire season – which I’d decided would be my last – came to a screeching halt. Suddenly the cow that had sustained me for 6 years lay dead at my feet, and I had no idea what I’d do next. All I knew was that staying where I was had stopped being a viable option long ago. The intense friction I felt against my career in fire was trying to tell me something, and I ignored the signals until they screamed.

I knew I no longer wanted my life to comprise of sucking smoke, grinding my body into dust, being away from the people I love for weeks at a time, or regularly wondering whether I had it in me to get up and work another shift like the one we’d just finished.

It wasn’t always like this. My first few fire seasons, I genuinely believed I’d found my thing. I was one of the lucky few –18 years old and would have to look no further. I loved sucking smoke and grinding my body into dust. I loved being away from home for weeks at a time. I loved the way my Nomex would stiffen with salt after days of profuse sweating. I loved cracking jokes with the crew, coping with the way our bodies felt. I loved working deep into the night to tie in a burn. I loved the rush of putting in hot line while fire licked at my skin and singed my eyelashes. I loved the way my bones throbbed in my sleeping bag at night because even laying horizontal was not an adequate form of resting – I needed to melt.

None of that changed overnight. There was no earth-shattering light switch moment. Little by little, pivot by pivot, brief moments where something felt off, accumulating like snow. My body rebelling, my enthusiasm diminishing, panic attacks in my sleeping bag at night that I muffled as best I could so the crew wouldn’t hear. It took days, months, years for the message to grow loud enough.

I spent a long time constructing various narratives to convince myself to stay. I’d come this far. It was plastered all over my resume. I was totally interrupting my character arc. The plot no longer made sense. Who would I be instead? What if the only alternative was sitting at a desk sending too-polite emails about shit I couldn’t even pretend to care about?

It’s tough to walk away from the thing that has dictated every aspect of your life for so long. It’s tough to feel as though you are betraying your younger self – to have everything they’d dreamed of and abandon it. You are witnessing the collapse of so many plans. The slow passing of time between the death of your cow and the first sight of something growing where it once stood. And yet, you owe your past self nothing. You are who you are in this moment only. You cannot live out your days as the handmaiden of your old desires.

I’m still grieving that chapter of my life. I feel like I’m walking in circles through its ruins. “Bittersweet” isn’t the right word. “Bitter” nor “sweet” do the opposing feelings justice. I will think about each of those fire seasons for the rest of my life. They were glorious and excruciating and magical and miserable. I miss it. I think some part of me will always will, despite everything.

“Todos tenemos una vaca”, another thing Martha said. We all have a cow. You hear a fable about a maestro and a vaca and your chest gets tight because of something. Something you’ve continued to feed because although it does not give you much, maybe at one point it did, and old time’s sake is keeping you alive. Something — A false assurance, a relationship, an image, a vague sense of self-worth or control, a story you think other people might want to read…

I believe there is a long enough runway within the bounds of uncertainty to take off. We scrap, adapt, revise… plant and plant and plant, praying to one day walk outside and see some small green thing in the dirt. That’s what I tell myself I’m doing down here. Eventually we harvest every seed. Eventualllllllllly.

Whatever your cow, no one is coming to kill it for you in your sleep. How does it feel to consider doing it yourself? You don’t need more motivation. You know what you want (or at least what you don’t) and probably know what needs to change. It’s scary and hard and it might not immediately make sense, but tienes que matar a la vaca… and if you haven’t been told yet, you have permission.

Since I learned how to write, I have found enormous comfort in quick access to a blank page. As a kid, I would jot down my story of an event over and over until I felt better about it. I was coping – just didn’t have a word for it at the time. Some things never change; I was/am an obsessive list-maker and diarist. In the morning, at night, during any downtime, it is necessary that I hang my interpretation of experience out to dry.

During fire season, if I didn’t have a notepad, I’d write in my IRPG (incident response pocket guide), where the “notes” pages are intended for jotting down the call-signs of engines or tail-numbers of helicopters or relevant weather readings. If someone were to open my IRPG, they would not find that sort of useful intel (I wrote that stuff on my sleeve like a true salty dog). Rather, they’d find an unspooling of my own entangled thoughts. They’d find extensive lists and line after line of chicken scratch handwriting in which I attempt some sort of reconciliation with self.

To watch the unstated become letters, then words, then sentences instantly blunts its ability to isolate me; and I’ve always revered the person I show up as on paper far more than the vessel of free-floating irrationalities that I usually walk around as. Those free floaters always yielded to my lined pages, where they would be rendered impotent.

Upon entering the realm of written word, I am wiser, calmer, smarter. I am my own mother, mentor, Wizard of Oz, capable of making things mean whatever I want them to. I start a paragraph in first person, and without my even realizing, usually slip into second person; no longer speaking from myself, but to myself. I am now an abstract being with the distance (dissonance?) and authority to tell my present self exactly what she is longing to hear, which usually boils down to some iteration of “you’re going to be okay”.  

1. Suffering together is the quickest route to bonding between humans that I have come across in my short life. How a group of 20 people can go from complete strangers to feeling closer than family in the first 30 days of fire season is some kind of magic.
2. There is a psychological toll and subtle eviction of self when women spend significantly more time with men than with other women. Being “one of the guys” grants you access to a lot, but it robs you as well.
3. We absolutely must take care of ourselves with whatever means available. Sometimes self-care is flossing your teeth or changing your socks or writing affirmations on your hand.
4. Doing hard things just for hard’s sake is overrated. 6 years of gutting out miserable work and pushing my limits has made me more discerning about what is truly worth it.
5. Hotshot crews source a lot of pride from the fact that they are just a little more miserable than everyone else. We work longer shifts, in steeper terrain, on hotter, more dangerous pieces of line, in thicker brush, with hikes in and out that others won’t even attempt. We eat more MREs, oftentimes cold, we rarely get to shower, rarely see a bed, rarely see a day off. Low grade misery pervades everything, but it’s seasoned with plenty of dark humor, camaraderie, and endorphins to foster a good time.  
6. Most people have never experienced true sleep deprivation and it is downright painful once you reach a certain point.
7. On that note, I can do anything on a good night of sleep. Anything.
8. The last 6 years have taught me how to be miserable. I do it quite well. So well, in fact, I can make myself even more miserable than is reasonable or warranted. Lol.
9. Self-pity is self-harm. The ability to reframe a situation is one of the most valuable skills a person can have.
10. It’s quite hard to stay in love when you rarely see your partner and are very much otherwise engaged/distracted. Love is a choice and it is work and it requires a certain level of presence. 
11. A journal entry from this season: “It’s a new day, and every time it’s the end of the day and I think I can’t keep doing it, I have to know that I’ll feel different in the morning. I have to know that.”
12. The key is trusting yourself to handle whatever it is you’re anxious about in the moment it presents itself, rather than letting it occupy mental real estate when it’s still pure abstraction.
13. People attach themselves to structures, to titles, to neatly wrapped pre-packaged/ribboned personas with all associated components built in. We care about how it looks, how it sounds, what the title will summon up in peoples’ imaginations more than the nitty gritty, day-to-day of what it is we actually do. Most of what we do is just a means to an end – and that end? It’s acceptance. It’s respect. It’s fundamental, it’s primal, it’s innate. But what we fail to metabolize is the truth that the kind of acceptance that really heals us does not give a shit about what you do for work or what your title is or how fit or tough or rich or beautiful you are.
14. You will create a lot of internal friction by curating a life that you no longer even want.  
15. At the end of the day, it has always been and always will be about the people.

There is a love story between me and myself,

between my mother and I,

between my (possible) daughter and I

The story is a work in progress

Yesterday my mom sent a photo of me when I was less than a year old, lying on my baby blanket, face bunched up and grinning with that infectious, side-splitting laughter singular to infants who have just discovered humor. She wrote, “the very first time you started to crack up laughing as a baby! You were just busting up and thought whatever it was, was soooo funny!”. I took another look at the photo. Hot tears welled up, my throat tightened, catching me off guard.

It’s not the first time seeing my own baby pictures has made me emotional. I can’t pinpoint why the simple evidence of my younger self brings up this acidic cocktail of love, pity, heartbreak, regret, shame, and guilt.

Guilt, mostly.

Guilt, because that baby had no idea what was coming (as none do). Sure, there are the things she’d see and ways she’d have to grow up before she was ready; but most painful are the things she would put herself through – the abuse she would inflict on herself. I think about that little baby, safe and loved and happy as a clam, and I picture her enduring the ludicrous rigors that I have volunteered for in an effort to feel good enough. It kills me to envision treating that baby the way I treat myself. My mother would kill me if she knew I treated her daughter that way.

Despite the compassion I have for the baby in that photo, I’ve been a merciless tyrant to that same body and mind as an adult. When she defies me with emotion, forgetfulness, appetite, imperfection, I punish liberally. I’ve deprecated her into a fine dust, and that dust is still too grainy for my liking.

There are, however, elusive instances when the curtains are drawn and I’m alone in bed or sat in my car and waves of remorse pulse through me. She who has been there with me from the very beginning — who has cried with me and sang with me and sweat and bled and laughed and loved with me — who has continued to work for me tirelessly despite the absurd demands I’ve placed on her.

I’ll undress and observe my sturdy legs, thick with muscle and covered in scars, scrapes, bruises. We’ve climbed countless hills together. I’ll feel my abdomen and apologize for the countless nights I’ve made her fall asleep on empty. I’ll run my hands up and down my scarred arms and tell them I’m so sorry. I’m sorry to every inch of me that has sopped up my murky hatred like a sponge on filthy floors.

The one thing I will have so long as I live. The vessel that carries me through and allows me to access any little bit of human joy and will someday be lowered into the ground to be absorbed by the earth. I’m so fucking sorry. How could I allow this? I’m sorry that care and compassion has not been my default.

It’s just been us the last 23 years. 23 years is not very long, according to everyone else. If we’re lucky, the best and worst is yet to come. Let’s you and I be on the same team. I am your only caretaker, as long as your heart beats. You are mine. A caretaker that does not at least like you is no caretaker at all.

“Tony, is that your civic out front?”

One of the shelter’s maintenance workers had noticed all 4 of my supervisor’s tires had been slashed. We went outside to observe the damage. Confirmed: Tony clearly pissed somebody off. I watched his face, waiting for a tantrum that never came. With a shrug, he only noted that the tires’ tread had seen better days: “If this hadn’t happened, I might never have noticed how bald my tires were. I could have blown one on the freeway”. And he laughed.

I was staggered at the ease with which he concluded that this was not only no big deal, but genuinely a blessing in disguise. Most people, to varying degrees, would have freaked. Personally, I would have taken the cynical stairway all the way down, chewing on the misfortune, until realizing that stairway didn’t go anywhere cool. Only then would I conjure up a new narrative, convince myself of the bright side, and climb back up, fully exhausted from the ascent back to a place I never needed to descend from in the first place. In this case, Tony successfully saved himself the trip. There was no convincing needed. It was automatic, like he had a metal detector for silver linings.  

Tony has worked at the homeless shelter for 7 years. He’s run into much worse and frankly can’t afford to lose his shit every time something goes awry. Something goes awry every half hour (on a slow day). I’m sharing this anecdote because it happened at a time when I was already thinking a lot about the concept of positive thinking and my own skewed notions about it (height of pandemic). I reached the basic conclusion that hope is an adaptation. One that, given the circumstances, evolves to preserve us; Just like a fight-or flight response to threat or hunger/thirst cues. That “silver lining detector” is integral to our continuation as a species. Day in and day out, we must evade a threat more convoluted and pervasive than starvation or death: the uniquely human threat of losing your mind.

Another key part of that human narrative is the desire to overcome, to solve, and to triumph. I want to reclaim bliss from the ignorant, because really it belongs to those well-versed in tribulation; well-versed in staying tethered despite it all. Bliss belongs to those who choose not to exacerbate hardship and instead respond to it.  

So, about those skewed notions of positive thinking I mentioned… The sentiment “good vibes only” has always slightly made my skin crawl. I love me some bad vibes. I’ve always been drawn to things that are admittedly a little disturbing and/or depressing. It could be that I’ve conflated darkness with the raw and the real of the world, and conflated optimism with disingenuity, passivity, and naivete. I’m sure you’ve wondered at some point why so many great artists and thinkers have committed suicide. These people who seem to be standing two steps back from the rest of us, who seem to really see the essence of it all, simultaneously dragging around some inner ball and chain. As if someone took the lid off life, let them have a look inside, and what they saw made them want out.

So, is there something we’ve romanticized about hopelessness? Idolized? Have we falsely associated it with heightened awareness? You can exalt desperation as much as you’d like. But the way I see it, wading around in the murkiest waters of the world doesn’t serve a purpose unless it disturbs us enough to change. Darkness is just that if we can’t transmute it. We’ve been mass producing sorrow. There’s enough. We need momentum — impetus to get back on our feet when it’s time. You can’t change the situation outside, so there’s nothing selfish or naïve about focusing on whatever helps you manage your headspace. Find the middle ground without sticking your head in the sand nor spiraling. You can still acknowledge that it sucks, do what you can, and try not to waste mental bandwidth on what you can’t. Cut your losses or go mad.

Your life is a product of your thoughts and your thoughts are your facts. Objectivity is an illusion. Your entire experience is just an embedded network of perceptions that ultimately you control, and that’s an invigorating concept. The marvel of consciousness pretty much necessitates that we have a frame of reference allowing us to bear the weight of life’s volatility (an awareness that’s been magnified by globalization and high-speed internet); A lens to ease the bewilderment of navigating the world. We all possess the miraculous faculty to find gems in the ashes that, when strengthened, will be what saves you. We all have the volition to re-write the narrative. We all have a metal detector –and silver is a precious metal.

I started a blog. Yep. And I’ll just cut to the chase and say that, given the current circumstances (see date), the primary subject of this post is an easy guess. There’s a long list of things I plan to write about here (I’m incentivized to write more since paying for a domain). But right now, a lot of my “passions”, “interests”, “hobbies”, “experiences”, etc (and really anything not directly concerning the COVID-19 pandemic) feels kind of… banal? Maybe I’ve been watching too much news, but lately can’t seem to give a shit if it doesn’t involve c*ronavirus and how we’re going to get a grip on it. In other words, there’s one big fish being fried and not much room left on the grill.

In just a few surreal, whirlwind months, this virus has spread globally, infected and killed loads of people, stunted economies, broken healthcare systems, taken people off the streets and into hospitals or their homes. And for those sheltered in place, all you can do is hope that “home” is a safe place. People are out of work, away from loved ones, deprived of tactile human connection. Those of us still working are terrified to be there. It has disrupted society on a larger scale than anything in my (albeit short) lifetime.

The folks in charge say this will be a long and slow burn. The world is scrambling for solutions, while simultaneously holding its breath, praying it will take what it wants and leave. When will it end? What will the pandemic being “over” even mean?

If you’re not on the front lines of healthcare or operating other essential services, the heroic thing to do is stay home and away from others. It could obviously be worse. For example, we aren’t being asked to paint all windows and headlights black so bomber planes overhead won’t see the light of our towns. We are asked to stay at home with all our creature comforts and streaming services and various means to still quasi-connect with others. But that doesn’t invalidate how each of us is hurting, big or small.

In summary, it’s a bum deal. I’ve found myself crying and unable to really articulate what I was even feeling. Fear? Grief? Lamenting the loss of my bubble, the narrow lane of my own easy existence, before COVID-19 came in and popped it? Are we all waving goodbye to the characteristic frivolity of pre-corona America?

The air feels heavy with dread and uncertainty. I could be fabricating it, but we’re empathetic creatures that, I think, have been deluded into thinking our happiness can exist in isolation. Even if YOU’RE fine, it’s normal to be afflicted by the pain of others. I’ve wondered if the only way to be happy right now is to just be highly selective with reality. Being anxious, overwhelmed, and depressed about the state of the world isn’t productive, but you don’t want to have your blinders on either. It can be difficult to walk that line, allowing yourself to connect into the current globally-experienced pain, while staying in your lane and counting all the blessings there. And 2020, though still young, has suggested a theme of worldwide tragedy-induced reflection.  

Kobe Bryant died in a freak accident on my 22^nd birthday. A helicopter crash. I spent most of the day thinking about death, about all the helicopters I had flown in during my 4 years fighting fire. How could this emblem of human excellence, this personification of invincibility, die so… randomly? I could go down a rabbit hole here, but point being, that day brought to light some hard truths for us all: Life is fragile. Humanity is fragile. We don’t have nearly the amount of control we think we do.   

Thus, with the onset of COVID-19, it felt like the natural advancement of a bad dream, meant to teach some sort of lesson in our sleep to be acted upon when we wake. Like when you dream a loved one died and immediately call them to say “I love you” in the morning…? The world will change and adapt after this. It already is. I don’t know how much or in what precise ways, but I’m left to wonder how people will adapt on a smaller scale.

Has everything leading up to this just prepared us for the fact that we finally do not have to go outside and talk to one another? We are properly and officially frightened of our neighbors. At a time when so many suffer from loneliness, will COVID-19 have lasting effects on the interpersonal? Will this fresh awareness of the risks of social interaction linger long? Has the sun officially set on handshakes and hugs? 

What are we all really being forced to examine? I’d love to know what uncomfortable ideas everyone else is grappling with, stuck at home and unable to run from them. For me, I’ve thought a lot about living with intention, what matters and doesn’t, what characterizes a “meaningful” life. Pretty run of the mill navel-gazing.

People have been forced to slow down, stay home, interrupt the hustle. It’s hard to maintain momentum. Personally, I’ve felt stagnant at times while adapting to this new reality. I was emailing a friend and mentioned a feeling of meaninglessness and empty space. I want to share part of his response, because it genuinely made me feel better and might do the same for someone else reading this.

“As trite and cornball as this sounds, I really believe it: the only thing that seems to fill those spaces is love.  I’ve probably spouted off about this in some previous overly-romanticized, idealistic soapbox-sesh, and it’s not a new idea, but it’s the only magic I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.  People whose lives are filled with it don’t seem to struggle as much, or at all, with meaninglessness.  And, of course, it doesn’t have to be romantic love; the love that exists in a healthy family, or an unhealthy family that’s willing to put in the work to be real–accept flaws and failures and mistakes and other aspects of real life–or the love among true friends, all these, I know, fill those spaces.  I know because I have these things or have had these things and not had them too.  Without them, the void is pretty hard not to get engaged with.”

“Whatever we do to survive and keep the species, life of some form, whatever, going on, extends the potential to realize meaning.  And along those lines, you mean something to me. All of the little things, and the big things, that make it possible for me to keep running around on the beach, bored by the blown out surf, running terrified from waves, wading in even swells, watching the water suck sand out from around my feet, keep me alive and are in some way responsible for every smile and every laugh and every good feeling I’ve ever had.”

Cliché, yeah. But don’t turn your nose up at clichés in the name of originality. There’s a reason we adopt their sentiments universally. There’s a reason that simple reminder to love was exactly what I needed to hear. This is happening, and worse things will most likely happen in the future. Figure out how to keep moving and do what’s in your power to love those around you. Message the friends you don’t anymore, facetime your cousins, call your parents and grandparents. Take care of yourself and offer what you can authentically to others. And right now, when the safety of everyone is hinging on our willingness to sacrifice, make those sacrifices out of love.

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”

-Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning

^Seemed fitting.

-Sofia