josie :3!!!

turns out when you start looking more and more like your mom circa when your mom and dad were married, things get kinda obvious :V

I've been thinking about this for a while now, so I decided to write about it.

I've heard the advice to "go for walks" so often from various mental health advisors that it felt like a meme. With all the serious shit going on in the world and all my unmet needs personally, just going for a walk about it seemed a bit ridiculous. I felt that even if there was a tiny positive effect to it in some way, it would be so far from being enough that it felt frustrating to hear this recommendation so often.

I grew up in a very rural area and I did run around outside a bunch as a kid. But the social isolation, lack of peers and options made me want to get out of that village as soon as I could. So I moved to one of the largest cities in my country when I was 18 to go to university. And I stayed there for over 16 years. City life had a lot of advantages, things that made me feel like I needed to be there, but I'm not gonna talk about them right now.

The stuff that I was less aware of for a long time were the ways in which living in the city made me feel stressed, trapped and alienated. Now I feel that the lack of space, quiet private environments, and ways to approach nature messed me up much more than I was realizing. I think now that these things aren't just nice to have little treats for me, but necessities for the kinda brain I have. For a shorthand description I wanna say I am autistic and I have ADHD and I tend towards depression... (and I'm also really gay.)

Going for a walk in the city was alright, I guess. I was privileged in that I have the ability to walk, lived in a place where I didn't feel unsafe going out (even after dark), had a lot of free time, and the city had a bunch of accessible green areas that were pretty big and diverse for city standards. There even was a botanical garden within walking distance of my appartment. I love nature and birds and bugs and plants and all that and I always found them interesting to learn about and spend time with.

So while I was living there, I didn't quite understand why it was so hard for me to just get out there and walk... I just couldn't do it regularly, it could feel almost like a chore or a challenge. There were nice things about it for sure, but overall I just never felt that clear positive healing effect that it was "supposed to have". Then due to several reasons I spent a bunch of time back at my parents' home in the countryside, which for many years I had only been visiting for very sporadic and short trips. The experience of "going for a walk outside" is just SO different between those two places. This was an important one among the reasons that started my process towards deciding that I needed to get out of my living situation in the city.

I moved back to the tiny village in november last year. I live on my own now, with my two rabbits. I have a big garden for myself, and lots of space outside where I can walk forever with hardly ever seeing a human. And now that I've been here for a while, the difference this makes has become a lot clearer to me.

In the city, you can "go for a walk", that is, go outside, continuously walk on some roads and paths for a while until you complete the loop and get back home. If the city is somewhat nice, and especially if you can go to a park, you can see some trees and flowers and ducks, hear some birdsong, feel the sun/wind/rain on your body as you pass through. If you can find a bench or other socially acceptable place to sit, you can even stay in one spot for a while to take in a view for longer.

This is all cool and good, but it's so not enough for me!! Here's what I did during roughly an hour long "walk" yesterday (which is on the short side compared to my average daily outside time nowadays): Walk very slowly, stop frequently for closer/longer looks, check individually on everything I'm growing in my garden (looking and touching, including hand pollinating my greenhouse plants), carry water from the rain barrel to the greenhouse plants, eat some berries here and there (I counted 6 different berry types over the course of the "walk" when I was thinking about it afterwards), take in the scents of earth and plants, see a wild hare chilling in the sun, see a bunch of slugs and bugs and watch them for a while, carefully remove slugs from inside the greenhouse, identify some flowers I realized I didn't know the name of¹, listen to birds and think about which call/song comes from which species², take photos (including close ups where I have to squat or otherwise maneuver to get the angle I want, and taking several/many shots of the same thing until I'm satisfied with it), visit a bunch of cows whom I know individually and have named (even though I don't "own" them), talk to those cows (sometimes I also get to touch the cows but not yesterday)... There are probably some more little things I'm forgetting currently. On most days I also collect some wild greens for my bunnies, and I have learned to identify and locate a variety of plants that are safe and that they like to eat.

My point is, it's an entirely different experience of a "walk". In the city maybe if I wasn't so self conscious it would have been possible to do a few of those things. But being perceived while doing anything that felt outside the norm always meant some stress for me. Spending a long time looking closely at things, or on taking photos, straying from the official paths (which in the city also feels like an intrusion on the few spaces that are designated for nonhuman nature), going back and forth slowly rather than walking on a linear path, even standing around in the same spot for a bit could start feeling stressful if it felt like others could notice me (which was pretty much always). I also had to consider whether I was dressed in an "acceptable" way before I could even go out.

I felt like I couldn't nurture or make friends with any aspect of nature. Feeding pigeons was illegal under a fine (I did it anyway but that's a whole different topic that came with its own lot of stress). One time I heard about an acquaintance who had done a bit of semi-guerilla gardening in their area where they had even asked authorities for permission to plant stuff on a tiny patch on the side of the street, and a bit later it was razed down anyway. In the city there were so many lawns and carefully placed hedges that were always cut, trees were being strictly "maintained" (and often enough outright cut down), everything needed to stay in its allocated spot and it was lucky if that would stay allocated. And of course all of that came with the constant noise of big lawnmowers and my eternal nemesis, the leaf blowers, regularly right up against my window pretty much all year long.

Nowadays, I go outside every single day. I don't have to make myself do it, I want it. I need it. I can absolutely feel the benefit, both immediately during, and afterwards. I can feel the lack of it if I ever don't get to spend enough time outside. I can very much see what people mean when they say that we are creatures who are adapted to spending time in natural environments. Nature provides a level of stimulation for me that just feels right, it is constantly interesting without being overwhelming, and it is soothing at the same time. Everywhere I look, I see something that is aesthetically pleasing and/or worth investigating and learning about (almost always both). I still feel horrible often enough. I still have really dark thoughts on the bad days. But being outside helps me deal with these things better than I could before. It gives me a way of being where I don't feel out of place or judged. It gives me things to care for and protect, and an immediate tangible connection with other living beings.

Alright, that's my experience that I wanted to share. I realize that I am incredibly lucky to get the opportunity of changing my living situation like this, and to now have so much space to be myself in. I can't and don't want to give advice to others. Just if you ever feel like people keep telling you to go for walks and it just doesn't help as much as you think it should, it's likely not an issue with yourself but with your surroundings. Thank you for reading.

～

Also if you'd like more of my photos and you haven't seen my page for them yet, they're at https://cohost.org/halcyon-garden .

1. There are really good mobile apps for plant IDs nowadays, I use "Flora Incognita".

2. Learning to identify bird songs is also something I do with an app, I use "Merlin".

like it seems like you just take shots in the dirt…? just knowing your band and cup size seem borderline irrelevant to bra shopping for comfortable tiddy holders