I lived like Thoreau for a whole year and this is what I learned

tl;dr: I reached self-actualization

Up until moving to California two years ago, I enjoyed a life so charmed that it felt like it was curated by Wes Anderson. I grew up in an unusual upper-middle-class Chicago suburb, Oak Park, known for renaissance thinkers like Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright, and parents who’d turn their noses up at anything that smacked of convention. I have this early memory of my dad being so effortlessly cool that I was actually a little intimidated by him when I was four. I remember thinking, "Am I even going to be cool enough to hang with him?" He could charm the socks off anyone, spinning wild stories from his life with a kind of ease that made you wonder if half of them were even real.

My parents were the original crunchy granola intellectuals—think Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and Doc Watson on vinyl, with a strict no-TV policy because reading Don Quixote, Kurt Vonnegut, Moby Dick, Tolkien, Jane Austen, and other counter-culture classics were far more important. My grandparents were even more bohemian to the core. Forget stock portfolios and career ladders—they would've been over the moon if I became an artist. My mom fiercely resisted becoming a soccer mom, hosting dinner parties filled with art historians, filmmakers, and the occasional anthropologist. I probably knew more about Byzantine sculpture by age 10 than most people know in a lifetime.

Growing up, I wasn’t the kid sneaking out to hang with friends—I was one of the few who preferred the company of my parents. Emotional and financial support? Check. Freedom to follow my whims? Double check. No compromise on values. I had the audacity to live outside the "keeping up with the Joneses" bubble. In our household, the Joneses were boring.

So, having an awesome life? Yeah, that was always the goal. The only hiccup? “Awesome” didn’t exactly come naturally. I failed at everything I touched. I had terrible grades, wasn’t popular, sucked at sports, and wasn’t very good at my job after college. All I had going for me was a cool family and a brick with my name on it in Oz Park. Fantasizing about your future when you’re a starry-eyed twenty-something is all fun and games—until you realize you’ve been envisioning the perfect outcome without putting in any work. You don’t even know if what you think you want is what you actually want in real life. I had been chasing a dream without a plan. My grandma had this saying: “Careful what you wish for… you might just get it.” Wise woman. I had to learn that the hard way when I hit 28, and let’s just say the quarter-life crisis was in full swing.

Suddenly, all those dreams I’d cooked up started looking less like a fairytale ending and more like a messy jigsaw puzzle with pieces I wasn’t sure I even liked. The life I thought I wanted didn’t match up with the reality staring back at me. Grandma’s words haunted me, hitting me like a freight train and leaving my inner world reeling. It felt like an internal seismic shift, reminiscent of the chaos at a Taylor Swift concert, or like being the sole survivor of a plane crash, stranded on a deserted island with nothing but the knowledge gained from one ill-fated camping trip in Michigan—where the only real threat was a drunk frat bro stumbling into the wrong tent at night.

The stories my family spun about unconventional bliss conveniently glossed over the rough patches. Living on the fringe comes with its own set of downsides—the tortured soul of an artist is a real thing when you’re committed to being offbeat. It means instability for an uncertain amount of time. The way I handled the past eight years has been a roller coaster ride that would make even the most seasoned thrill-seeker dizzy.

I had no survival skills and no idea how I’d make it through this ordeal. So, I took it one day at a time, trying to avoid thinking about the impending danger lurking just around the corner. All I could do was hope for a rescue that seemed as likely as finding a Wi-Fi signal on that deserted island.

With no one to save me, I leaned into the chaos and let the tsunami take me on this wild ride, learning to swim in treacherous waters along the way. This was my calling. This is what everyone in my family has done. I am now going through what my grandpa did when he punched a shark in the nose while deep-sea diving during WWII. This chapter of his story glossed over what was probably very traumatic, only to share the fun parts.

During this low period in my life, I used to look at the Joneses in their metaphorical boats, just floating by, enjoying the dry, cool air, while I was unconventionally stuck with salt water up to my nose, welts from the elements, and the occasional run-in with sea creatures ten times my size. But then it hit me: I was lucky to be down here with all the sea rats, swimming on the surface of a largely undiscovered frontier filled with mysteries waiting to be unraveled. I had a million questions swirling in my mind, and it was up to me to dive deep and find the answers.

So, like any good cliché-finding-yourself-at-30ish tale, I packed up and moved to California—because why not? YOLO. The goal? Strip away my ego and see what I was actually made of. I went full monk mode: living modestly in the woods, hiking the mountains like I was channeling my inner transcendentalist. No distractions, no one to compare myself to—just me, my thoughts, and a lot of awkward self-realizations.

Ugh, and the way I spoke to myself? Zero percent awesome. I make a big deal over paper cuts, so you can imagine how I handled self-imposed isolation with nothing but a mattress for company. I had to train myself to push past that relentless voice in my head screaming, "Quit!" every time things got tough. No wonder my mental health was garbage. Trying to live like Henry David Thoreau, it turns out, is not for the faint of heart. But hey, at least I wasn’t surrounded by Wi-Fi or other people’s opinions, so that was something.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, I dropped a bunch of weight, and suddenly I was hiking and running distances that would’ve made my past self look at me like I had two heads. I learned how to identify plants in bear country and figured out which ones I could actually eat—not too shabby for a city girl. I became a weirdly proficient mountain-dweller, minus the beard. But the biggest takeaway? I stopped taking myself so seriously. It’s funny how most of the things I used to stress about never happened, and the things that did matter turned out to be tiny, almost laughable in comparison. Like tadpoles. There I was, helping these little guys get transferred to a bigger pool of water so they wouldn’t die, and I thought, "Yeah, this is what it’s all about. Not my five-year plan or doing everything perfectly." Tadpoles put things into perspective real quick.

Silencing the inner voice is one thing when you're out in the wild, with nothing but trees and mountains as your company. But the real challenge comes when you're back in the thick of it—where Instagram's just a tap away, and you're rebuilding your life after two years of unemployment you never saw coming. Applying that same mindset I used on hikes—pushing past the noise in my head—I started noticing patterns I hadn’t seen before. Little details that explained why I made the same dumb choices again and again, choices that stayed hidden even after years of therapy.

Self-actualization is kind of a superpower. It’s like putting on a pair of glasses that lets you see the world with a sharpness most people miss. Suddenly, you can spot the traps before you fall into them, read between the lines in ways you couldn’t before. You can tell who’s really walking the walk and who’s just talking a good game. It's not just clarity—it’s a whole new way of navigating the world, making life much more...vivid.

And because of that whole monk-in-the-woods experiment, I've developed this unquenchable thirst to write. Seriously, I can’t stop. It’s like a waterfall of words pouring out of me every day. I probably write for four hours, minimum. Articles, journals, notes—most of it never sees the light of day, but that's not really the point. It’s like all these thoughts and feelings bottled up inside me finally found their escape route, and now they won’t shut up. I’m not even trying to get published; I’m just writing for the sake of it, for the release. And it’s wild how much clarity comes from that.

As I was moving my car this afternoon, a thought suddenly crashed into my mind—my usual stream of consciousness nagging me about all the things I lack and the endless list of what I need to feel secure, the usual nonsense. It’s the anxiety-ridden emotion from Inside Out 2 that fuels your imagination, conjuring up a parade of worst-case scenarios to keep you from being in control of the present. “You’ll never have children because you’re too old. You should just stay in bed and eat ice cream to mend your broken heart.” Really clever stuff, right?

But then my self-awareness chimes in, like a wise friend saying, “Um, Ego? You don’t even know that! Stop being such a buzzkill and let me enjoy the fact that I’m outside.” Just like that, the chains of my past started to loosen, giving me the chance to revel in the joy of what I do have. In my car that I love, music on, just feeling so alive and so loved.

I wasn’t going to let fear dictate my life anymore. I started craving new experiences like it was the first taste of chocolate after a lifetime of bland broccoli. Suddenly, my social life was on fire, blossoming in ways I never thought possible. I mean, I’m still a dork, but now I’m a dork with stories worth telling and a newfound zest to explore all the unknowns of the universe.

And just like that, my narrative shifted. I learned to embrace vulnerability instead of fearing it. Don’t get me wrong; I still have my fears. I would never go downhill skiing or rock climbing without nearly pissing myself. But even if I did, I would be fully present in that discomfort—it would only ruin my pants, not my day. Because in this sprawling, chaotic universe, what better way to connect with others than by sharing our wild adventures, both the ridiculous and the profound?

And if my grandma could see me now, she’d be grinning, knowing all along that I was just one giant leap into the unknown away from finding my place in this beautifully messy world.