Retracing Your Steps In The Alpenglow
What I finally discovered about being understood.
I live near a lake that seems to have all the answers.
Maybe I played too much Mario Party as a kid, but I always thought about problem-solving like trying to find a trap-door. You know? Like if I could mentally zoom out far enough, maybe I’d finally be able to see the whole puzzle. And I figured if I could scroll forward into the future and see the alpenglow after a sunset, for example, surely I could reverse engineer the best place to watch one in real-time.
I think, at some point, I accidentally started approaching real life with that type of guess-work. But I never felt like I was very good at describing when I was zooming out, or even why I thought looking at things like that would help in the first place.
I could never seem to share in ways other people understood.
For some reason, this lake has been helping me make sense of why, bit by bit, for the better part of 15 years. And I finally found a trap-door.
There’s a gap between what we notice and what we share.
The other day, my friend and I were walking side-by-side along this lakeshore and, at the same time, we’re moving through very different chapters of life right now.
He and I have always sort of had this thing where we just kind of get each other without having to explain it. We met in college through mutual friends. Really, though, we got to know each other well once we started working retail for the same outdoor gear store in town. Quickly, we realized our overlapping attention to detail was pretty rare. It was the kind where picking up on very small subtleties led to asking people the right kinds of questions that turned us into rather successful sales associates. We even set a record.
I wish I could say it was a learned technique, taught to us by retail reps, but it wasn’t. As it turns out, we both just grew up in similar type of chaos where we learned to clock behavior-change without thinking. Fortunately for us, that kind of thing also makes for very trustworthy adventure companions in the mountains, which we also became. Then, after school, we moved away to different corners of the earth until a few years ago when, we boomeranged our way back to living in the same place by accident. We landed right here in Vermont. Right by this lake and all its wisdom.
Now he’s about to be a dad.
So we’re walking by the water and talking about life, as we tend do whenever we see each other.
The weight of being misunderstood makes it harder and harder to close the gap.
Me? I’m in the midst of deciding whether or not I should wave goodbye to my entire career. Again. I tell him I’m kidding before admitting that, wait, no, actually I’m not.
It goes back and forth between us like this for a bit and I’m recognizing the same attention to detail that made us good sales associates back in college. Now, though, I see it for the filter it really was instead of the insightfulness I thought it to be.
For years, my way of connecting with people looked like trying to proactively guess where they were going and then tailor my side of the conversation to meet them there. Somewhere along the way, that stopped working. Maybe, it never even did to begin with. Regardless, I used to feel that disconnect most acutely in work environments. I’m sure it’s tied, in some way, to feeling a need to prove myself. It’s like my sense of worth depended on a clear articulation of my thinking, but I could never quite achieve it. Not fully, anyway.
As an outdoor guide, I understood how to break apart my thinking and share it with the people I was responsible for. If there was an incoming storm where we needed to adjust our pace, or plot a new course, I could work backward from our end goal and explain our next steps in a way that helped folks feel safe, capable, and confident. But, for some reason, when problem-solving like that as a knowledge worker, it always felt like I was speaking a different language. Or maybe like I’d glossed over the parts with the details on what steps we’d need to take in order to get there from here, and why.
Throughout my life, it’s sometimes felt like I have to work EXTREMELY hard to share myself with people in ways that make me feel understood. It’s utterly exhausting and, at times, really demoralizing.
That’s something I’ve never really run into with this friend of mine. I’m lucky to have a couple of people in my life like that. Everywhere else, though, has always felt kind of like presenting someone with one of those floating blocks from Super Mario and watching them try to slam it open without really getting very far.
Ohhhh noooo.
What if the thing that felt like confrontation was actually a bid for connection?
It’s sunny and slightly cool, summery and just a bit breezy. We’re walking on this straightaway section of path along the shore, between two mini peninsulas that sort of create a small cove. Instead of sand, though, this stretch of the path is lined with these blocky, square-ish rocks that make it feel very un-beachy. As a result, people don’t congregate here, which makes it a really peaceful place to be. So I’m looking out across the lake—at the Adirondacks along the opposite shore—thinking about how views like this just do something magical to my nervous system. I really love mountainscapes, but lakes have a special place in my heart. Probably, I’m realizing, because of this one and the many, many times it’s kept me company over the years while I’ve been deep in thought, or chatting through life events with my people.
Like right now.
My friend’s trying to slow down in a major way so he can be as present as possible when the baby gets here. And I’m just SO happy for him. He and his wife have worked their asses off to get to a place where they could comfortably start a family. And, while he and I are walking, I find myself thinking of their happy-hour style baby shower from the day before. It was at a local brewery and, admittedly, while being there was super fun, it was also a little hard.
That brewery’s a place of mixed emotions for me. Truthfully, this whole town is. This is a place where my life fell apart, more than once, and where I returned to put things back together (eventually). I knew a lot of folks at the shower, but there were plenty I didn’t. So I’d been ready for the “what do you do?” question and was braced for impact accordingly.
I hate that question less than I used to, but it still ruffles my feathers. It took a long time to realize that the problem was my own insecurity with how to present myself. Answering got easier when I thought about what people were really asking, which actually has nothing to do with work or jobs. More often than not, people ask that question because they want something to talk to you about. Especially when you’re… you know, at a social gathering to celebrate your mutual friends.
Usually, it’s not meant as an indictment of who you are.
I look away from the water and back toward the path in front of us. Somehow, it’s not all that much further until my friend and I arrive back where we started. These kinds of walk-n-talks mean a lot to me. So I make sure to tell him just how excited I am to do them with him while he’s pushing a stroller. We part ways with a hug and more than one “let’s do this again soon.”
As I’m biking home, I’m still thinking about that “so what do you do?” question.
I’ve spent the last 15 years calling myself a marketer. Only recently did I realize I’d been lying. Sure, it may have been true once, but what I’ve actually been doing is identifying behavior patterns and coming up with ways to elevate them—again and again, for people and for companies. And I’m still working on how to say that plainly when someone asks, “so what do you do?”, but I no longer feel the need to prove my worth in my response. So that’s cool.
Who knows what I’ll be doing next, anyway.
‘Just be yourself’ is confusing advice that’s hard to follow.
Later that night, Isobel and I bike back down to the lake to have dinner and watch the sun set in the very same place where my friend and I had been walking earlier.
Unsurprisingly, we got to talking about a lot of the same stuff.
We’re sitting on this rock wall by the shore, and looking out across the water at the sun while it’s descending into the mountains on the other side. The crescent moon, already hanging dimly above it, is growing brighter by the minute.
For the last 267 days, I’ve been writing a story for my daily column as part of a year-long, self-imposed challenge. Originally, I hoped to accomplish two things at once: learn to communicate my thoughts and feelings in ways that made them more accessible to others, and write a book. In some ways those two goals have nothing to do with each other, and yet, if you think about it, they sort of have everything to do with one another.
At first, I thought this was mostly an exercise in learning to “just be myself.”
Well, um… nope.
That didn’t work at all. For me, that just feels like a really vague, bullshit phrase that only highlights someone’s struggle to connect with others. Amidst the vulnerability of putting ourselves out there, it basically feels like getting hit with a buzzer and a “Nice try, sport. Wanna try again?”
Being understood comes from retracing your steps and showing your work.
I’ve read a lot of books to try and crack open the “just be yourself” side of writing. Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks helped a lot, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, really seemed to get things moving, and tackling Austin Kleon’s trio might’ve just been enough to tip the scales toward progress.
An unexpected bonus of this challenge was getting invited to share my story on national TV during an episode of Stories From The Stage, and that’s where I found something that worked a whole lot better than “just be yourself.”
While working with the producers on my story, I kept reminding myself to share both what happened and why it happened like that. And, as it turns out, the parts of myself I always thought I needed to filter wound up being the kind of stuff people connect with most.
Now, as I’m sitting on the rock wall with Isobel, I’m watching the alpenglow bloom and light up the lake with purples and oranges, and I’m feeling... proud. Thinking about my journey up to this point, I realize I’ve already reached my goals. So everything from here on out just seems like… a bonus.
That feels like such a huge win.
Whether I’m chit-chatting with friends, speaking to audiences, talking to colleagues, or even writing essays like this one; I’m growing more and more certain that the “what & why” principle is at the heart of my entire journey with becoming more understood.
As someone who grew up trying to zoom out and jump ahead to solve the puzzle, I have to be honest that I still fall into that trap from time to time. But I’m really trying to be better about letting people know when I’m retracing my steps in the alpenglow, and sharing why I’m doing it like that in the first place.
Especially when I’m hoping to catch a sunset or a life chat by the lake with them.
onward.
If you enjoy reading my writing, I publish short reflections like this each day as part of my daily column, Kickturn.
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