I was laid off from my job on Monday. I’ve never been laid off from a company before and I always assumed that I’d be sitting at home wallowing in self pity if that were to ever happen to me. But surprisingly, I feel extremely relieved and excited for my next chapter. I had been thinking about quitting my company/banking/the corporate world in general, and had done the financial calculations of exactly which expenses I’d need to cut, and the minimum income I’d need to pay my bills and pursue something else. So this came a little bit earlier than expected, but this feels like the step I needed to take but I was dragging my feet on taking on my own.
This may come as a surprise to absolutely nobody who knows me well, but creating shareholder value is not my life’s passion, and I was becoming increasingly burned out operating in that environment. I think living in ways not authentic to my values, and pretending to be someone I’m not, were becoming completely untenable for me.
The week before I was laid off, I came back from vacation from a sort of last minute, and not planned out roadtrip that I took to Yosemite, Crater Lake, and Mt Ranier, where I went on some solo backpacking and camping trips. There was something that I felt was urgently drawing me to Yosemite and I really can’t explain it. I’m not going to write about it, but I ended up having some experiences on that trip where I had made some decisions that happened to put me in a very specific location at a very specific time, in one of those kinds of things where it feels like the universe is trying to shake you awake and tell you something really important.
The day after I was laid off, I went for a hike in the Hood Canal to a nature preserve that goes through pine forests filled with giant ferns down to the water, where the tops of the mountains were covered in low clouds, and the air doesn’t smell like anything particular, it just smells like the cleanest air you could ever breathe. I was laid off because I had moved to WA during COVID and I could either relocate back to the east coast or lose my job. It was almost laughable that anyone would ask me to leave the green and lush mountains of the Pacific Northwest to go work in a cubicle in Wilmington, Delaware. But things like that in the corporate world aren’t personal, it’s just cost cutting before year end results. As I was walking back to my car, I thought about the backpacking trips I went on in high school where I read “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson for the first time and promised myself that I would hike the Appalachian Trail, someday. I thought about reading the book “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed a few years ago when I decided that I also wanted to have some life changing thru hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, someday.
It then occurred to me that, someday, was now.
Prior to being laid off, I wanted desperately to go on some wild and grand adventure and to shed all of my material possessions that I had purchased to feel better, but never seemed to make me feel better or any more alive. I thought about trading in my 25′ sailboat for something bigger and sailing to the Caribbean, or buying a camper van and traveling around the US, and now, I suppose, walking 2,600 miles from the Mexican border to the Canadian border with only a backpack filled with basic life sustaining essentials. I don’t know how much more minimalist of an adventure you can get, really.
It’s Sunday, not even a full week since I was laid off and my life greatly changed. In a very strange way, I don’t feel like I’ve now departed from my original plan at all, I just feel more free to take the next step. Since my Hood Canal hike on Tuesday, I went full on down the PCT rabbit hole looking at topographical maps, downloading trail apps, researching backpacking gear, mountaineering and wilderness first aid classes I want to take, food resupplies and provisioning, navigation protocols, physical training, realistic start dates and milage paces I’d need to make to finish the trail in Canada by first snowfall. I joined PCT Reddit and Facebook groups, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so sure I wanted to do anything in my life. I’ve decided to try to thru hike the PCT and not the AT due to the damage from Hurricane Helene, and also because I live in the PNW and how cool would that be to walk 2,600 miles including the entire length of my own state?
I’ve already had someone tell me that it’s impossible for me to hike the PCT; that I don’t know anything about backpacking, that I’ll be too slow of a hiker, that six months isn’t enough time to prepare, that I don’t have the mental fortitude to do this, that I’m not in elite athletic shape, that I’m going to fail, and I’m going to fail early. Maybe I will, but nobody can know that with any certainty unless I actually try, and I actually fail. Life is so unbelievably short, and I’d rather try and fail, than have regrets about this for the rest of my life.
I haven’t written in this blog in 10 years, ironically since I went backpacking around South America for a year right before I started working in banking. I worked in banking for the last 10 years and this feels like a perfect time to end that chapter of my life and document this next adventure, so stay tuned for updates about my PCT training and prepping and about the trail itself!
The executive who read from a generic script to inform me that I was being laid off, had told me once that she admired how adventurous I was. She had no idea.
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”
― J.P. Morgan
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