John’s Mountain is a metaphor to fight against suicide. People with depression should choose their own “mountain” and then climb that to gain strength, clear their head, and see the beauty in life ( along with taking their meds and psycho therapy). It takes a radical course of action to fight against MDD but it is worth it.
I began this art trip as an option to suicide. I don’t want to dwell on that subject. But for such a radical choice as suicide I needed a radical alternative. So I left work and family to overcome my suicidal ideations, to become more healthy, more fit, and more mentally able to cope with triggers that inevitably occur in everybody’s life. So, John’s Mountain is the story of one person’s fight against suicide by channeling energy into creativity, by channeling triggers into life-saving tools.
I began at the southern border of California, and I’m working my way up to the northern border of Washington. I travel to the coast, I travel to the mountains. I take photographs, I create watercolor paintings. I’ve journaled my entire trip. I’ve talked to a therapist every week, every Wednesday, eight o’clock, to help me to become well and stay on the road to keep my goals. My primary goal is getting back home as a permanently happy person.
Climbing mountains, however high, requires strength, it requires breathing, and it requires awareness of oneself. We all have limitations physically but pushing against those physical limitations will give us strength to fight mental limitations. By exercising both, we realize our capabilities and we don’t surrender to the demons that haunt our minds.
John’s Mountain is a challenge but it is reachable. You should choose your own mountain. If you have depression you need activity that takes you out of your own head. You need to breathe and you need to build your strength. Hiking is one way to do that.
Off the Beaten Path – a Life Choice
This is a difficult story to write. We are surrounded by this tabu topic, however, it happens to great people and unknown people alike.
One of the ways I planned to commit suicide was to drive out into the desert. I mean THE desert. Park and then walk and walk and walk and walk until I couldn’t be found and would not survive.
Suicide is an epidemic now. It comes from such a fast society. I think that social media has been a monster that we unleashed on ourselves and our children. My daughter attempted suicide when she was 17. It’s actually pretty common among teenagers to feel this way. They don’t understand what’s going on and they don’t have control over situations and they feel like it’s a hopeless long term issue they can’t escape.
So I’m a working guy. I had a long career, fire fighting, surveying, civil engineering. I helped my wife raise our four children, and were happily married over 40 years.
The problem came in a slow descent, You know, issues in my own head of inadequacy, things not turning out the way that we had hoped. That lead to melancholy, which led to drinking, which spiraled further down over time.
And I find out I have clinical depression underlying the situational depression. So you’ve got a mix of problems going on. One is how you’re thinking and the other is how you’re feeling. You need the chemical that’s lacking, serotonin, in your mind to to help you make it through the worst of days. You also have a way of thinking that is not helping.
This is why people with depression have both medication and counselors, and you need both. Some people struggle to just get through everyday life. What surprised me, my wife and I went with a friend to an annual suicide walk. I was shocked at the number of people there. And the number of people whose lives have been touched by suicide. I think it’s a real problem in the United States, especially now with COVID.
I don’t know exactly why this is, but I can speak to my own personal experience and how I walked myself out of suicide. So, hiking is actually a pretty good analogy. One of my ways to commit suicide was walking, and people who think like this have about a dozen ways of how they would take their own lives. It’s something that comes to your head without you desiring it. Once you get in to that way of thinking, it’s like a channel that just continues and you can’t stop.
Slipping into that channel and thinking that way, on a daily basis, was hard to logic through, except as a real solution to the problem. And you reach that point after this slow descent of, you know, melancholy, feelings, depression and it’s past time to seek help. You need to seek help before you get to the point of having those channelized thoughts, that reoccur and put you into a life threatening problem. So I walked myself out of the problem.
I was about five years from retirement. And just hit the point where, you know, I’m 40 pounds overweight, I sit at a computer all day. I loved my job. But, I’m not the person that I was. My wife could attest to that. She could see that I wake up with bad dreams, I would be cynical, even though she was being an angel to help me. I was discovered in a-fib in June and had a cardiac ablation in September.
I reached a point Monday starting Thanksgiving week 2021, I decided I had to make a choice. And I didn’t want to hurt my family by choosing suicide.
The dreaded S word, people don’t want to talk about it. But we need to, we need to confront it, we need to help where we can. So one of the major reasons that I chose to walk myself away from suicide, literally, was because some of my children have depression. And I didn’t want to set an awful example for them of how to handle this. I’m an engineer, a problem solver. And, to me, this problem was nearly insurmountable. It took a radical change, to make the decision to live. And it was very hard to leave my family, to leave my job and then focus on myself for an 11 month period, camping, living in an old shuttle bus with all of my art equipment, going to California, Oregon, and Washington to look at the scenery, the coast, the mountains, and to hike.
So I use an app called All Trails, it’s a GPS thing with your phone. And that’s great because it keeps you on the trail. I wish that we had some sort of guidance in life to keep us on the trail. You get a notification beep when you’re going off course. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken a wrong turn with the with the All Trails app, and it let’s me know. I use the walking time by myself to think, to ground, to get back to the person who I used to be. One day I told my wife, probably five days into the start of California. “I’m looking for your old John.” She liked that. I fell incredibly in love with this young blonde woman when we were 21 years old. And here I am at 63. I’m thinking hard, where did that person go?
So here I am, in the middle of the forest, taking notes, talking about my choice to live rather than to die. If you have mental health problems, make sure that you’re talking to a counselor. Make sure that you’re getting the medication you need. Make sure that other people close to you know how you feel. And if you need to go out in nature and and walk and use walking to help calm your spirit, then do it. The sunlight will help. Feel the fresh air, feel the exercise, and choose life
