The Adventure of a Lifetime - my mental health journey out-of-doors.

"There are two ways to spend five thousand dollars. You can sit at home, doing what you have always done, becoming less fulfilled as you let the years slip by, or you can go out intentionally and create the adventure of a lifetime." -Conor Lynch

Shot by Conor Lynch at High Falls Lake, Ontario.

All across the world people are suffering from different things. Poverty, Obesity, Anxiety; the list goes on. With more than (stats to come for the movie!)(50%*) of North Americans on anti-anxiety meds, (00%*) on antidepressants, (00%*) overweight and (00%*) under-nourished, we as a people are dealing with what the World Health Organization may refer to as an epidemic of epidemics. We spin our tires trying this shortcut or that, but ultimately, nothing feels better than what we are already doing and there are no easy ways out. We quit one addiction to take on a less satisfying one. We blame ourselves but it doesn't help. There are so many things going wrong but we don't even know where to start. We are so drained from life in this society that our spirits cry out for nourishment, and our throats remain choked up, ruminating for fresh air. Our creative spark that we knew from our childhood is dying out. We look before us to our elders and see frailty, injury, sickness and pain, fear and loathing. What hope do we have in this world? We all have big problems. The pharma companies are calling it Pharmaceutical Deficiency, yet others herald this disease as Nature Deficiency Disorder.

I was a classic case. I didn't know what nutrients I was eating as a child, and never knew until after my 24th birthday. I used to play video games for eight hours a day. This was life. I would have a common dinner of pizza or chicken with fried and gravy, and I would spend most of my free time trying to talk to people on Facebook. I was an awkward pariah by nature. When I even did invite someone over, I was so confused as to what you were supposed to do when you hang out with friends, that I stopped inviting people over. I had moved out on my own, only to gain 45 pounds, have my relationship fall to pieces and move back in with my parents. I had spent the last 5 years stuck and frustrated, interested in a lot but never really delving into anything and pursuing it. I was an idea man, and I had more ideas than people I had walked by in a lifetime. I was at rock bottom. People kept telling me I was going to waste my youth and turn around to 40 wondering where the years had gone. These same people had all their own worried to contend with, but they weren't wrong. I was losing track of my life, and fast. Besides just a little progress in beat boxing and a couple one-off art projects, I was in the exact same place as five years ago. It was as if my wall coverings and surface interests had changed but I was just the exact same awkward child I always was. I worked my way up to taking a semester of college, but I had a mental health breakdown after one good semester and had to drop out.

Now everyone thought I was a quitter. My doctor told me to take an antidepressant, but I had tried one years ago that had made me feel hollow inside, like it would be just the same to drown myself as go for a cold swim. Nobody had any answers for me, and I was going out of my mind looking for a cure to "Life". I was all alone. Like I was trapped in a forest of unmoving trees with no way out, darkness all around me, no one to help. This is exactly how I found myself mid-January, curled up under a tarp with my collapsed tent keeping the snow from my sleeping bag, totally exposed to the elements. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't get up and leave, my socks were soaked and I had wrapped my only blanket around my bare feet to keep them from freezing. And yet somehow, I had never felt more real in my entire life. This would be the first trip to inspire the second horrible trip, through half a kilometer of bog to a windy break in the trees, and a third trip to a dead old cedar forest. Day by day, I slowly started to come to terms with the wilderness - building fire reflectors, tarp shelter frames and camp latrines. The camping really took a lot out of me, and maybe I needed that, because pretty soon I realized I was going to have to figure out what I needed in my body.

My skin had gotten weak and I was regularly losing sleep, at home or otherwise, my stress was still at a high when I wasn't using cannabis, and it didn't really feel good to me yet. Bring on the camp food! One day after a particularly bland and unfulfilling potato, I decided to spend three hours going through a list of all the nutrients I could find and writing down all the foods that were high in those nutrients. My regularly distracted eyes zoomed in with laser focus. I was so used to dealing with paperwork and computer errors, having to face getting a job unnecessary in the dawn of botomation and stuck reading boring communications articles in class. Now here was a problem that actually mattered to me. Here was a problem that was REAL. In all my life, I had never met such deserving anxiety as wondering what I was going to eat to survive out in the wilderness. My girlfriend and I had been watching documentaries about factory farming and animal intelligence, and though the smell of bacon continued to make my mouth water, after making the nutrients lists, it didn't seem like it was going to be that hard after all. In 31 nutrients, only five or six proved complicated, and I noticed that even things like Vitamin B12 -which people claimed we could only get from meat- I could get from crimini mushrooms and Iodine I could get from seaweed or navy beans. In fact, almost everything I needed on a daily basis I could get out of a trail mix. Almonds, Peanuts, Sunflower Seeds, Pumpkin Seeds, Papaya in the trail mix, and Kale, Crimini mushrooms, portabellos and seaweed to work in somehow. But enough about the food and back to the adventure!

We had gone to the wildlands! I was told it would be a 12 kilometer hike. The fact did not register in my mind. I had no idea what to do with that. I was told there would be beaver dams, and I am damn glad I had already made a habit of walking carefully on my local railroad tracks. The hills were 300 feet tall and there were at least 8 of them. We arrived the first day exhausted and dehydrated, our water completely out, water filter not working and hungry from a days long hiking. That's when my two friends almost passed out. We were stoking the fire trying to boil water so we could drink it, lovely that that very same water would be boiling hot as we all dealt with our heat exposure. A couple much appreciated apple sauces later and we were OK again. Still, I was upset that we weren't able to reach our first days campsite and were stranded on a tall rock outcropping, covered in fragile caribou lichen. Sleep came and a four kilometer hike saw us to the next site. Would we have to keep going? A fisherman was taking up the site, but my friend, exhausted and out of water again, went out on the limb to ask him if we could camp there. Never would I have known how glad I would be that he asked.

Behold, the habitat where we would spend the next 16 hours! On this rock were so many forms of life, it absolutely blew my mind how many different kinds of things could live in one place together. My friend who had planned the trip, who already happened to eat vegan, cooked us our meal of chickpeas, corn, beans and kale. It was more than enough and actually tasted really good. But as the sun started to set, we gravitated more and more out to this miraculous peninsula. A beautiful path stretched through multicolored plants and sands, out to a fire pit by a large light-feeling rock. And then they came out. Not the coyotes, but the stars! I had never seen the milky way before, and my friend pointed out just how crazy that was. Here I was, an infinitely small speck in the universe, and I hadn't even seen my own galaxy! The stars, which were normally dim and sparse were overpopulated in bright clouds of light all across the sky! So bright were they that we could do nothing for hours but set up our tarps and sleeping bags and lay beneath them as we watched more than 15 shooting stars burn up in the atmosphere. It was starting to condensate and get really cold so we stoked up a fire, and I realized that, for the first time in a long time, I was happy.

Here we were, braving the elements, gazing up at the infinity of space through what seemed like a thin transparent film, eating out of pots and pans, sleeping cold under the stars, and I finally felt it. I was connecting. With myself, with nature, with my friends; I had found myself in real survival situations, trained my skills in the crappiest of spots, suffered and studied and shopped. I had put more work into just this than anything I had touched in my life. I knew my gear, I knew my bare feet felt good against the cool ground and sharp broken sticks and rough rocky sand; I was living. And I couldn't get enough. Move on to the falls; this is where I had my first trail mix trip, and the trail mix and kale were surprisingly filling. The organic canned bean dishes I had weren't even as tasty. Someone had told me the nutrients were mostly in the stems, so I munched on the leaves with my brother as I fried up some kale stems. After a kilometer or two of hiking, we were there, and I set up my new hammock for the first time and went to scale the falls.

One of my best friends had moved away just a week or two ago and I was looking for acquaintances. I, normally shy and awkward, was super talkative! At first nervous but after the first few people, I was smiling and waving at everybody, taking the lead like I never would. And for once my brother and I weren't arguing, we were just exploring, taking pictures of snakes, walking carefully across logs, above deathly looking waterfalls. And it was all free. Freedom! I could feel it! No longer did I wonder why the sitting desks and classes felt no good to me, or why standing behind a counter or a cutting board someone was unfulfilling and burned me out. Here, I was living, for real. These were real world problems; balance well or fall into the falls and break your neck. I've never focused so intently in my life. And when we crossed the log, we found the rope climb; a single thick rope tied across another section of the falls. At this point, it was just another path. I gave the rope a quick test, turned around and climbed on! In about fifteen seconds, there I was on the other side, and my brother short to follow. Soon we met a couple couples, and they did the rope climb too!

The next day, we met a photographer working on his own media company, a young father of three, and we had to show him the view from the bottom. So there he was, as he told us he normally wouldn't do this, crossing the twelve foot log with his pant legs rolled up, and saying he would never do this as he scaled the rope climb. This was awesome! Not only did I get to be a part of someones experience, I got to listen to his story about getting involved in film and got to talk with him about what I wanted to do with camping for mental health. I was inspired. And like so many people I had talked to about similar things in the past, so was he. I had my mind made up. I wasn't a quitter, some millennial dropout that was on the precipice of wasting my life. I was a real human being, surviving in a timeless wild out of doors, shooing deer flies the size of my pinky fingertip and drinking a hard ice tea with some people I had just met, sharing a fire with new friends that would last a lifetime in my memories.

It all just fell into place. I wasn't going to work out in a gym -which bored me- or listen to people's problems as a therapist without being able to help them, I was going to be an adventure guide for mental health. And I knew it would work because I could FEEL it. For all the times I was unsure whether this or that was working, out here I could really feel it, and it felt good. On was I to a water filter and my precious dehydrator, and to greater hikes and trips still! My girlfriend and I had been talking for months about getting a camper van and travelling, getting our own land, living outdoors and cutting costs, getting healthier by eating well and immersing ourselves in an active lifestyle, and here it was. I could see myself now, travelling to a different place, staying nowhere longer than 21 days, travelling to BC and Newfoundland, Alberta and Northern Ontario, as well as across the US and Asia, Europe and Africa, South America and even the poles. And I would do it by saving so well that my gear paid for its self, my rent disappeared and my food became healthier. We would save more in our trailer than the two years rent it would take to pay it off and get our first piece of land before we were 30. We would get all organic seeds and plant strangely coloured fruits and vegetables all over, and begin creating food forests by nourishing wild edibles and working with the wildlife.

We would come to get bitten by ticks and step in glass to be sure, but we were on to something. Each time I went out, I came back with more enthusiasm than before. Where first I started working myself up to going back out, now I was halfway through the door before I had put pen to paper and was dreaming about my new dehydrator. Gone were the hallow nights playing civilization without the expansion packs, and now my life consisted of packing everything I needed to survive in a bag and carrying it across the world. I remember, I had taken it upon myself to create a rule that I would never listen to anybody who told me I couldn't do something again, or that I was wasting my time. And before long, I was doing a lot more for myself, and I was coming back and showing those people the fruits of my labor, and they were loving it! I was getting along better with my dad, I no longer felt like a loser at family gatherings, claiming the same old things I had done since last I saw them, and I actually felt like I might somehow fit in to this weird and changing world. I was free. Free to be myself, free to baton a piece of wood and turn it into a wand by tying quarts crystals to it with twine from the dollar store, free to do something dangerous without fear or falter. And I could see myself getting better, not just at camping, but at life.

Here I was, eating better, getting active, learning new skills, building my self confidence and connecting with nature. And I truly cannot describe that to you without taking you out into the woods yourself. Because it really is something you have to breathe in through the air and feel in your lungs. Its something you have to drink from the fresh water and eat from the wild berries. This is something you have to walk on with the hard bare skin of your feet and climb with the sore, raw flesh of your hands. This is a journey of alchemy, where you step out of your tree into the forest and become one with the world, losing your old self and discovering more to you than you ever believed. This is camping, and I can't wait to bring you along.

#HighFalls #OntarioCamping #Camping #CampingBlog #AdventureBlog #MentalHealth