Many people have heard of Transcendentalism, the brand of philosophy that centers around self-reliance, nature, and human experience. The concept was popularized by men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and typically comes with a more masculine image. If you aren’t familiar with Transcendentalism or don’t know what I’m talking about, think of it as those people who put massive backpacks on and head into the forest to “find themselves.” Yes, there are plenty of women who do things like that, but historically, men have made up the majority of long-distance thru-hikers and have been the most dominant voices surrounding Transcendentalism.
For me, my dad was the one who introduced me to the concept, and at first, I didn’t really get it. It wasn’t until COVID that I began to understand why all those old men in the 1800s were obsessed with the forest. Even though we were all stuck inside with the virus, I don’t think I had ever spent that much time outside before. I was 17, bored, and had just gotten my driver’s license. So I would take a water bottle and a mask and go out to the woods for hours. It didn’t matter if it was raining, blizzarding, or a heatwave. I explored every inch of the nature reservation near my parents’ home. Since then, I have spent a lot of time backpacking and exploring more difficult hiking trails.
Although the tradition was paved by men, I have learned a lot about myself and being a woman by being alone in the woods. The traditional role of a woman is to be reliant, but being completely alone forced me to realize that there is nothing inherently reliant about me. Breaking it down, I saw that the things I thought I was supposed to be didn’t necessarily have to be true.
The forest is a break from gender and from the identities embedded into being a person. It’s a chance to separate your own identity, the truth about who you are, from the expectations of who you are. There doesn’t have to be a performance when you are truly alone. I’ve talked before about my previous discomfort with “girl” because of how wrong it used to feel to fit that label. Alone in the woods, I came to realize that who I am doesn’t hinge on how I am viewed or described. My identity is a personal experience beyond language and impossible to fit into a uniform social box. Of course, I felt that I didn’t fit in with any category, no one has ever been me before! None of us can be truly understood in full, so we generalize ourselves into stereotypes that help others get a better idea. But when we’re alone, we can drop the act and get to know the real, important parts about ourselves.
If you think I sound crazy and don’t really get it, I would encourage you to head into the woods for a while. It’s impossible to recognize who you’ve been pretending to be until there’s no one around to watch.
