Almost 100 days. I’ve been sitting with this one for a while.
There’s a difference between having experiences and understanding them, and after three months I think I’m crossing from one into the other.
I didn’t have language for a lot of things when I moved up here. I didn’t know then what I know now about how my brain works — the impulsive yes, the hyperfocus on preparation, the way I thrive in novelty and struggle in lull, the emotional intensity that makes leaving hard and arriving electric. I thought those were just personality traits. It took years — and an eventual diagnosis — to understand they were something more specific than that.
What I can say, looking back, is that the Arctic was exactly the right environment for the brain I have. Everything up here demands presence. There’s no coasting, no autopilot, no comfortable routine that lets you stop paying attention. The water situation demands it. The weather demands it. The community demands it.
And I thrived. Not perfectly, not without difficulty — but genuinely. More than I would have in the safer choice.
That’s what I want people who are reading this now — especially those of you who’ve been told your brain is too much, too impulsive, too all-or-nothing — to take from these posts. Sometimes the brain that looks reckless from the outside is the one that knows exactly what it needs. Sometimes the big, strange, unlikely yes is the right answer.
I would make the same choice again.
Ninety-something days to go in this chapter. I’ll keep writing.