“Wow, you are so brave,” said a woman standing behind me.
I put down the tent pole I was unfolding and looked up. “Excuse me?”
“You’re so brave to be camping alone. I could never do that. And at your age!”
I didn’t know what she meant by “my age,” but this woman was probably in her 60s and I was in my early 30s (and was often told I looked younger), so I assumed she wasn’t calling me old. I assumed she was shocked that young women could…do things.
“Thank you?” I said. Her words sounded like compliments, but they didn’t feel that way.
The woman had come over to me while I was setting up my trusty orange and brown tent in a car camping site in Big Bend National Park. My own park–Amistad National Recreation Area–was a four-hour drive east. I had been a US national park ranger for a few years.
I had set this tent up on backpacking trips in the Alaskan wilderness. A car camping trip seemed like light work to me.
I was spending three days in Big Bend, one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful and remote of America’s national parks. Each day I hiked, birdwatched, and fended off comments from other campers about how brave I was.
One morning, as I was trying to brush my teeth at the edge of the parking lot, a retiree came over from his RV and told me that he wished his daughter was like me. “She would never camp like you.”
I wondered who had taught his daughter that she couldn’t camp alone. Perhaps it was him. He certainly seemed to find what I was doing remarkable.
Even while he was praising me, even while all the people I met were praising me, they were also making sure I knew that I was different, that I was stepping out of my lane, that I wasn’t supposed to be doing what I was doing.
I didn’t see a single person approach the man camping alone at the same campground and praise him for his courage.
On my drive home to my own corner of Texas, I stopped at one of the few gas stations. A woman came out to turn on the rarely-used pump and frowned at me. “Women shouldn’t be driving out here alone,” she declared. At least she wasn’t trying to mask her opinion with fake compliments.
In an essay announcing her evolution away from professional tennis, Serena Williams wrote, “My sister Venus once said that when someone out there says you can’t do something, it is because they can’t do it. But I did do it. And so can you.”
I think about this idea a lot when someone is telling me I can’t do something.
As a woman who hikes, camps, backpacks, and travels alone, I can’t tell you how many times I have been scolded or shamed or given shocked “praise” for it, mostly by other women.
There is something about a woman telling another woman that she can’t do something that I find particularly chilling. And revealing. She is telling me what she can’t do. And that is her issue, not mine.
Let me be clear–I am not reckless or unsafe. I understand there are risks when camping or hiking alone as a woman, and I am not without fear. I avoid strange men and never drink alcohol when traveling alone. I carry bear spray in bear country and take other precautions.
It’s not that I don’t feel some trepidation being alone in nature; it’s that I don’t let my fears keep me from doing what I love to do. And I am not going to let the fact that sometimes I have no one to hike or travel with stop me from doing those things.
And the truth is–sometimes I just like being alone. I like the quiet of a solo hike. And I get pretty sick of justifying that to other people. So I choose to let them think whatever they want about me. And enjoy my life.
When other people are telling you that you should be afraid to do things, they are projecting their own fears onto you. When they tell you that you should not, they are saying that they cannot. When they try to shame you for doing something that makes you happy, they are letting you in on how brutally they treat themselves, how they keep themselves from being happy.
It is sad, to see people so terrified of living that they feel the need to shut other people’s lives down. They were taught to be that way, probably by a long, unbroken line of people who shamed them and told them they couldn’t do things.
The difference between them and us is that they believed and internalized the lies they were told about what they could and couldn’t do. But you and I, we know the truth. We know that we are capable of doing the things we want to do, even if we have to do them alone.
So don’t believe them. Hear what they say and understand why, but don’t listen. Ignore them, have compassion for them, and keep setting up your tent.