The other day, I woke up almost excited to finally be able to make a doctor’s appointment online. Anxiety, chiefly triggered by the diabolical receptionists at the local surgery*, has been putting me off calling at 8.30 am for weeks. To be able to make an appointment without needing to call had me thinking perhaps there is a God after all.
That was until I realised I was required to submit an essay about why I needed the appointment. The questions I needed to answer felt even more invasive than those typically asked over the phone. Explaining in writing why I needed to see a doctor took around twenty minutes, and after submitting my request, I was so wiped out I considered going back to bed.
A couple of hours later, I received a text message saying:
Confused, furious, and with no desire to try and solve the mystery right there and then, I booked a train ticket, made a flask of tea and some lunch, packed up my camera and left for the hills – when in doubt, hike.
There’s a particular spot I always go to in the woods to sit for a while before setting off to hike proper. Moments after I’d started to assemble my obscenely pretentious lunch of fork-smashed avocado on flimsy lentil crackers, I noticed, a little way off, the red cap of a fly agaric. I shot up from my mossy stone perch. I hadn’t yet split the avocado so lunch could wait.
I went back to my lunch after half an hour, having been led further into the woods by alluring toadstools, each one looking more fairytale-esque than the last.
The plan was to hike a decent distance to shed my rage, but it became clear that for the duration of the afternoon, nothing else mattered except finding toadstools. So that’s precisely what I did.
I wandered through the woods, fueled with wonder and a joyfulness I hadn’t felt in too long. I marvelled at the paper-like gills, the tiny bite marks (and the not so tiny) and how red the red of their caps could be. I found toadstool parts strewn around the woods like limbs, and some overturned and moulding, their journey back into the earth already begun.
Back at the train station later, I had over an hour before the train arrived. Ordinarily, this would stress me out, but the time I spent tracking toadstools left me feeling so utterly tranquil and my spirit so light that the wait didn’t bother me in the slightest. I sat and ate some apple cake my mum had made, and drank the rest of the tea from my flask, feeling perfectly content. Reflecting on this now, it’s dawning on me that I received more therapeutic benefits engaging with toadstools than I ever have sitting face to face with a stranger trained to try and help.
*I’m convinced receptionists cause a portion of the trauma I carry around. Even incidents that happened decades ago can crowd into my mind today and stab a good mood to death.
A Wyrd Of Her Own 