A Conversation with Sydney Williams, Author of Hiking My Feelings: Stepping Into The Healing Power of Nature, Who Will Bring Her ‘Take a Hike, Diabetes Tour’ to Washington, D.C., in September
I first heard of the book Hiking My Feelings: Stepping Into the Healing Power of Nature around one of my lowest points during the pandemic. Coming out of a winter where I couldn’t go to the gym, couldn’t see my entire family for the holidays, and tested positive for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), again, left me feeling sluggish and uninspired.
After reading about how author Sydney Williams turned her experience with Type 2 diabetes into a book and program that gets other diabetics outside, I felt reaching out to her might spark some inspiration.
I called Williams on a dark and overcast day in Charlottesville, Va. We had scheduled to talk at 1:15 pm PT, which meant the sun was already starting to go down on the East Coast. When the Zoom call opened, Williams was sitting in the passenger seat of what appeared to be a #vanlife van. The sun was high in the sky illuminating the van decor and her curly hair. It made me think back on brighter and warmer days outdoors before the pandemic.
“I’m so glad we finally are doing this!” I said, excitedly.
Williams replied: “Me too!”
Right off the bat it was clear we had similar energies and excitement for the outdoors, so I could tell this was going to be a fun conversation. Though at the time, my dark and dreary background of a rainy day in Virginia was doing a better job representing how I had been feeling the past few months.
I asked Williams about the origins of Hiking my Feelings, and she told me of her life before diabetes. Growing up in Kansas, she discovered her love for the outdoors and desire for pursuing more dramatic landscapes. But before heading west for the mountains, she maintained her athleticism with cheerleading, gymnastics, rowing, and competitive skydiving for years.
“I’m sorry, did you say competitive skydiving?” I asked after she had casually mentioned it as if it was as common of a hobby as biking or crafting.
“Yup! I was on a team with four people where we would hold onto each other’s body parts in the sky to form pictures,” she explained. “Then whoever makes the most pictures in a certain amount of time wins. You have about 35 to 60 seconds depending on what you’re jumping from.”
I was very relieved to learn that it wasn’t a race to the ground.
Skydiving is what eventually brought Williams and her husband to Southern California, where she had originally planned to become an elite skydiver. But soon after the move, hiking began to dramatically reshape her life. “My first backpacking trip was in 2016, which was across Catalina Island, and I had no business doing that trip,” she explained. “I was not prepared, I was 80 pounds heavier than what I am today and in the worst shape of my life. But I was excited and I wanted to do it.”
Even though her feet were covered in blisters within the first hour of the five-day trek, she was already hooked on backpacking. “I would have thought that the trip would have been really discouraging for me, but in fact it was a turning moment where I realized I love my body, because it helped me get almost all the way across the island and where I needed to be,” Williams said. “This was something that I wanted to do more of and I didn’t want my body to be the thing that gets in the way. For all of my life, I battled with body image and my weight, yoyoing between fad diets and a borderline eating disorder. This was the first time where I felt present in my body and was starting to feel safe in it.”
The trip launched Williams into a new lifestyle devoted to health and wellness with dreams of bigger backpacking trips as a major motivator. Nine months later she was given an even bigger reason to continue pursuing changes—she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
“I did a complete overhaul of my nutrition plan, started walking almost every day, and I was taking my medications as prescribed,” Williams said. “I started losing weight which is one of the goals for managing Type 2 diabetes, and thankfully we caught it early. When you’re still able to be active, there’s a good chance that you could do this and not have to be on medication for the rest of your life. And that was my goal. Even though my physicality was improving, I was still super stressed out, and my blood sugar levels just weren’t coming down at the rate that I wanted them to.”
At the time Williams was diagnosed, she was working for NBC Universal, a job that had intense deadlines and goals. She decided to leave the company to reduce her stress levels and began working for a startup, which after 95 days proved itself to be even more anxiety-inducing. With stress directly affecting Williams’ blood sugar levels, she decided to leave the start-up as well.
“I thought, ‘I don’t know what’s next, but my health has to come first. I’ve tried everything I can to still have my high power and high-stress career, and I have to choose something and I’m choosing me, I can’t keep working like this.’”
Four days later, while training for her next trek across Catalina Island, she reflected on her most stressful days when she would, “eat and drink her feelings,” and compared them to the tranquility she was feeling as she stood atop a mountain. That’s when “Hiking My Feelings” first hit her.
“It was basically a slogan or a hashtag to start,” she said. “While on top of this mountain, I thought, ‘I feel like I could take a nap I’m so relaxed and I’m present and everything’s making sense.’ But that shouldn’t be—I don’t have a job, my husband’s working part-time so that’s not enough for us to survive off of here, I’m a newly diagnosed diabetic who just gave up health insurance benefits, I should be freaking out, but I’m not.”
She realized that her diabetes diagnosis helped change her coping mechanisms. With this new perspective and healthier way of life, she was ready to start exploring the root cause of her previous harmful habits. While hiking Catalina Island for the second time, she began to connect the dots between a sexual assault she survived in college and her excessive eating and drinking habits.
“I’m out in the middle of nature, I don’t have my headphones in, I’m not listening to podcasts or audiobooks or music or anything, and it’s just me and my thoughts and the world around me,” Williams said. “I realized that this is a really beautiful container to access some of these memories that were really deeply buried. I had done a really good job of numbing myself for the past decade prior to this. If hiking helped me connect those dots and if there’s any way that I can help other people, I want to tell the story to anybody that’s going to listen.”
Thus Hiking My Feelings came to be, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people feel empowered outside through organized programs and awareness. In her book Hiking My Feelings: Stepping into the Healing Power of Nature, Williams unpacks her trauma and helps inspire others on a similar journey.
One of the programming portions of the organization, Take a Hike, Diabetes, is touring across the country to raise awareness by hiking over a million miles. The group will be rolling through our region this coming September 13-17 in Washington, D.C. They are also celebrating Take a Hike Diabetes Day on October 2nd, 2021
“Sydney, I feel very lucky to get to speak with you today,” I said finally after blinking many times in astonishment. “To be candid with you, I have felt very knocked down by the pandemic and my own health issues these days. And talking with you has reminded me that I rarely worry about life’s hardships while on the trail.”
“My personal connection is what started this organization, but I’ve always said from the very beginning this is bigger than me. It’s bigger than my story,” Williams replied. “It’s not just hiking my feelings, it’s rock climbing your feelings, it’s kayaking your feelings, it’s any outdoors activity where you are disconnected from a device and your attention is focused on the task at hand. That’s where this kind of healing is possible. So, opening up those doors for any part of any kind of community that wants to be a part of it and have that access, that is our focus.”
Header photo courtesy of Sydney Williams
