On My Own Terms

By Ava Ahmadbeigi, produced by Out There Podcast

Released on August 26, 2021

Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

WILLOW BELDEN: If you’re someone who likes to travel, you might be interested in a podcast called Out Travel the System. 

Out Travel the System is one of our sponsors for this episode.Their show is brought to you by Expedia, and its mission is to inspire and inform about travel. That can mean anything from building your bucket list, to taking concrete steps to take that next trip when the time is right.

The podcast finds people who are passionate about travel — including a commercial airline pilot, a woman who travels pretty much year-round, and a man who wants to have visited every country in the world by the end of this year. When it comes to inspiration, Out Travel the System is also giving a voice to people who love their hometowns — and want to share them with travelers — or people who love, say, lake or beach life in the winter.

 Out Travel the System is available wherever you get your podcasts. 

(Out There theme music begins) 

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And now, on to our story for today.

(theme music ends)

Have you ever had an experience that you just couldn’t stop thinking about? A memory you kept returning to years after it happened? 

Today’s episode comes to us from a woman named Ava Ahmadbeigi. She now lives in the Hudson Valley in New York, and she’s surrounded by more outdoors than she ever saw growing up. But for years, she kept hanging on to an experience she had a long time ago. An experience that, she felt, held the key to whether or not she could have a place in the outdoors. 

I’ll let Ava take it from here. 

And just so you know, there is some adult language in this episode.

(sound of frantic digging)

AVA AHMADBEIGI: Connor, what's going on? 

(Connor sighs)

CONNOR: Oh God — we drove on a snowmobile trail, and the car is really quite badly stuck. 

(soft music begins to play)

The snowmobilers keep driving by and calling me an idiot and a moron. I think they might be right. 

AVA: Stay tuned. 

Before we start, I want to offer a disclaimer: I am no great athlete or adventurer. I have never in my life claimed to be “outdoorsy”, and my heart still races when I try new, simple things in the outdoors. 

This is not the story of a life-changing event that made me fall in love with nature. 

This is the story of trying to connect with the outdoors and my body, both equally foreign to me. And it’s my journey as I try to come to a decision: can I depend on my body? And if I can, can someone like me find belonging in the outdoors? 

(music fades away)

What I consider to be my first true experience in the outdoors — like nature, trails, bears and bugs outdoors — was in my junior year of college at NYU. 

I had saved enough money to afford a nasty little sixth-floor walk-up apartment with three other roommates. We had sky high rent, and rooftop parties, and mice that ate our Cheetos. It was all very NYU. I, despite my best efforts, was not very NYU. I loved the education part — I could feel myself growing intellectually. But I was still so aware of where I had come from, how I had grown up. And even more, I was aware of just how different that might be from how my three white roommates had grown up. 

I was not — at this point in my life — self-assured by any means. I’m an Iranian immigrant, but at NYU, I found myself in a group of mostly white friends. I was trying and, I thought, failing to fit in. 

(contemplative music begins)

So one fall night in 2014 when the idea of a weekend trip to the Adirondacks came up, I was surprised to be invited. I was happy to be included, for sure, but I was worried by the same token. Should I be included? Can I do whatever it is you do when you go camping? And, was this a pity invite? 

In the end, I said, “Ses, please and thank you, I will come to the Adirondacks.” After all, how different could it be from the as-seen-on-TV camping getaways? 

(music fades out)

Turns out, it was very different. Not in the least because I had optimistically overlooked something pretty important...I had no idea how to be outdoors. And, I would learn, I didn’t trust my body to figure it out either. 

To understand just how unprepared I was for this trip, there’s something you have to know about me. 

I was born in Iran and grew up mostly in Queens, New York. Immigrating is never easy, and our case wasn’t any different. My mom and I shared an apartment with my uncle, my grandmother and her live-in caregiver aid, while my mom and uncle worked as much as they could to make ends meet. I was taken care of and loved, and I never felt I was lacking anything. But I did feel alone. 

(music begins)

I spent a lot of time watching TV, doing homework on commercial breaks. I felt safe indoors, and I wanted to stay there. But as time went on, I got lost in the made-up stories of movies, and I started to have some...let’s say “magical” thinking. 

I had seen somewhere on TV that you can make a sort of vision board — images of what you want most in life, cut out and pasted on a display board. And if you just believe that these things can be yours, the universe will give them to you. 

Instead of making a board, in middle school, I cut out photos of body parts I wanted when I grew up, and I put them in an envelope in my underwear drawer. I had cut-outs of a flat belly; perky, full breasts; perfectly toned, hairless thighs — you get the picture. And they were all unambiguously white. Fragmented body parts of white women from magazines.

(music fades out)

THIS is what I wanted. 

And when my body turned out to look different than what was in that envelope, I think I turned my back on it. I even remember saying to a friend in high school, “My body is just there to carry my head around.” 

It’s sad to think about now, the way this relationship with my body grew. I understand it now as the anxiety of a child trying to fit in, to look the way I should look, using whatever tools were available to me. 

It was not a healthy relationship, but it’s the one I had with my body. And to be honest, it worked fine. I was perfectly happy in my routine. After all, if you’re a healthy young person, it’s easy to pretend the body is an afterthought. But this made-up division between my mind and my body — it didn’t hold up in my first big experience in the outdoors, and it didn’t hold up in one of the most tumultuous years of my life, either. 

(sound of soft thunder and steady rain begins)

The night that we arrived at the campground in the Adirondacks, it was cold and raining. My memory of most of the trip is vague — but there is one thing that I still remember, that I haven’t been able to let go of, to this day. 

(sound of rain ends)

The day after we arrived, we went on a hike. 

(sound of footsteps on a trail)

It’s safe to say I didn’t know much about what I was getting myself into. I knew it was not a long hike, but that there was a view at the top, and I felt reassured by the attitude of my friends: just a fun little hike, on a fun little weekend trip. Great. I can do this. 

(music begins)

Most of the way up was manageable. But as we approached the last stretch, the trail got steep — like, really steep. 

The rocks dug into the arches of my feet, and I wanted to get off of them as fast as possible, but this was literally new terrain for me. I couldn’t balance. Add to it that it had rained the night before, so the trail was extremely muddy. All the fallen leaves were slippery and wet, and they made it a terrifying feat to climb the last stretch up the mountain. 

I had to stop, gather myself, breathe, and hydrate a lot. Like many, many times. And with each time, I could see my companions getting more impatient. And I felt bad. 

I wanted so much to keep up — to prove that I could do this, that no matter where I came from, or how much experience I lacked in the outdoors, I can do a little mountain trail. So I kept pushing myself. But as much as I was used to pushing my mind, this is not the relationship I had with my body. 

(music ends)

I was suddenly painfully aware of my body and its demands. It seemed to be saying to me, “Oh, you pretend I don’t exist for all your life, and now you want me to step up?”

I needed to take my time, but my friends wanted to keep the momentum, and eventually, on one of my breaks, they left me behind. Yeah, you heard that right: they left me behind.

In a way, I couldn't blame them — I was not prepared to do that hike the way they wanted to do it. But at the same time, I was so afraid. I didn’t trust my body to be able to do this, and now I didn’t really trust my friends either. I was furious that they had left me — a person who’d never been hiking, and didn’t know the first thing about trail markers or safety in the outdoors — alone on a steep and slippery trail. I think it’s this fury that kept me going up the mountain, to the viewpoint, and back down. 

But I think, in a way, this whole incident broke my heart. It solidified the fears I had that I was too different from these friends: my background was different, my upbringing was different, my body was bad and weak and different, and I should just leave the outdoors to the people who could appreciate it. 

(quiet music begins)

It’s this feeling that I hadn’t been able to forget. And it’s this feeling that made me decide, definitively, I am not outdoorsy, and I will never do this again. 

WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. 

(music fades out)

We’ll hear the rest of Ava’s story in a moment. But first…

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And now, back to the story.

AVA: It’s been nearly seven years since that trip. In that time, I graduated from NYU, got a job at an international non-profit in Manhattan, left that work place because it had become toxic, and landed at StoryCorps. 

StoryCorps is a non-profit that records conversations between two ordinary people, and airs segments of those conversations on NPR. My job as the site manager of their mobile tour was to supervise a small staff as we moved a mobile recording studio from city to city each month, going all across the US. I felt the tour promised me a year of adventure, away from everything that had caused me so much stress in New York. 

But my first few months on the job, I was more anxious than I’ve ever been in my life.

(soft music begins)

I was in such a rush to get out of a bad situation that I didn’t stop to consider that my unprocessed feelings might catch up with me in the loneliness of a year-long tour, or that the newness of everything, and the lack of community, would seriously affect my mental health.

As these things started to take a toll. I started holding so much tension in my body that over the course of two months, I went from having hip cramps that made it hard to walk without a limp, to feeling like my hips and sides were being squeezed so hard my organs were going to burst out through my abdomen. It was the kind of pain that was subtle enough to ignore, until it wasn’t. 

(music fades out)

The anxiety caused tension, which caused actual pain, and the pain caused more anxiety, and it just went round and round. 

I had to change my relationship with my body. I didn’t have much of a choice. Those fragmented parts in an envelope, the way I had learned to think about my body, they were no use to me anymore. For the first time in my life, I was willing — or forced — to acknowledge that my mind and body are connected.

(optimistic music begins to play)

I started with a little stretching every morning, a practice that was completely about comforting my body, not getting fit or looking good. I was working on accepting that my body was more than a vehicle for my head, that it had real needs and value. That actually it was, and it is, strong. 

And as I got better at this, the world around me transformed a little bit. I found a feeling of home in my body, and I felt safer. It was like taking off anxiety-tinted glasses and seeing the world around me as it was for the first time in a long time. 

(music fades out)

And it just so happened that where I was, was the outdoors. It was not the kind of outdoors that I experienced on that first camping trip, but it was a stark contrast to the concrete structures of New York that I had known most of my life.

I sometimes have a hard time articulating this connection between my relationship with my body and the outdoors, because the truth is, it’s only by coincidence that they’re linked. 

See, I had started to feel a kinship with the outdoors because these were the spaces where I learned to get comfortable in my own skin. Like in Memphis, Tennessee, where I first went on a bike ride with my boyfriend Connor. And Yuma, Arizona, where we’d drive out into the desert and run around on sunny afternoons. And then those surreal last months in California, making our way above clouds to look over the ocean. 

But as much as I had started to feel comfortable in my body, and even in outdoor spaces, I felt unsure of whether or not other people who claimed the outdoors for themselves would accept me there. 

I know this might sound a little odd. Like, so what if they don’t accept me? But the kind of belonging and acceptance I worry about is not the kind you might feel at a party where you don’t have any friends. Belonging, for me, is tinged with power — the ability for someone who claims that space to tell me not just that I don’t fit in, but that I have to get out. 

This is an anxiety based in reality that I’ve negotiated since I was eight years old, first immigrating to this country. And I’ve learned to manage it in most situations, but the outdoors is still pretty new to me, and one of the reasons I felt unwelcome there is because I kept replaying that hike from college in my head. It was the first time I felt someone was communicating to me that I don’t belong outdoors, whether they intended to or not.

I wanted to finally face this memory head on. Why did my friends leave me behind? And did the trip actually reveal something essential about my belonging in the outdoors?

So I reached out to Kevin — one of my friends who was on that trip — to see if they’d be willing to talk about what they remembered. 

(music begins)

And they said yes. 

KEVIN: It's so good to...it honestly is so good to see you! Where are you? Are you in New York?

AVA: I'm in New York. Where are you? 

KEVIN: I'm in Chicago right now. 

AVA: Kevin and I caught up a bit. We hadn’t seen each other since we graduated from NYU and it’s been a long few years, packed full of life. But what I really wanted to talk with them about was that hike from college. I told Kevin about how hard it was for me to climb that little mountain in the Adirondacks, how slippery and steep it was, how I had to take break after break after break, how at some point the group stopped waiting for me…

AVA: And I was left behind. Do you remember this? 

KEVIN: I really don't, but that's...I don’t remember that.

AVA: I remember when I got to the top, people were spread out and just like chilling, like enjoying the views. And I remember I was so bitter. 

KEVIN: I’d be bitter too.

(Kevin chuckles)

AVA: I was like, “I can't believe you guys left me behind.”

(Ava laughs)

AVA: And I got up there and I was like — not proud of it — but I was like, “Thanks assholes.”

(Kevin laughs heartily)

KEVIN: I mean...I don’t remember any of this, but that would be exactly how I would react too, if someone left me in the woods. I'd be like, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

AVA: Kevin didn’t even remember leaving me behind. I was at a loss. Like, how could they not remember?

But as we talked, I started to understand why. Kevin said they were in their own head about a lot of things at the time. For one thing, their grandfather had recently passed away...

KEVIN: And I was also, like, realizing that I needed to come out. And I didn't really have a language for that yet. And I was, like, still trying to figure that out. That was just a really weird time for me.

It's funny for me to think about this now, because I'm SO fucking gay. But the first two years of college, I wasn't, I wasn't out to anybody except like...I came out to two people my sophomore year.

For most of our early friendship, like I said, I was still living as like a straight person, you know, which was a complicated thing for me. I didn't like need people — I couldn't have people knowing anything about me that I wasn't ready to know about myself. I think that the way that I learned to be in the world is just in response to, like, preemptively assuming that people are going to reject me if they like get to know me at all. So I have to kind of be something that they either can't reject initially or, you know...anyway...

AVA: This is not what I expected from our call. I thought that the hike we did was probably so normal for the rest of the group, and there was some collective but unspoken decision to leave me behind. But, at least for Kevin, they were just as caught up in themselves and their anxieties as I was. In different ways, we were both trying to fit in, and at the same time come to an acceptance for who we each were. 

I don’t know what that trip looked like from our other friends’ perspectives, but if I could be so wrong about Kevin’s motivation that day, then couldn’t I be wrong about this other assumption I’d made? This assumption that I couldn’t find belonging in the outdoors?

Talking to Kevin really made me want to go back to that trail. Maybe it would spark some new memories, or be some sort of healing experience. Maybe by the end, I could feel confident that not only can I be outdoorsy, but others will accept me in this space too.  

So my boyfriend Connor and I decided to make the four hour trip to the Adirondacks. 

(music begins to play, then the sound of closing a car door and starting to drive)

It was February. We had had a couple of big snowstorms, and we knew the trail wasn’t safe to do in its entirety. But I really wanted to be back there again, even if we just went out to the first, easy part of the trail with our snowshoes.

(music ends)

But we never even made it to the trailhead. With just a few miles left, the road we were driving on changed. It was packed with snow.

AVA: (laughs) I was not concerned about the driving portion of this trip. 

CONNOR: Well, I just, I remember...

AVA: Oh my god, there are people behind me!

CONNOR: Oh my god, they’re on snowmobiles! 

(sound of turn signal)

That’s funny. We just passed a sign that said “no snowmobiles.” They should be able to go past, but it kind of looks he wants to talk to us. Roll down your window.

(sound of window rolling down)

AVA: Hey!

SNOWMOBILER: This is a snowmobile trail.

AVA: Really?

SNOWMOBILER: Yes. 

CONNOR: Oh, we didn’t realize…

AVA: Well, we got to turn back around.

SNOWMOBILER: It’s a snowmobile trail, back where it says turn around. That’s the end of the road.

CONNOR: Alright.

AVA: Thanks!

CONNOR: Go on ahead.

(sound of window rolling up)

CONNOR: Let’s just let them go past. 

AVA: Yeah.

CONNOR: I swear that sign said “no snowmobiles,” but maybe it said “snowmobiles only.”

AVA: We kept going for another few minutes, trying to find a place to safely turn around. But just as we found our spot, another group of snowmobilers came up behind us. So we pulled to the side just a hair, to let them pass, and...yeah, we got stuck. 

(sound of digging in snow)

We dug with whatever tools we had: our snowshoeing poles, the snowshoes themselves, our little windshield scraper. Snowmobilers would go by and immediately start yelling at us, cursing with real venom. No one offered to help. 

We did eventually get out. We got to a trailhead, and set out on our snowshoes. It wasn’t the same trail Kevin and our friends had gone on in college, but this one was beautiful. A complete winter wonderland. The sky was clear and light, and there was snow on even the thinnest tree branches. And the few other people we saw with their snowshoes were super pleasant — it was a complete 180 from our morning, and I’m glad we went out there. But I can’t say that I got the healing experience I thought I wanted. 

Still, on the drive home, our spirits were high. 

(driving sounds begin)

AVA: I feel like it was a success.

CONNOR: I think it was a huge success.

AVA: Really?

AVA: We had ourselves a full day of adventure, together, and that was worth it for us. 

But the more I thought about our long day — the digging and snowshing that would leave us sore for days, and the snowmobilers zooming by and throwing curses our way — the more I thought how strange this was...how strange that both times I had been in this area, this area that is so removed from our world and the stresses of daily life, tensions were actually running really high.  

AVA: And I feel like my assumption has always been, like, okay, if the people are removed from the world as well, they’re going to just be nicer.  

CONNOR: You think if the people are removed from the world, the world is removed from the people? 

AVA: Exactly.

(driving sounds end and music begins to play)

AVA: I had a thought, in some crevice of my mind, that the outdoors was different. I thought my experience in college was an anomaly — that really, the outdoors is supposed to be a place where people leave the other stuff behind, the stuff that makes them mean or impatient. But the outdoors is just like anywhere else — with welcoming people, and people who think everyone should look like and act like them. And people everywhere in between.

That realization is somehow liberating for me. And honestly, I think running into all those snowmobilers is what I needed. If I had had the healing experience I was looking for, it would’ve helped me pretend I am accepted unconditionally. But I know I am not. I’ve been worried all my life about belonging, and I don’t expect I’ll ever really stop.

But I’ve learned how to claim space for myself in the world, and how to continually accept myself — my mind and body all the same — just as I am and without permission from anyone else. And this realization that the outdoors is like everything else, it means I can claim space here too. On my own terms.

WILLOW: That was Ava Ahmadbeigi. Ava is a freelance audio producer based in New York's Hudson Valley. You can see more of her work at avaahmadbeigi.com. And I have a link to that on our website as well.

(music slowly fades out)

Coming up next time on Out There: Becky Jensen was out on a backpacking trip when a wildfire started near her house in Colorado. She came home to an evacuation order. 

BECKY JENSEN: One minute I was giving myself the classic pep talk that it’s just a house, just stuff, and things can be replaced. What matters is we're safe.

The next minute I couldn’t stop crying.

WILLOW: How do you cope, when you’re displaced by a natural disaster? When every day you watch the news, wondering whether you’ve lost everything? How do you make peace with a complete loss of control?

Tune in for that story on September 9.

(folksy music begins to play)

A big thank you to Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, and Deb and Vince Garcia for their financial contributions to Out There. 

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Just go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast to become a patron today. I have a link to that in the show notes too.

(music ends and Out There’s theme music begins to play)

If you’re new to Out There, check out the “Best of Out There” playlist. This is a collection of some of our favorite episodes of all time, and it’s a great introduction to the range of stories we do on the show. You can find “Best of Out There” on Spotify, and at our website outtherepodcast.com.

That’s it for this episode. Our advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Cara Schaefer is our print content coordinator. Our interns are Melat Amha and Tanya Chawla. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold. 

We’ll see you in two weeks.

(Out There theme music ends on a last whistling note)