I find it hard to believe that not all writers are secret catastrophists. I can’t be the only one who fears that the misused words and typos will come banging on my apartment door to haunt me like Jacob Marley. I’ve spent the past week throwing my causal daily dose of anxiety toward the upcoming publication of my article on Salon. Don’t get me wrong, I am over the moon that it was published, and the editor who helped make it beautiful is fantastic.

And yet as the days ticked down, I made a list in my head of how many people would erupt in rage about me either 1. Possibly alluding to them, 2. Combining feminism and Catholicism, or 3. Sounding like a general ding-dong on the page. As of 24 hours later, none of these things have happened. But as a writer who feels that my purpose is to build a structurally stable story, any potentially loose beams convince me that the whole house is going to come tumbling down (my day job is writing about home renovation).

My mind even woke me up at 3 a.m. to reveal that a sentence in my article makes an incorrect tap-dancing reference. This is the sentence:

“And then, as if they’d been patiently waiting in the wings, the hidden thoughts of weirdness, anger, silliness, confusion, sadness and elation all shuffle-ball-changed to the front of the stage. We were here all along! they sang.”

Two nights ago, my eyes shot open as I realized that a shuffle-ball-change is not a traveling step. Even if you do it over and over again, it’s pretty difficult to move “to the front of the stage.” Good God, brain. Nobody cares. And “flap-ball-change” doesn’t have the right ring to it anyway. No one at my former dance studio is going to post my picture with a “BANISHED” header over my headshot.

Where am I going with this? You guessed it–the Camino. I started the instagram and TikTok accounts @dearperegrino last summer in honor of completing and sending out my manuscript about my 2017 hike. One of the most common questions I receive is, “What if I can’t do it?”

This is the baseline question no matter how many times you’ve walked the Camino. You may not make it. You may get sick, injured, lost, frustrated, or so enlightened that you choose to head home early. The reason I never say this to someone directly is that we do not leave as much room for failure and reconfiguration at home as there is on the Camino. Outside of common-sense planning and decent boots, there is literally no way to know what you’ll need on the top of a mountain in the rainstorm until you are walking through it.

But again, I can’t tell people that. One time in junior high, I fell off my friend’s jungle gym and tore up the inside of my arms trying to catch myself. As she approached me with the hydrogen peroxide, she said, “Don’t worry, we buy the kind that doesn’t sting.” Welp, she was lying. Stung like hell. But if had told me it was going to sting, I wouldn’t have let her do it.

I can tell people all the things that could go wrong when hiking 500 miles across a country, but I can’t quite verbalize how it won’t matter as much as it would here. Ailments that would send me racing to urgent care at home require an extra long breakfast and some foot tape on the Camino. Spending four hours slipping down a cliff of slate and nearly breaking my face just make a great story at the bar later.

I don’t know how to tell people that things might not be okay, but–that will be okay. I suppose that is the millionth-and-one reason I go back over and over. It’s far too easy to slip back into catastrophe mode without some practice running away from a swarm of gnats that want the ham sandwich in your backpack. We just need to be told it’s not going to sting so that we can heal (YES I CONNECTED THE METAPHOR!)