This season in Alaska has been a special sort of apothecary and apothic for the mind-numbingly lackluster and painful years that preceded it.

I can’t expect perfection from the wilderness. The Tongass National Rainforest is a painfully dark place: it’s rainy, edgy and dangerous. In fact, people disappear and die on Deer Mountain every year from ignorance, drunkenness, idiocy or all three. It’s easy to laugh save that the person was someone’s son, someone’s niece. But it happens. The trees quake and fall and rot from the inside. There are bugs set out to destroy them, the mosquitoes in Northern Alaska are notorious for their size.The forest recycles itself and decays every day. It’s a wild forest, truly, and that is a reflection of my experience here.

The work schedule is rugged: you get numbly acclimated to early mornings that feel like they could finish you mid-season. There is never a reason not to party, not ever. There are drunks who carry their stupor as a badge of street identity, no shame in sight. The tourists are 95% pleasant or manageable, and the other 5% are angry, grumpy, confused, lost, confined to wheelchairs, decaying or simply needy, needy, needy.

The tour companies range from professional, fascinating, mismanaged to a complete crock. It’s Alaska, not Silicon Valley- we still use paper tickets to load tours and I’ve never seen someone use a scanner. My guess is technology will eventuate in Alaska in 2075. Until then, it’s smart fishermen who’ve learned to make a career of tourism and laugh all the way to the bank. You can’t come out here expecting to have a professionally enhancing resume booster. No sir, that’s why so many college kids are bopping around on the dock in their Skechers and artificial blonde.

Then there are the Tongass eyes. The paucity of females here, especially women who dress like they live in LA, is a funnel that draws eyes in your direction at any time of day for any reason if you find yourself in pants with “spandex” listed on the inside tag. You can be jogging with headphones in ears, tennis shoes in motion, sunglasses covering a third of your face and three day-old hair pinned back and still feel the body scans as you go on your merry way down the main drag.

Let me say this: if you are a woman walking on Tongass Avenue going unnoticed, you’re probably a ghost. It’s not charming, it’s not edifying, it’s not confidence-building, it’s not pleasant. It comes with the territory. I have theories but I have no explanations.

Buying produce here is shite. $2 for a petite avocado, $5 for a box of an inexpensive cereal brand and the vegetables spoil in a couple days, or maybe just one. Groceries are the biggest expense, next to rent, which is astronomical. Target here is only a rumor and Walmart is one of two places you can buy socks.

Mayhaps I can look at the logistics like a rain shadow: the dry, dark side of a mountain that’s a consequence of such beauty. Being a dot inside a panorama of mountains resting in the distance is going to expose a lack of civilization. It’s what you signed up for, kid. Embrace it and just be glad for AT&T and shoddy wifi.

As my college professor would say, I have a point and my point is this: THIS IS THE TIME OF MY LIFE.

I always heard that phrase and thought it sounded ridiculous. I mean, Dirty Dancing aside, it’s a ridiculous phrase. It takes away from all the other great parts of your life. Surely you can’t just have one “time of your life” when there is so much time, period.

BUT IT HIT ME RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYEBALLS AND I DID NOT KNOW THAT IT WAS COMING, LIKE BIRD POOP OR THE PRECISELY AIMED RUBBER BAND IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH.

My time here has been happiness and reality meeting one another, like the bass and treble playing hide and go seek through a symphonic movement.

Perhaps for the first time in my adult life, happiness snuck up behind me, covered my eyes and said “guess who?” I almost slapped it when I turned around out of complete disbelief. Here I am away from my friends, not making a cent, missing the chance to say goodbye to my precious Grandmother in person, working everyday in the 6am hour 6 days a week, without a car or a couch to my name.

For a grapevine of time, I have been stamping my feet, fists balled and tears rolling down puffy cheeks yelling at the fates as to when it would arrive. Eventually, I got tired, got distracted and got happy without giving my permission. The word may in fact be satisfied. Working in Alaska has been satisfying.

If I had to take a stab at the ingredients, these things have brought me gobs of joy:

I’m busy with work. I don’t mind working with tourists and I really like the people I work WITH, so I think that’s the goal. If I LOVED what I was doing, I’d be more invested which can lead to added pressure and stress. Sometimes it’s better to be along for the ride.

I used to think I’d always be miserable in any job, because that’s all I had known. But this doesn’t feel like a prison. I meet a lot of interesting people from the cruise ships (well, some) and the Shore Exs are usually cool to talk to. The important thing I think is to get out of bed and have somewhere to be in the morning.. It cuts down on brain olympics and anxiety wrestling.

Medicine has helped me tremendously. It’s allowed me to be myself and function as a healthy person who takes showers and doesn’t feel burdened by the weight of the world at the sight of dishes or dust bunnies.

Gorgeous walks. I’m just not much of a hiker, but I love a good afternoon or evening walk (with jogging tossed in, let’s get wild).

Freedom (not the kind that falls into your lap right after college, but the kind you work for with the help of understanding and probably therapy)

A social life! I’ve fought and tried and tarried in Atlanta, trying to cobble together a social life. I have fabulous, most excellent friends there but we are all stuck in traffic and are horribly busy. I don’t ever have a hard time finding people to hang out with here. If I want to grab a drink, I text a friend and we grab a drink. We still work long hours here but our commutes are virtually nothing and this island is small. I don’t feel desperate for interaction and I can always slip away on a solitary walk if it gets to feel too much.

Unfamiliar territory (fishing makes me feel real awkward, but it’s good to do it!)

Other things that have aided my cause are: a good pair of shoes, a top-notch playlist and Tillamook ice cream when it’s on sale for $3.99 at the Alaska and Proud.

I haven’t had tons of cash, a car, a couch, cafes to sit and write, a pet, a boyfriend, or a place that really feels like home.

As for dating, well I could write a treatise on being single and another on being heartbroken, and a short pamphlet on being in happy relationships. My point: it must not be necessary to find satisfaction..

I’ve realized that dating in Alaska is like dodgeball: have as much fun as you want, but try not to get hit by the balls.

For those of you who always told me that college would be the time of my life, I urge you to reconsider. For those of you who said that my 20s would be great, I urge you to reconsider. For those of you who think your best years are behind you, I urge you to reconsider.

For those of you who have made this summer so fabulous, please accept my heart hug. I urge you not to reconsider.