How Flyfishing Helped Cure One Man’s Anxiety and Change His Life Forever.
By Dylan Beeson
October 10, 2023
The conference room was filled with Orthopedic Surgeons. Tan, with no necks and Roman noses. They looked over their glasses at their phones. They looked at charts but also at mountain bikes and guns on Instagram. A ray of sun highlighted dust and steam from a coffee cup before landing on the dirty rug. I was there to present our new product. It was the same as the old product with a new color and had been tweaked just enough to get a new patent and a new indication. It was bullshit. They knew it and I knew it.
I looked down and to the left as I spoke, the way people do when they are lying. I was mid-
sentence when I saw the second hand on the clock looked off. My breath
became shallow and my mouth filled with steel wool sawdust. The room closed in. I felt a deep, animal need to get out. I excused myself from the room, walking then running outside. I almost pissed myself. I was nauseous, sweating. I wanted to run, flee, get out of my skin. I sat on the curb rocking back and forth, holding my knees, crying. The sun slashed metallic knives that bounced off cars, into my eyes and deep into my brain where the source of all this, laughed loudly. That was my first panic attack. I was 28.
Many years later I sat at a bar in Park City, sipping an Old Fashioned. An attractive, older woman sat down and, after ordering her drink, began a conversation. Soon, we were talking about flyfishing. Why do you like it?” She asked. I immediately replied, “Everything that is important comes into focus and everything that is ancillary is out of focus, or not even close to being in the frame.”
It is impossible to be at odds with ones' self or the world when holding a Cutthroat trout in the riffling blue shallows of a river. The idea that the spots on their dorsum, like a snowflake or a star or a human’s iris, are not and never will be made the same, is infinitely calming. Each fish is uniquely different, and I am just one human of billions casting a fly into a stream to one of trillions of fish on a spinning blue ball. That is nice. That, I tell myself, feels good.
I believe this is the reason I am here today. Not flyfishing per se, but the mechanics of the act of flyfishing. Breathing, seeking tranquility, focus and rhythm and acting only in the second that is ticking by on my watch. I spoke to a man named Franklin at a small fly shop in McCall, Idaho. He gave me the best advice about fishing and life. “Just keep it between 10 and 2,” he said. And he was right. 10 and 2. Back and forth, back, and forth, let it unfurl and then mend. That is the only thing one has control over.
I also like the meritocracy of the sport and the elegance of the equation between fish and man. And, more than anything, the ability to flee, far and deep into the wildest places, releasing the focus from one’s ego, ID and super-ego. I am a half a degree off with the people in the subway and at the stop lights, and the helicopter moms at the hockey rinks, but I am on plane in the mountains and in her high streams.
I went to the doctor. He asked a few questions and wrote, “Anxiety with Panic Disorder.” He gave me a prescription for Lexapro and told me to try to relax. It would be 14 years before I relaxed. I continued with my work. Most days battling the dark gnashing grip of the anxiety. I felt its grip most often before sales calls or when working with my manager who was humorless and always seemed like she had just smelled something rotting.
I became an expert at covering up, running to the bathroom to dry-heave and give myself a pep talk in the mirror. I would admonish the defeated man looking back at me.
I studied square breathing, meditation, focus, Eastern philosophies, and Western religion. Nothing helped. Sometimes, for no reason, out of the blue, just because my brain liked to throw a panic curveball at me, I would feel the train coming and just as soon, it would pass by. And that was the hard part. Not knowing when and where the train would come that would make me jump out of my skin or want to stand in front of it.
I drove over Lick Creek Saddle with my bike in the back, a new batch of olive elk hair caddis,
parachute adams, BWO, midges, hippy stompers and various hoppers. On the east side of the summit, grey, half-dome escarpments appeared. Because of smoke or the sun angle and haze, the canyon that fits through the several- thousand feet high andesite peaks, appeared ethereal and infinite, as though it went on through Montana and opened up into a far-away place like Iceland or Center-Earth.
The road was badly pocked. Boulders sat fat and lazy in the middle, and on the sides there were places washed out, looking 1000 feet down to the river. My half tank of gas suddenly sank closer to a quarter tank and I began to think of what I would do if I flatted. No cell bars and further and further away and deeper and deeper into the real back- country of the most remote place in America, I began to have pause, but more than that, I felt free and at peace.
I parked at the gate for the South Fork Trail and unloaded my Niner gravel bike. I strapped my 9 foot, 5 weight rod to the seat post bag, loaded in my vest, sandals, sunscreen and a turkey gobbler sandwich that had already been squished. I rode north along the turquoise river, further and deeper away from humanity than is possible anywhere in America.
After catching several beautiful fish, I drove south, looking at my gas gauge and starting to worry. I hit a fork with a bullet riddled sign- Warm Lake right, Yellowpine straight. Coin toss. I went south to Yellow Pine because I had never seen it. I went into the General store, first making sure to put shorts over my bike shorts. “I am lost,” I said to the mountain man and the clerk. “Shit son, you’re in Yellow Pine- We’re all fuckin lost.” He said with a smoker’s cough.
Through some work and meditation, I realized that the reason for the anxiety was simple. The attacks came because I was acting and not really memorizing my lines well at all. I was an imposter. I hated my job. I hated the people I worked with and I hated myself for doing it. I left a career as a Backcountry ranger in Denali to sell shitty surgical devices. I was not authentic and my body and my brain where revolting.
I hated my job, but I was good at it, going to Presidents Club several times, becoming a mentor to others and doing all of the other things to play the game. When I entrusted a colleague with my reality, they always looked shocked and would reply, “You are the most confident guy I know.” “I know,” I would reply, “It is all just a kabuki show, I have just painted my mask with more paint.”
The focus I spoke of in the bar in Park City is real. I drove over Deadwood Reservoir from Cascade, Idaho to fish a small stream that feeds the Middle-Fork of the Salmon. I stood at the confluence of two streams, threading tippet into the tiny loop of a small post on a size 18 elk hair caddis. It helped that I had readers on, but the focus and clarity I had for the task at hand was exacting and perfect. I saw a juvenile bald eagle fly over-head. In my left ear I heard a meadowlark and in my right, the far-off chortle of Sand Hill Cranes. I had no cell coverage so no emails, no texts or reminders, no bills or dings or rings or pings. There were no bosses and no expectations.
It was snowing when I took the call. I pulled over by the refinery in Commerce City. A flame shot up into the pewter sky as I stopped the car next to a giant tank. "Please hold for the Vice President of Human Resources.“ "Oh- I am getting fired,“ I thought. I took it like a man and wished them well. I went home and drank margaritas and cried big heaving sobbing cries. Not because I was sad, because I was elated. I cried because I had wasted 15 years of my life being something other than what I really was.
I was adrift. My wife told me to go do something that would clear my mind. I went to Costa Rica and drove around surfing and drinking. One day I sat on a beach and thought about the mechanics of swallowing water to drown but didn’t think I had the balls to do it so I went home to Colorado.
I had injured my back and in a haze of Vicodin, muscle relaxers and red wine I had what some may call a moment of clarity, a divine intervention, or an epiphany. I refer to it as the moment my life changed forever. A dart hit me squarely in the forehead. Do what you love. It is oft parsed wisdom, but it is true. I saw a Mathew McConoughey talk where he said, “Do the work you love and focus on the thing, don’t worry about accolades or money. That will come.” Like, flyfishing, focus on the thing right in front of you and keep casting, get better, learn, but keep casting. Do you love it? Are you in love with it? Then keep casting.
I wrote huge notebooks of notes, I started an LLC and created logos. I started a business doing what I love to do. Just like with fly-fishing, I was awful at it. I tore it down to the studs and built it back up over and over. I tried this fly and that fly, tied hopper droppers and nymphed, looked under rocks for insects. And then I got fewer tangles and my cast unfurled like a wave. I caught fish and then more fish and bigger fish of different and more beautiful species and varieties. I became an expert in my field and my brain knew, that I knew that, and so it sent signals to my body to let others know that my vibrations were real and authentic.
Just like flyfishing, I had a lot of knots and tangles with zero fish to show for it….. for long months on months, Then, like just when a wind knot clusters your whole set-up and it is time to pack it in, I hit paydirt. A stream with a honey hole, the right advice, a fly that matches the rise and turns lucky. I started to feel comfortable, and, in that comfort, there was success. I found my honey hole, my fly shop for advice and the right flies. I am catching fish and moreover, I have peace. I have not felt the dark train of anxiety’s rumble in years. I am, for once, calm and comfortable. I am just keeping it between 10 and 2…. 10 and 2.
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