Walking dread
How trekking 462 miles cured one woman of her crippling anxiety
T ORRE DeRoche, 37, had always lived in dread, fearing everything from random sinkholes to global catastrophe.
Then a series of terrible things actually did happen: DeRoche’s father died of colon cancer in early 2014. Within weeks, her longtime boyfriend broke up with her, though she had just published a memoir detailing their supposedly happy relationship.
The devastating experiences only deepened her anxiety.
“I was in a crisis and looking for something to believe in — hoping for some kind of serendipity to pull me out of it,” DeRoche tells The Post.
As chronicled in her new memoir, “The Worrier’s Guide to the End of the World” (Seal Press; out now), DeRoche took a trip to Italy that summer to clear her mind and cautiously consider her next move.
It was there she found the serendipity she yearned for — thanks to a fellow travel writer named Masha Vapnitchnaia, who was traveling in the same region. Vapnitchnaia, a spunky Russian-American woman whom DeRoche had met years earlier at an industry event, had spontaneously invited DeRoche to join her on a 221-mile pilgrimage through Italy.
It wasn’t an easy sell for the self-described worrywart.
“I was scared of snakes, I was scared of men, I was scared of animals, I was scared of what [all that walking] would do to my body . . . and then there was the fear of taking so much time off work and running out of money,” she says of her concerns at the time. “It’s really a question of what I wasn’t afraid of.”
With Vapnitchnaia’s encouragement, DeRoche agreed to tag along, setting out in July 2014, resolving to face her fears one day at a time.
To her surprise, the grueling exertion set her mind at ease.
“Walking all day, every day, caused my body to fall into this rhythm,” she says. “I became so deeply rooted in the present that I wouldn’t think about how many miles I had to go” — or what the future had in store.
“Worrying is kind of an obsession with looking ahead, and figuring out everything you can’t control in that situation,” she says. “When I was walking, I didn’t look ahead anymore. I learned to trust in myself.”
Take the tendonitis she developed within a week of starting her Italian pilgrimage — the result of shoddy street sneakers. She told her travel companion that she wanted to quit, anxious that the pain would intensify and lead to lasting damage.
“Masha said, ‘Keep listening to your body and honor whatever it needs,’ ” DeRoche says. So she decided to quash her fears and forge ahead, buying a rusty old bike to ride when she felt too sore to walk.
The friends reached their destination weeks afterward. DeRoche felt so empowered that she agreed to tackle another three-week pilgrimage with Vapnitchnaia later that year, following the 241-mile path Gandhi trod on his famous 1930 Salt March. The author, now settled in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia, hasn’t traveled much since successfully completing her India journey, but she’s still applying its lessons to her everyday life.
“I was seeing a therapist years ago, and he said, ‘ Go to your happy place.’ I burst into tears and said, ‘I don’t have a happy place!’ ” she says. “This gave me a place. When I’m struggling now, I go for a walk.”