Solo hiking & wild camping heaven vs. the darkness of depression and early menopause 007: Stephie Boon

 

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  00:17

Hello, and welcome back to the HeadRightOut Podcast. This is the show that hopefully will launch you into doing something that is way beyond your comfort zone. Something that you never believed you were capable of doing. Perhaps there's just a little seed of an idea growing and hopefully this is going to be the show that will spur you on that will give you the encouragement that you need to HeadRightOut. Now today, I have a lovely, lovely guest, somebody who I've been friends with online for many years. Her name is Stephie Boon, and I have to say she is so honest in her conversation with me, particularly about her experiences with mental health. I should add here that we do talk about the darker side of depression, anxiety, and feelings of suicide. So if you are not in the right frame of mind to listen, please feel free to skip this episode for another day when you're feeling in a better place. That said, Stephie is still very keen for women who suffer with depression to hear her story and understand that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. There ARE ways of coping and learning to manage this debilitating illness. We also touch on early menopause and living with a son with Aspergers and how above everything else, hiking just fuels our souls... and challenges... well, they help us to push us out of our comfort zone and they help to give us focus. There's a lot of things that Stephie and I have in common, and in addition to we both love hiking, we both feel the same about challenges, and funnily enough, we both have a degree in Fine Art in fact, Steffi has got post-grad in Fine Art. So we just have very similar viewpoints. It's a wonderful conversation, go and have a listen. Enjoy.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  02:21

Okay, and welcome everybody, back to the HeadRightOut Podcast. My name is Zoe Langley-Wathen and I am here today with another wonderful guest. Today I am going to be chatting to Stephie Boon and I have a wee bio here to read out for you so Stephie lives in Cornwall, she spends a lot of time on the coast path. A woman after my own heart. She's been a walker and backpacker for as long as she can remember. One of her most significant past challenges was to hike the Inca Trail, before her fortieth birthday. She made it at thirty-eight! It was a charity track and the biggest part of the challenge was the fundraising.

 

Zoe Langley-Wathen  03:00

Nowadays she solo hikes and wild camps in the UK. At the moment her goal is to backpack all the national trails before she reaches sixty. So far she's completed the South West Coast Path, Offa's Dyke Path, the Cotswold Way, the South Downs Way, the Pedders Way and Norfolk Coast Path, and she says she's gradually working her way south to north. Stephie has an MA in Fine Art and always takes a sketchbook with her on her hikes. She plans to make a series of national trail paintings and possibly sell or publish them. Stephie shares her expertise and guides over on her website and on her blog, 10MileHike. She also suffers with serious episodes of depression, which was first treated for her in her early twenties. She's very open about this on her social media and within her blog, and she hopes that by sharing her experiences, she may inspire others to overcome personal difficulties and step out of their comfort zones. After all, life is just too precious not to do the things you've always wanted to do. There's also an article over on the 10MileHike blog called 'Fears Laid Bare' and I'll put the link to that in the show notes. It really does bear all, particularly about the biggest challenge that Stephie  is facing at the moment, that she says is literally scaring the living daylights out