It’s already been a few years since I started traveling alone. I like to travel with friends or just with my husband, and longer trips or to faraway places I do with them. But once or twice a year I go alone, usually somewhere by the sea. I’m staying with myself. I talk very little on the phone with those at home, only what is strictly necessary. I don’t follow the latest alarmist news from the world (I don’t do it in “ordinary life” either). I don’t turn on the TV in my hotel room (I don’t do it at home either). I don’t wander around the shops, I just buy what I strictly need. I talk very little with the people of the place I go to.
I just walk around, sunbathe (if it’s sunny weather), I read and write. In those days writing becomes a pressing necessity, more necessary than eating. I have important insights that make their way into the light because I have the time and inclination to face them. I have accepted them and allow them to exist in my inner space. I don’t solve them yet, but I take them in my arms and tell them I see them. “I see you! I know you are there and you are part of me! I don’t hide you under thick blankets of guilt anymore, so I couldn’t feel you! Come, come to the light!”
*
It wasn’t always like that. I was a woman who only went to work and shopping alone. I wrote here how scared I was when I got on the train alone for the first time. How afraid I was to be alone far from home. I imagined that all the evils in the world would descend on me: flares of spondylitis, pain of all kinds, earthquakes, floods, the end of the world… Even now I still have discomfort on the first day.
“I fought with myself and I succeeded!” Yes, I thought I was a great fighter, that I managed to overcome my fears. What an illusion…! You don’t fight your fears. You don’t even ignore them, as if they weren’t there. But invite them to sit at the table with you. You look them in the eye, allow them to exist, and then accept and integrate them. It’s hard. Very hard. The more afraid you are, the more the fears become embedded in you. Like thorns that stick deep in the soul. It hurts to have a thorn stuck in you, but the idea of taking a needle to poke it out hurts even more.
When I started traveling on my own, I was spinning like a lion in a cage. Alone in the hotel room, alone on the beach, alone in a cafe or restaurant. I was not comfortable being alone. I wanted to talk on the phone or text with people at home. I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror of solitude. I wanted to run away from myself. Hilarious… How can you run away from yourself? Here is what I wrote on the first evening of the trip I made a month ago, in Mangalia.
*
“I am sitting alone at a table in a restaurant. The sea is in front of me. I’m drinking a cappuccino. Around me, families, couples. Another time I would have felt sad, alone, abandoned. Inferior. I’m alone at the table…
I’m smiling. I sip from my cappuccino. I don’t need anyone to feel enough. I’m not abandoned, never have been. That’s just how I felt. I needed someone to validate my existence. To give me a justification that I exist. That I don’t live in vain. I always had to prove that I deserved to exist, that someone wanted me around. That I’m needed. I couldn’t exist just for myself.
I’m relaxing my muscles. I take another mouthful of cappuccino. A ray of sunshine emerges from the thick clouds. Does not matter. I feel good. Tired, but good. I look for the horizon line, beyond the foaming waves. Is far. I don’t want to run towards the horizon anymore. I’m fine here.
I finished my cappuccino. I signal the waiter to bring me the bill. I don’t care what he thinks, what everyone thinks. I only had a cappuccino, while the others around me devoured entire plates of food. It’s their business.
I pay, get up and leave. I feel a wave of joy wash over me. I’m at the seaside! I scan my body. There are still areas where joy has no access. I have patience. That time will come. Now I enjoy the joy.”
*
That first night I had chills. Because of fear. Emotions were coming out of me and I couldn’t stop them from coming out. I allowed them to exist. With me. The character I had created, about myself, was falling apart.
In the last evening I spent in Mangalia, I had another insight that shattered my false image of myself even more. From somewhere, deep within me, came the little girl rejected by her mother, who joined the little girl abandoned somewhere, in the middle of the unleashed world, from the first evening. Here is what I wrote.
*
“I am small. By human standards, I’m very small. I take up very little space. My consumption of: food, water, electricity, people’s time and nerves is also very little. Even my shadow is very small.
In recent years, since I no longer have a job, like the rest of the “normal” people, I have decreased in height and weight. Now I’m even smaller. I consume even less. Because I no longer produce something tangible with the sweat of my labor. I’m a parasite, according to… according to what? According to my mindset.
My mindset says I have to do something to deserve to exist. What should I do? Something great, discover the cure for cancer, alleviate all the ills of the world. Something… that I don’t do. I have never considered what I do to be enough. Which probably means the answer isn’t there. In what I do. But in what I am.
What am I? An unwanted child that was not eagerly and lovingly awaited. A child who came at an inopportune time. There was no time and soul for me then. The circumstances were such that I was an extra concern at that time. It was no one’s fault. No one. Not me. Fate? Karma? Is this what my spirit has chosen? Who knows…
My mother told me much later that she didn’t want me. She thought she was sweetening the “pill” by saying that what was she have done without me later, at another critical moment in her life? Growing up, my mother became indispensable to me. She was my mom. I was addicted to her until she died. Again, no one was to blame. Karma.
And now… Look, mom, how little I consume! Don’t I deserve to exist?
I just ate a sea bass on the stove in the fanciest restaurant in Mangalia. I drink a glass of wormwood wine. I like wormwood. It’s honest, not hiding. “This is me, bitter and true! Take it or leave it”. I said thank you 15 times and apologized for getting too many napkins dirty. I think I am a little tipsy. The wine glass is big. Fancy restaurant.
I practice abundance. I prove that I deserve to exist. Like that, for no reason. The waiter came 3 times to ask if I wanted anything else. Fancy restaurant. I asked for the bill, because it seems to me that he is like a stalker. There’s a hole in the fence near my table. Maybe he’s afraid I’ll slip in there, little as I am, and disappear.
The rejection wound…the fugitive’s mask, small and agile. Who rejects me now? Just me.”
*
In recent years I have broken many false mirrors in which I saw myself as good and misunderstood by the world. What illusions! What masks! What fear! What guilt! What punishments! And how many more are still undiscovered…
When you hide your true face, your true identity, under thick masks of happiness, beauty and abundance, ask yourself why you do it. The answer will come. If you let it.
