Traveling
“Travel is not about escaping life, but a way to keep life from escaping us”
The past year and a half have changed many things in our lives from how we work, how we prioritize, how aware we are of our own fragility, how much to not take for granted, and how big, yet how small the world is and continues to be. Travel for me has always been a way to reset when I feel as if my life is in a rut, when I am feeling as if I am moving through the motions of daily life without really seeing, really feeling, really understanding. The need for it has been more acute in the last nine months as life teetered between the changes of the unknown and the reassurances of life before. After my recent re-emergence of my depression, I have felt the need to go somewhere far away that is not home, but is still familiar enough to me.
As with most writers, Paris has always had a lure for me. It is the city where writers and intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald had held court in cafes during their time. The romanticism of these writers gathered in cafes to talk, to argue, to draw inspiration from one another has been the stuff of legends. It has always been my goal to live here one day, which is something I still hold on to as a dream, perhaps a bit closer than in years past.
As the fog of my recent depression lifts slowly, thankfully with the increase in dosage of the medication that has helped me for the last nine years, I arrived in Paris anxious because of the reality that I am not feeling myself entirely just yet and the unknown of how much life has changed since Covid here in this city that I love as much as my home of New York City.
As I meandered down the windy, small streets of the Marais, noticing familiar shops and new places, I could feel my own fragility of what I’ve experienced these last few months ease just the tiniest bit. With each step toward setting up life here from getting my monthly metro pass, to stocking my fridge and cupboards, and setting up the apartment that will be home for many days, I felt a bit of my self-confidence that I am capable and a survivor return bit by bit. See, one of the emotional side effects of this disease is how helpless you can feel since there is no way to quantify how bad or how much better the illness is on any given day. It is like living with a disease that is a phantom. So, every little bit of navigating in a country where my language skills are passable (even though I’ve been studying for years) can start to make me feel like a capable human again.
Most have asked what it is I do here when I am here for such a long time. It may sound glib or pretentious, but I am here to feel alive in a way that I need to feel so desperately right now. I need the stimuli of having to figure out the most basic of life’s tasks to remind myself that I am not sleepwalking through each day, that the fog that descends on my own mind when the depression is firmly in place is thinning enough for me to see what is ahead. I need the sense of accomplishment by being able to get the most basic of life’s tasks completed like going to the post office to mail a letter back home. Like with all of the unknowns of this illness, my own remedy is my own, something I know wouldn’t, nor should it, work for everyone who suffers. In years past I think I ran here to get away from the pressures of my daily life as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend, and as a human. This time I am not running away, so much as I am running toward a place within me where I can feel like myself as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend, and as a human.