Lost and Found

                 “Knowing how to belong to yourself is an art in a world 

                  where everyone is finding their home in others.” 

                                                                               —Renuka Gavrani 

This is my favorite photo of me from my recent trip to Barcelona. Usually, I cringe or cry when I see myself frozen in time, but this pic is different. My features were surprisingly devoid of the stress and anxiety usually etched across them. My countenance was joyful and confident, my complexion radiant next to the colorful mosaic tiles of Casa Batlló. Obviously relaxed, inspired, and dare I say happy as my windblown, salt and pepper hair framed a beaming smile and twinkling eyes.

When I first saw this pic, I was stunned. Not because I thought I looked beautiful, because I never did, but because I looked like ME. Not the me who has grown discontent, plagued by grief upon grief, anxiety, stress. Not the me waiting for the next horrible thing to fully crack me open and leave me a shattered, writhing mess unable to put myself back together. No, I look like the real me few people see or know. The me I actually like.

Life has done to me what it does to most. Shocked me. Devastated me. Wounded me. This year should have given me space to breathe, but somehow it slowly started to squeeze the life out of me. The girl who could take a licking and keep on ticking could no longer cope. My deeply sensitive side started recoiling at every real or perceived slight. I lost the ability to pivot, started slipping at work, and began avoiding those who could look at me and know something was off. I quit taking care of myself, quit being gracious, struggled to put one foot in front of the other. I felt unsafe. Jumpy. Scared of the unknown. I quit reading and writing, things that usually center me. With rising panic I sought a quiet, blank mind, which I equated with peace, but it was teasingly elusive. I was disappointed in both God and myself for failing to do better. I wondered a lot about the point of my life and if I could ever be enough when I failed so spectacularly so often. I was not depressed so much as I was anxious, tired, and disengaged. Simply put I lost myself. 

              "You are not loved for being above the human condition. 

               You are loved for being deeply, achingly human within it." 

                                                                                  —Chuck DeGroat

July was tough. August, September, and October were tougher. I cried more easily than usual over trivial things. I took everything personally, believing I deserved only bad and never good. I craved solitude, which everyone assumed I got a lot of because of my single status, but there was always too much to do to actually live in it. 

                   “Solitude is the soul’s holiday, 

                   an opportunity to stop doing for others 

                   and to surprise and delight ourselves instead.”       

                                                                  —Katrina Kenison

And then I simply could not do it anymore. I needed a reset. A soul holiday, so I chose the place I wished I had visited when I was in Spain 13 years ago and booked tickets to Barcelona. I have gone to Europe many times and returned with clarity, albeit exhausted, each time. This trip needed to be different. It had to be less sightseeing and more resting to allow my tired brain and wounded heart to come out to play again. I wanted to experience who I could be instead of who I had become, to like myself again. 

Things fell seamlessly into place: I used points to fly for free, found the perfect AirBNB overlooking the Mediterranean, and easily coordinated a visit with a friend who retired in Valencia, but still I waffled and almost canceled a few times. Self-sabotage much? And then I was almost derailed by the government shutdown (I initially mistyped that word with an i instead of u - fitting!)  

The anxiety intensified and I was angry and worried, but I stuck to my guns and went 2 days after the government reopened. The whole trip was satisfying, peaceful, and self-indulgent and the magic of Barcelona invited the truest parts of me to reemerge. Even though I will protect her from most of the world, the gift of reconnecting with myself was priceless. Walking alone as the Mediterranean crashed around me, acutely aware of my smallness in the context of this universe broke through my cynicism and gave me the freedom to make peace with the God who brought life to me. I settled into the reality that my life is different from most people's. I did not marry or have children and that is often a heavy grief to bear in a world that favors couples and families. But it does not mean I cannot thrive on my own. 

"I used to thing that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life to to end up with people who make you feel all alone."

                                                                          —Bobcat Goldthwait 

It is interesting that I traveled across the ocean to visit a city of millions in a quest to find solitude, but I did. In a city so large, next to a sea so vast I could become invisible. No one knew me, cared what I was doing, or would even remember me, and that felt like freedom. I sat in beauty that inspired me, captivated by light, movement, and symbolism. I wandered both aimlessly and with purpose, the beauty and energy of the city inspiring me more than the beauty of the faces and bodies begging for attention. 

In a world that favors fleeting, physical beauty, I found real beauty, definitely not staring back at me in the mirror or in the buff bodies at the beach, but in art and nature. In kindness, grace, and mercy. In the big, blue Mediterranean. I left with the resolve to let go of who the world tries to force me to be and instead become who I want to be, who I was created to be. And only in that am I found.

"It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” 

                                                                           —Ralph Waldo Emerson