My first big sola trip in 30 years!
I’m doing it. I’m on my first big sola trip in 30 years! Me voy a Espana, la tierra de mi corazon. So much to share about why Spain is so deeply embedded in my heart. For now, tho, I’m just reveling in the beginning of the adventure!
Getting across the pond
A fluffy black bird hanging out inside the terminal where I waited to take off; the bright yellow grasses and flowers on the train from Madrid to Granada, and the peaceful little street where I’m staying (complete with pomegranates on top of the pedestrian posts).
The trip over was long, but with the help of a super friendly Air Canada flight attendant (he was very attentive to my needs all throughout the flight), I had everything I needed to get to my sweet little home-for-a-week in Granada, Spain.
Traveling in my youth
This is a pretty huge thing for me. 30ish years ago (when I was 16), I took a trip to South America for the summer. It was my first time navigating around a foreign country (sometimes sola), and it just felt so right. I felt alive in a brand new way.
There’s a beauty in being a foreigner. Brand new sights and sounds, different language, and just the feeling of being off-center. It requires new perspectives, and now I realize it puts neuroplasticity in turbo mode.
After that trip, I took a few more, on my own and with friends, before the jet-setting life I had envisioned for myself faded into the far far distance. I got pregnant, became a wife, and proceeded to redirect all my energy into being a mom (at the ripe old age of 22). It turned out I loved being a mom- which was unexpected for me! But for me it meant bending my life around other people, on a day-to-day basis, and at some point I lost myself. And since I really had no concept of self-care to begin with, I just kept getting more and more depleted.
Diving head first into the deep end of caregiving
After about 4 years of very challenging married life and motherhood (sometimes single motherhood, when my husband was deployed), my nervous system was fried, and I started to get sick. That was the beginning of a very long, hard journey through chronic illness. Over the course of 18 years, I lost the ability to do most of the things I loved: dance, travel, walk, sleep, eat good food. My body started rejecting pretty much everything, and basically shutting down all my systems in order to protect myself. Over the past 5 years, I have learned sooooo much about what was going on in my body, heart, and mind during all those years of chronic symptoms and limited capacity. I’ve spent these five years diving deep, excavating old structures that had been protecting me from trauma, and pouring love into the cracks.
This year, after 26-ish years of mothering and caregiving, and after 5 years of turning lots of that care toward me, I am celebrating a new era of my life. I don’t know yet all the places it will take me, but I do know it’s brought me to SPAIN!
Those 5 years made all the difference
I just want to say: there were many, many moments during my 20+ years healing journey when it was very unclear whether I would ever be well. Times when I thought I’d be stuck in the dysregulated loops forever. Times when I could feel myself “getting worse” and I was scared I wouldn’t get to see my kids grow up. Times when I just wanted to give up because I was so profoundly exhausted.
So I am beyond grateful (more like in awe and wonder and still a bit of shock) that my body is able to join me on this adventure!
At one point in my journey, a couple years into learning about nervous system dysregulation, I actually gave up on getting better. However, I decided that even if I never got better I would still spend time every day learning to love and tend to myself in a new way. It became my devotional practice to myself, with very little expectation that it would “get” me anything, that it would make me better. That moment was actually a turning point for me. I spent the next few years re-configuring my relationship with myself, my expectations of my body, my understanding of why I am here on earth. (It was a revelation to me that my main job was not to make other people happy and fix things that are “wrong”. More on that another time.)
So those five years of devotion to a new way of being went deep. And my whole system, which had been depleted and stuck in survival mode, finally started to remember how to live in peace. And that’s how I was able to reclaim my energy and my health. Pretty amazing.
