In October 2014, I did something I’d been afraid to do for a long time. I broke up with my boyfriend of four years. And then I ran away to Aruba for a week.
I cried for the first two days of my trip. I floated face up in the ocean and thought about what it would be like if I just drifted out to sea. I texted my ex and asked if he could take care of our dog (“correction: my dog,” I remember typing) if I died. I filled up the bathtub in my hotel room and submerged myself just below the surface.
I wondered if dying felt like being underwater.
The crying wasn’t a new thing. I’d been crying everywhere. I determined which bathroom in my office was the least frequented so I could spend my periodic uncontrollable weeping breaks there. I sobbed in my car in the Whole Foods parking lot. I bought furniture for my new one bedroom apartment at IKEA, tears streaming down my face the whole time. So it wasn’t that different or surprising to be crying in a tiki hut on the beach. And as you’ll discover if you try to run from yourself, feelings aren’t bound by borders.
I came home and people told me I was brave for taking an international vacation alone. I wondered what they’d think if they knew what my trip was really like. The only real brave thing, I thought to myself, was that I didn’t actually let myself float off into the ocean.
After four years, the prospect of leaving behind the life you’ve built is almost as scary as staying in an unfulfilling relationship. You start to wonder if you can tolerate that your relationship is “not terrible” at best, as long as you just don’t have to start over. You start to wonder what the future will be like and, when you can’t imagine a future alone, you start to wonder what it would be like to not have to face the future at all.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I put on a brave face and pretended I felt ok. “Fake it ’til you make it,” I figured. I woke up every morning scared and alone, but I woke up. I started looking in the mirror and telling myself, “You deserve to be here.”
And eventually it started to work.
I’ve started going out of my way to do things that scare me. I chopped off my hair. I told someone I love them. And last month, I climbed a mountain. I thought about quitting less than half a mile up and every half mile from there. I struggled to climb over a fallen tree trunk and ripped my pants in the process. I ran out of water. My body hurt. My lungs felt like they were going to explode. Four hundred feet from the top, with the end in sight, I still didn’t think I’d make it.
As I was hiking, I realized this was a clumsy metaphor for everything I’ve been through in the past few months. When I got to the summit of the mountain, I couldn’t walk any further. I collapsed on the ground next to my backpack, then crawled to peer over the edge.
As I looked out at the valley below, I screamed: I DESERVE TO BE HERE.
