Fuck Clothes, Buy Flights – Italian Edition.

Dear Katie 

Thank you for making it through January. February. March and April.

I lost you for awhile there, and I never imagined I would ever get you back. 

Yet here you are! Here’s a trip to your favourite place in the world to say thank you for sticking by me. Love Katie.

I have been fighting with myself and my creative brain, dancing around different approaches, subject matters and ways to even begin writing of this trip, so I decided to start typing and see what happens.

During my studies with Yale University on the psychology of happiness, I learnt of the profound features of the mind, some annoying and some extremely fascinating in their simplicity.

One annoying feature of the mind, which, to my absolute joy, is the art of ‘Buying things or buying experiences’.

We buy the car and we feel a sense of accomplishment, of pride. Then, after 1 year of getting in that same car every morning, joy subsides, and we feel familiarity. There is no dopamine rush. Just a vehicle that causes us more bills, more frustration.

And then there is buying that trip to Italy. The rush of booking it. Looking at hotels and places to hike and eat. Dreams of roaming the unfamiliar streets alone. Then, there is the joy of travelling there, enjoying not just the destination, but also the journey. Then we arrive and everything is new. We wonder the streets aimlessly without purpose, we have no idea what our day is going to look like and that is a big ass dopamine rush in itself.

We take ourselves out for dinner and take a photo enjoying an aperol spritz at sunset. Then the journey ends, and 1 year later we see that photo of us enjoying aforementioned Aperol Spritz and our heart flutters as we remember it.

The dopamine kick hits us over and over again.

I left on this trip with a feeling I could not quite place. I had endured a mind-boggling betrayal by 2 people I trusted earlier this year, then hit a pandemic. I was so terrified of myself during this time and I never knew it was all preparing me to create a sustainable business deeply rooted in all of the things that light my soul on fire, I was now doing up to 7 sessions in a day and manifesting like a champ.

But something in the shadows of my prefrontal cortex was lingering, after finding out the very person who hurt me had moved back to Lisbon, I was watching myself becoming… Well, a little bit unhinged. So I booked that trip and off I went into the depths of Italy to dissect the Humpty Dumpty of my thoughts and put my soul back together.

I bought myself a vino on the boat to Sorrento and saluted myself for having the courage to run away to a different country solo on a quest to find myself. ‘Taking yourself to Italy’ is met with a bored roll of the eye, silence, or the dismissal of a hand. People don’t see what goes on behind the scenes, they don’t understand that these trips are the very component that keeps me together, I am a fugitive of a tainted past.

These trips are NUMBER 1 on my priority list, far above new clothes or rounds of shots at the bar. In fact, I realised with a laugh, I was wearing the exact same clothes as 2 summers ago.

As we approach Sorrento, all of the muscles in my stomach contract and release in its beauty. The love I felt for myself in that moment overbeared every muscle in my body and I wept. The journey to falling in love with myself has been a long and turbulent one. I have endured more pain that I care to write about. But standing here, I wouldn’t change a thing. 

I hope everyone gets to experience this kind of euphoria within themselves. It is my mission to make it so.

Almost immediately I find the limoncello store with the quirky owner.

After all those months since I was last here. All the adventures I have endured and the people I have loved, he is still here, doing the same thing, cracking the same jokes. They say that in the times of Shakespeare what one would process through their mind in an entire lifetime, is simply what we process reading a New York Times cover to cover today.

I dream of such purity.

After asking him about the desires of his soul he shuts the store to show me his paintings and talk about psyliciban and shadow work. No matter what language we speak, the internal battle we expereince inside of ourselves is universal. The polarities of light and dark and how art, in whatever forms it moves through us, is the most important work on this earth. That, the world now more than ever, desperately needs us writers, dreamers, painters and wounded healers.

I walk to the cliffside for sunset. I sit here. I sit here for a really long time.

My phone is broken and I forgot my notepad. I dissect my life for the 1000th time in my mind. I ask myself deep questions I created for my clients. And I realise there is nothing left to dissect..

I know myself through and through

Internal coherence. What an achievement!

I am not sad, nor am I happy

I am content….

My inner mean girl raises her ugly head. Am I confusing contentment with melancholy? Should I feel lonely?

I can’t stop smiling yet something pulls at the walls. This is what happens when you immerse yourself in the unfamiliar solo. The highs are high because they are new. And the lows are low because they are familiar

Still, I move forward to identify the emotion, give it a name. Give it meaning.

I sit it here and I drink in every moment, I pull apart my 3€ picnic and thank the skies for giving me my favourite colour sunset

A free show from the universe as if to say

‘You are exactly where you are can meant to be. Don’t stop’

I walk home in silence as phrases for my novel hit me in the stomach. I repeat them over and over in my mind until I can purge them through a pen.

I am living in a freedom most dream of and few know exist

Not because I am special

No no!

I am just a girl from Gold Coast, Australia. 

I am free because I had the courage to say…. This is not my story.

On the third morning, I was met with my first panic attack since January. My phone had decided not to turn on and 2 days of navigating a foreign country alone became slightly more diffcilut. I also hate to admit, that I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms from constantly having that fucking thing in my hand.

A combination of solitude, self inquiry and no contact with the outside world (inside my phone), coffee and gluten riddled this ‘no caffeine celiac’ into a state of pure anxiety. 

I was shaking too much to journal and I was in a lobby waiting for my room in my new hotel by the Marina to be ready. Affirmations don’t work on me. My subconscious knows when I say ‘I am this’ and ‘I am that’ that’s it’s bullshit.

When in a state of panic there is no time for self inquiry. I went into the toilets and did alternate nostril breathing and EFT tapping and within 5 minutes it passed through my body and I felt good again.

The guilt of people saying ‘oh you’re so lucky’ instead of ‘I’m so happy for you’ weighed so heavy on me I spent most of last night tossing and turning. 

When I got out the owner was standing there with my room key….‘You look a little bit stressed, we want you to be happy in our country so we gave you an upgrade’

Don’t let anyone shame you or belittle the severity of your internal war… Your surroundings can only be beautiful when you feel good within. My outer world was a reflection of my inner world and as soon as I got in that hotel room I did breathwork, yoga and more EFT tapping and was out the door feeling a million dollars within 30 minutes.

I came here with a mission to start piecing my novel together. I open up the pages and discombobulated chapters I started writing 4 years ago when I moved halfway across the world to follow my gut feeling.

Was this really my life? Did I really just up and run away like that?

Was I really that low? Was I really that high?

Did I really let these men manipulate my mind and my body?

Do I really want to put this out into the world? Would I have been better off just living a simple life?

Oh, the questions we ask ourselves in a world of deceit, A world of smoke and mirrors on social media. Oh, there it is, that residual unidentified feeling again.

I want them to write on my tombstone that I created a world in which I was rich on the inside and made others feel so. The locals in Sorrento had named me the night previous ‘The Australian girl who is a millionaire in her heart.’

I write like this because I have to. There is a longing in me that niggles at the 4 corners of my mind at 4am. A longing that assertively whispers in my ear ‘Please, we need you.’ It is self indulgent and selfless all in one mind boggling mix.

I book myself a last-minute shitty little room in Positano and set off on a bus along the coast. A woman in the limoncello store had heard me talking about it. She told me ‘Sit on the right side of the bus, and don’t forget to look back, the journey looks completely different in hindsight, just like life itself.’ And poof she was gone.

On that bus trip, I discovered a new kind of blue. It was not aqua, nor was it turquoise, I decided in my diary at that moment to name it ‘Amalfi blue’. The sea beamed at me in variations of this hue and my heart stopped. I took myself out for an overpriced gluten-free pasta down by the water and strolled home slowly along the cliffs.

As I sat enjoying a limoncello the boys had wrapped up for me to take to Positano, a feeling of dread overcame me. Did I waste this trip indulging in my feelings? Should I have written more? But on the plane home as I looked back in hindsight, I realised, the experience in itself is what makes me a writer.

I looked out at the sky and thanked the Universe for taking away my phone, whilst also through gritted teeth asked for it to be solved upon landing.

I saw sites during this trip I would have missed before whilst walking like an idiot staring down at google maps or answering a WhatsApp message that could have waited for later. Without headphones or anything else to look at or listen to, I heard voices within myself that had been longing to be heard for months, shit…. probably even years.

And it isn’t until 30 minutes before landing I identify the hidden emotion. In Italian ‘to forgive’ is almost the same as ‘to forget’. In forgiving this person, my heart feels I will have to forget them, which, in all the pain this person has caused me, is something I cannot bear to do. I burst out crying without warning, as if a valve in my heart has been released now I can put a name to thought.

I open up the door to my little pink apartment in the centre of Lisbon and smile. Everything was the same yet I was a completely different person.

Although I had only been gone 4 days, I endured years worth of growth within myself. Another tear niggles at the corner of my eye and I let it fall as I open up my laptop and decide to start this blog. I hope it inspires just one person to go out there and tackle the world.

What a feeling it is, to truly be free… I wish everyone knew how easily they could feel this way. 

Solo travel is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

If you don’t run away to foreign lands and immerse yourself in solo unfamiliarity, how will you ever know what voices inside you are real, and which voices are just byproducts of the company you keep?

Fuck Clothes; Buy Flights.