Paris Day Seven: La Fin

Around a month ago, a former college professor sent me a Facebook message. She came across a story I had written nearly a decade earlier after going to a Cleveland Indians game for an assignment in one of her classes (People of Cleveland — Daily Curve).

I read the article and was struck by how little my voice had changed. I realized I'd spent years thinking I'd lost a voice that had been waiting for me all along.

I wrote that story during a season of my life when I still allowed myself adventure and surprise. Not long afterward, I met my ex, and over the years that followed I slowly convinced myself that version of me had simply been younger — more naïve, more carefree — not someone I could become again.

I became a lawyer. I got married. I moved to my dream neighborhood. My parents were proud. From the outside, everything looked exactly as it was supposed to. So I ignored the quiet feeling that something wasn't quite right. Why disturb a life that looked exactly the way it was supposed to?

I have vivid memories of how small I let my life become. I remember declining to go snowboarding because the weather was bad and I didn't want to risk the drive. I turned down invitations to parties because they meant being away from home too long, surrounded by people I didn't know. I applied only for local jobs because I couldn't imagine leaving the people I thought mattered.

Little by little, I built a life around avoiding discomfort. I shared nothing — not my fears, not my doubts, not the quiet feeling that something wasn't quite right. I let no one in, because then I didn't have to let myself in either.

I lived a clean life because I didn't want messy.

Leaving my marriage was the first time I chose messy anyway. I was twenty-six. I had spent essentially my entire twenties with him. I didn't know where I would live, how I would support myself, or how to be alone.

But I knew I had to leave.

So I chose the mess instead of the storybook.

That's when I realized something. Confidence isn't what gives us the courage to make those decisions. It comes afterward, once we've collected enough evidence that we survived what we once thought was impossible.

Every time we avoid something uncomfortable, our brain experiences relief. That relief convinces us that avoidance was the right decision, and over time our world quietly gets smaller. We stop leaving relationships that no longer fit. We stop pursuing the ones that scare us. We stop changing careers, taking the trip alone, or telling the truth about how we're feeling.

At some point, you have to stop waiting to feel ready and give yourself a chance to become ready instead.

A few days after my divorce finalized, I took my first solo trip overseas. I walked 190 miles from Portugal to Spain with ten pounds on my back. I thought I wasn't in good enough shape. I thought I would get lost. I didn't even tell my parents what I was doing until I was already on the trail because it felt that ridiculous.

It wasn't.

I got lost. I made mistakes. I once spent an entire night trying to get a piece of asphalt out of my eye with a Q-tip.

It was one of the best experiences of my life.

More importantly, it reminded me of something I'd forgotten years before.

I could trust myself.

That lesson changed everything.

One solo trip became another. Aruba. Wimbledon. Mountain summits. National Parks. Concerts in places I'd never been. I stopped waiting for someone else to make life feel bigger.

Solo travel didn't just show me the world. It gave me my life back.

But this trip was different. After Dad's battle with cancer and his death, and after losing Jordan, I realized I was avoiding something else in my life. It wasn't another adventure I was missing. It was the courage to let other people into this one.

I have notebooks filled with stories just like the ones I shared this week. Travel stories, ordinary Tuesdays, bad first-dates, little moments that felt worth remembering. I always told myself they were just for me. As long as they stayed in a notebook, no one could reject them — and neither could I.

If I shared those stories, I would no longer be the buttoned-up lawyer who escaped a marriage, learned how to travel the world alone, and somehow overcame unimaginable tragedy.

I would just be the mess.

After these losses, I started going to therapy again. I wasn't looking for permission to fall apart, but I didn't know how to hold everything together either.

Instead of teaching me how to manage my grief, my therapist gave me much simpler advice: be messy.

Don't hide your grief; live it. Don't hide your emotions; share them. Don't package everything so neatly that people never see what's really going on. And if someone can't handle that version of you, let them walk away.

I wasn't planning on writing or sharing anything during this trip, just like all the ones before it. But then Professor Lee sent me that message, and I realized that maybe sharing these stories wasn't separate from being messy.

Maybe it was the practice of it.

I started thinking about why I had taken this trip in the first place — to honor Jordan, to take the trip he always wanted to take, and to remind myself that life has to be lived now.

Jordan and Dad both left this world far too early, before they could see all the places they wanted to see, say everything they wanted to say, or become all the people they still had time to become.

In that sense, writing every day during this trip wasn't for me. It was for them. But it was also for the twenty-year-old girl who went to Cleveland on a whim, wrote a story about it, published it, and never questioned whether she was a writer.

I don't know what my writing journey looks like beyond this. I don't know whether I'll share every day, every week, or every month. But I do know this: I won't retreat back into the perfectly antiseptic version of my life, where no one can see my hurt, and no one has the chance to connect with it. I won't hide from my emotions simply because they are uncomfortable.

And I'll say it here, for all of you to hear:

I will write a book.

Back to Paris . . .

My flight home left at 9 a.m. from CDG. I did everything right this time. I booked an Uber instead of relying on the metro. I left myself extra time. I packed-ish the night before (after the World Cup game, that may or may not have ended at 2 a.m.).

Then I woke up with my alarm at 5, tried to flip on the lights, and the power was out.

I packed by iPhone flashlight as best as I could and left the apartment, proud of my decision to book a place that at least had an elevator.

Then I remembered that the power was out. One-hundred and sixteen stairs with a suitcase. Made it to the bottom and realized I'd forgotten to put the apartment keys back in the lockbox. One hundred and sixteen more stairs, up and then down.

A week ago, I probably would have seen it as another disaster. Another sign that nothing was going according to plan.

Instead, I laughed.

Because that's what this trip taught me.

Not how to make better plans.

How to let go of the illusion that good planning guarantees a smooth life.

When my therapist told me to be messy, I thought we were only talking about my grief. But we were talking about life, too.

Airports. Heartbreak. Missed trains. New dreams. None of it is tidy. None of it is supposed to be. But it's meant to be shared.

Five years ago, I thought the goal was to build a life that never needed changing.

Paris reminded me that life will always ask us to change our plans.

The only choice we have is whether we keep hiding behind the life we built to protect ourselves, or find the courage to build one that allows us to be fully seen.