Unpublished

I confess – I didn’t think I’d be sharing anymore travel posts in 2020. But then I stumbled upon these unpublished photos from our stay at the Hotel Westminster in Paris in 2016. And I knew their moment had finally come.

It’s not often that I leave photos unpublished. At least not photos that I hang onto. If we take photos that I find I really don’t feel good about, for whatever reason, I simply delete them and move on. There’s no reason to dwell on it. Everyone has a bad day and some outfits just don’t look as lovely in pictures as they feel in reaslity. C’est la vie. But these… these photos are special. And yet, they’ve sat in my archives for four years, ignored.

Our trip to Paris in 2016 was an epic adventure, to say the least. We were hosted by Warwick Hotels, and had the chance to stay at both of their properties in the city. But we spent longer at the Hotel Westminster, and fell much more in love with it. It would be hard not to, if you love Paris. The property is truly a quintessential Parisian luxury hotel, from the Louis XIV furnishings to the courtyard views and easy walk to the Palais Garnier. For me, in a way, it was a homecoming, a moment when I knew that I was exactly where I’d always wanted my life to lead me.

…I think anyone taking a bubble bath in a marble tub with champagne, strawberries and a vintage Dumas novel can probably say that. But it was absolutely true for me. In the spring of 2016, I was thirty, half a lifetime older than on my first trip to Paris in 2001. The hotel I stayed in on that school trip was just a few blocks away from the Hotel Westminster. But they might as well have been in two different worlds. I was the youngest student on that school trip, a nerdy girl with bright white sneakers and a fleece jacket, both clearly chosen by her parents. No one, I knew, could have imagined she would wind up here just fifteen years later.

But there I was. The champagne was a gift from Warwick Hotels and, for their generosity, I nearly shattered the glass door of the shower uncorking it. That was just part of the fun, really. (Ian still makes fun of me about it.) This evening, and the photos that capture it, were perfect. So why have they sat unpublished for so long?

I’ve asked myself that question often since I stumbled upon them again weeks ago. And in the end, I concluded that at thirty, although I found myself living the life I’d always wanted, I still felt a bit ashamed of that. What right did I have to such luck, when so many people around me were struggling just to make ends meet? Why did I get to be so happy, when so many people were miserable? I don’t know the answer to those questions anymore now than I did back then. I suspect I never will. What I’ve learned, though, is that every success is worth celebrating. That the little bit of luck that goes along with all my hard work – because make no mistake, it took years of work to get to this perfect Parisian moment – does not diminish the work.

Success is not the product of hard work alone. My personal circumstances meant I was perfectly placed to be the kind of girl who gets to live her Parisian dream, if she wants to. And I did. That doesn’t mean that anyone handed it to me – it just means they didn’t hold me back. I can acknowledge and verbalise that now, in a way that I couldn’t in 2016. I don’t ask myself, “Why me?” anymore. I know the answer. And I at once accept it and do what I can to change it. Which means no more unpublished photos.