Wilfred blazer (similar)
Almada Label top (similar)
H&M shorts
Zara sandals (similar)
Celine necklace
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Modu Atelier earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Attiki – Athens, Greece
Sometimes, when I give myself a moment to pause, I can’t help but marvel at what a rare, special and, frankly, incredible life I’ve had as an adult. I’ve lived in Paris three times (and I continue to trek back to Europe multiple times a year.) While building a career that sometimes makes me crazy but that I’m also still somewhat in awe of, I’ve managed to find the time to publish two books (and I have a third on the way.) I’m married to a person I’m truly proud to wake up next to every day, even if our respective careers mean we never see enough of each other. My friends are talented, generous, inspiring. Everything I wanted to be, I’ve become. There’s no dream that I haven’t chased and caught. And I get to do it surrounded by the kind of people I always hoped I’d someday know.
…but there’s a shadow over all of it. Because if I’ve lived fabulously and passionately and entirely on my own terms, it’s because I hoped that being the most dazzlingly happy version of myself would be somehow enough to erase the events of a particularly ugly period in my past. That simply isn’t possible (although it didn’t stop me trying.) Happiness doesn’t exist by degrees. And it is never so radiant that its light can permanently block out moments of misery.
I’ve lived this life that I love so much in spite of a blot on five years of time in the early 2000s. That I’m able to do it is a testament, I’m starting to realise, to my own resilience. I bounced back, and then some – but I’ll never really be who I might have been without the experiences of those five years, which are still so hard to verbalise. There are words, but none seem right. So for years, I’ve simply folded them up and tucked them away inside myself. Maybe I hoped that eventually, they’d just get lost in there. They never did. And in living to the hilt, I’ve been trying to exist over them, like making one kind of noise to drown out another, but that doesn’t work. It doesn’t make them any less real or any less part of my history, to no matter how much I might wish for that.
Months ago, I alluded to an old story I’ve never told, because I couldn’t find the right words to express it. This is it. We’re getting there.
Before we left for Athens, I started the very hard but ultimately necessary work that I needed to do to step out of the shadow of this piece of my past. I’m not sure what pushed me to it, but somehow, I finally realised that I can’t go on living while pretending like it never happened. I can live in defiance of it, and I can live beyond it, but I can’t live a full life without acknowledging it. I’ve tried. It never gets better – sometimes, it gets different, but that’s the best I can say. There is no making it go away. There is no living like I didn’t live through it, because it’s insidious, it creeps into places I would never expect and surprises me, which is actually worse. That leaves acceptance. Unfolding. There is no other choice, no matter how much I want one.
To say it hasn’t been easy is a gross understatement. It’s a process, every single day. But I’m almost there. I’m almost ready to unfold this part of my life and hold it up to the light.
