Après Paris
I remember the moment so clearly.
I was sitting at my desk one morning, buckling under the weight of a job I no longer liked, creative aspirations that were emaciated from neglect, and a heart that had every right to press charges against me for reckless endangerment. I was adrift, sad, and desperate for a catalyzing moment that would shock me back into building a life I actually wanted to live.
Travel wasn’t a natural escape for me. My family had done it rarely when I was a child, and the only trips my ex and I had ever taken were for weddings and weekend getaways nearby — our finances and clashing priorities never allowed us to dream any bigger. People who took regular vacations abroad seemed like an exotic species to me.
But I had just had dinner with one of those exotic species — a friend whose habitual world travels and cultural immersions always made me promise myself that one day I’d follow suit. She had been telling me about one of her upcoming forays over one of our wine-and-pizza catch-ups, and as we walked to the subway at the end of the night I found myself musing aloud. I had just gotten my bonus payout at work, a good one for me after a very demanding year, and I wondered if I should use a portion of it to take myself somewhere far-flung for a week. Maybe, I thought, completing disrupting my routine and doing something that felt wildly self-indulgent was exactly what I needed.
I can’t remember exactly how Paris surfaced in that conversation, but I do recall sitting on a bench along Danforth Avenue in east-end Toronto on a humid late-summer night and my friend’s eyes sparkling as she told me how much I would love it. How someone like me, with a graduate degree in literature, a very defined sense of style, a deep passion for food, and an affinity for art and culture, had made it to my early forties without ever having been to the iconic city always seemed to amaze people. It suddenly felt imperative that I go.
It was a few days later that I found myself at my desk in that unbearable moment. It was just before 10am. I looked out the window and swallowed the last inch of coffee out of my mug. I used my arm to shove the books and papers in front of me to the side and pulled my keyboard closer. Twenty minutes later, I was in possession of a plane ticket and a flat rental in Paris’s 11th arrondissement. I would depart in five weeks.
Paris is one of those things in my life that I will always believe was meant to be. Every piece of the trip fell perfectly into place, and as I sat at the airport waiting to board my overnight flight across the Atlantic, I had this deep, intuitive sense that I was doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.
Less than 24 hours later, I was sitting on a terrace in Eastern Paris in a pair of black leather leggings and a black chiffon tunic, eating a late supper of tartines and drinking a blood-red Bordeaux while watching the 11e neighbourhood’s streets bustle and churn on a Saturday night.
“Live each moment to its very edges.” It’s something I say to people — or to myself — when my wish is that we, as Thoreau encouraged, experience the world deeply and suck the marrow from life. That’s exactly what I did in Paris, wringing the life out of each waking second, whether I was in full tourist mode at a landmark or a museum or simply watching the world drift by from a sidewalk brasserie or a bench in a park. The oppressive weight that had prompted the trip lifted as I got to know Paris’s storied streets, even if the things that comprised it — career restlessness, a lack of purpose, heartbreak — were never far from mind. Paris gave me the space I needed to contemplate those things rather than being pinned down by them.
As I carried a market bag brimming with exquisite food and an armful of pink Matsumoto asters home to my flat from the Marché Bastille on my first full day in the City of Light, I understood it was going to take an uncompromising approach to self-care to heal from the way I had been living. Once a Boston Marathoner, accomplished home cook, and vibrant personality, I had become a diminished human being. I worked too much and ineffectively, constantly distracted by my love for a man who lived in a different country on the opposite coast. The relationship had been labelled “impossible” before it even started, but that hadn’t stopped us from becoming entangled deeply enough that the constant ache of distance and starkly different views on what our connection meant derailed my sleeping and eating habits, which in turn eroded my ability to stay fit and injury-free as an athlete, which took a toll on my mental health and overall ability to stay motivated and engaged with things that brought me joy. It had all happened gradually, bit-by-bit, until suddenly there I was, two years after meeting him, wondering where the woman I thought I was had gone.
I was determined to find her again in Paris, and the moments of revelation and insight were plentiful and profound. I met the magnificent Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre, and she taught me that even though I was broken I was still beautiful. An against-all-odds gilded sunset I took in from the top of the Eiffel Tower proved to me that the Universe provides when we surrender. The majesty of Notre-Dame and Sainte Chapelle showed me how to let go of what no longer serves while still holding on to the beauty. And the journal I filled with abandon and urgency and elation every day reminded me that no matter what I do to pay my bills, what I truly am is a writer.
If I had gone looking for redemption and rebirth in the streets of Paris, the city certainly delivered. A different woman flew home to Toronto than the one who had departed eight days earlier. I felt that change in the centres of the very cells that make me. And so I expected that when I walked off the plane back home, everything was going to be different. I was finally going to get the happy endings I deserved.
Except happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales. They’re not real life. I would risk for love again, and fail. Twice. I would keep up the writing practice I committed to in Paris and begin submitting regularly to literary magazines and competitions. I’ve gotten nothing but rejections so far. I’ve made extraordinary progress in my comeback as a runner, but despite a year of hard, committed work, I’m still not running the paces I had been when I last raced. And I still fall enormously short of all the things a “successful” person is expected to have at my age: a home, a car, a family, financial security.
Yet, today, precisely two years since arriving home from Paris, I am the happiest I can remember being in years. It’s a sense of well-being that has crept up on me over time, much like my deterioration had happened so gradually that it seemed a surprise when I finally saw it for what it was. Personal transformation takes an enormous amount of brutally hard and unflinching work. But that work has often been a pleasure, which I credit to a shift in mindset. The journey to the moment when that shift happens is a long and arduous one. But the shift itself is simple.
I went to Paris looking for a better version of myself. I wanted to be that better self so I would be worthy: of love, of success, of the fulfilled life I could imagine and so very much wanted to be living.
It would take me two more years to understand that my goal — being the best version of myself — was a good one but that my purpose for achieving that goal was way off base. As long as my purpose was rooted in outcomes — finding, and being loved by, a partner; having my writing recognized and published; meeting socially acceptable standards of success — genuine happiness, the kind that is always accessible, even amidst life’s most difficult challenges and blows, would forever elude me. Because outcomes are never stable.
Rather, I have come to know my purpose as living my life in full and authentic alignment with the ways in which I make this world a better place. The sense of joy and belonging I feel when I write, when I run, and when I cook is rooted in the very act of those activities — not in how they land (though it’s lovely when they also produce results). When I dwell routinely in that place of feeling energized by what I do, it creates an abundance of joy that I am able to extend outwards, to others.
So while my daily routine, which includes mileage logged and reps lifted, looks masochistic or even boastful to others, it serves a critical purpose. When I push myself to and then past my perceived physical limits, it teaches me to open up the space required to be brave enough to create art and to manifest nourishment in the world. Perhaps one day the energy of that authentic self will attract love and “success” into my realm. Those are very fine things, and I would welcome them, but they are no longer what drives me. I get up every day and challenge myself physically and creatively because doing those things give me a sense of direction and a deep internal contentment. They make me feel most like myself. And it is only when I am truly myself that I have any hope of contributing meaningfully to this life.
It’s no coincidence that on almost the exact date of my plane touching down after that magical stay in the City of Light I am toeing the start line of a marathon. It’s my first one in four years, my first since I had placed an outcome — being loved — ahead of all else. On some instinctual level, I knew my ability to handle endurance training was linked to my healing. So many times I said that if I could find my way back to running consistently, my broken heart would mend. I knew it was going to take a courageous investment in myself to get out of the hole I was in, and there are few things that demand such investment quite like a race that will break you if you don’t commit to physically, mentally, and emotionally preparing for its journey. It’s a race that demands the best version of yourself to complete. The cycle of stops and starts seemed endless, as injuries and life would knock me off track more times than I could count. But I never gave up. I finally got back to that start line.
The Après-Paris Me took much longer to take shape than I ever imagined. But after two years I've finally reached the kind of place I imagined myself in as I cleared my desk and booked that trip. It’s an even better one, in fact, as it’s not a fixed point — it’s a place from which I can continue to evolve. I have a steadfast belief that if I continue to invest in myself and in the places where my energy thrives — in my physicality and in my creativity — the path and I will find each other. It’s a fortunate thing I’ve rediscovered my love for the run. Because there is so very much more road ahead.
Allons-y.
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I wrote a daily dispatch from Paris, each of which can be found in The Paris Diary category. Every one of those pieces is important to me and, read together, I think capture a unique narrative. If I had to pick, however, the three whose words sing out most distinctly are:
