For me – I feel good about 2019. I choose to believe the worst of my grief and issues are behind me and my journey forward is now much closer to everyone else – ie I’m sure I won’t get everything right but I’ll try not to make a royal fuck up every time a little snag comes my way. I’m calling resolutions ‘goals’ this year.
The past two years have shown that no matter the depths I sink to, I claw my way out. And as far as mental health recovery goes, I’m a long way along the path now.
Until today, I’d never heard the phrase abuse by omission. But now I’ve heard it, I feel like I’ve come home.
If you’d told me three years ago that my poor, long suffering psychologist would still be listening to my woes at the end of 2018, I would have said, No way! (Possibly in much stronger language.) But here we are, 42 months later, and I still grace her couch on a regular basis. And not just for the lols.
Decades of maladaptive coping mechanisms crashed down around my ears, and the words severe depression and chronic anxiety were bandied about – in relation to me. I was in the depths of self-induced starvation, self-harming, highly suicidal, too depressed to function, and suffering the physical misery of high anxiety – pounding heart, shaking hands, internal catastrophising, panic attacks. I’d become one of “those people”.
It’s the unfun bit of travel – going home. And after three months, it’s the bit to look forward to – going home.
I arrived in Lisbon a mental mess. The two hour flight from Pisa airport, on our most budget airline, turned me into a blithering ball of batshit crazy. It was time to see a doctor before my oldest and dearest friends traded me in for a better model.
My fondest memories are sitting at our villa, eating dinners outside and toasting the magic view of Lucca in the distance. The evenings were warm, the food spectacular, the drinks convivial, and the company exquisite. These are the precious memories I cling to. As our week came to a close, we packed up and headed to Pisa for the flight to Lisbon. With my anxiety now peaking and bordering on full panic attack, the flight became an interesting affair.
The Arc de Triomphe was within spitting distance of our hotel (we elected not to spit on it). Of all the iconic Parisienne landmarks, this was our favourite. It’s enormous – towering in the center of the Place Charles de Gaulle, with 12 streets radiating out in all directions. We explored Paris on foot, meandering almost all 12 at one time or another.
Our first morning we visited the Saint Cyprien farmers market. Oh my lord – how fabulous! I’d heard French farmers markets were pretty special, but they really are pretty special. The produce and the atmosphere, and the cheese and strawberries and nectarines and sausages and tomatoes and baguettes and yoghurt and more cheese and we were in gastronomic heaven!
Yep – I spent a week in Berlin, and by day three I was bored. By the time we arrived in the city that birthed Oktoberfest, the Brandenburg Gate, and Adolf Hitler, we’d been away from home for 46 days. So looking at old rocks, old churches, and old history, was wearing a little thin. As are funny-tasting tap water, pay-to-use toilets, European heatwave, and whatever-that-yellow-stuff-is-they-call-cheese.
The Krakow signal bugle call, or Hejnal Mariacki, dates back to the Middle Ages when it was announcing the opening and the closing of the city gates…The melody abrupt ending is said to commemorate a trumpeter from Krakow who was shot through his throat by a Tatar archer in 1241 when the Mongols besieged the city. Every full hour a golden trumpet shows above Krakow’s central Grand Square in the west window…of the Basilica of the Virgin Mary’s. Then a characteristic signal trumpet melody…resounds all over the city’s Old Town…Next the same bugle call is played towards the east, the south and the north.
Budapest is a city of statues – there are statues for everyone and everything. The beautiful wide streets, flanked by stunning gothic buildings, have small parks and plazas filled with statues and fountains every couple of blocks. There is no shortage of places to sit down and have a lovely rest.
The small old city of Sarajevo where we spent five serene nights, is full of historic buildings with beautiful Georgian architecture, displaying the brutal wounds of gunfire and shelling from two decades prior. Much of the city is graffitied and dirty as post-war economic devastation still remains, and a third of the population are unemployed. The busy streets are a kalediscope of cultures, with nuns, muslims, westerners, arabs, and people from every ethnic and religious background wandering the streets, ordering thick bosnian coffees, decadent icecreams, or the local must-try dish, cevapi.
Endless fields of tall, ripe sunflowers lined the roads to our first stop – Gallipoli. Blue skies, green grass and sandstone memorials line the shores of Anzac Cove on the banks of the Dardanelle strait. I waded into the water to see the coast of Gallipoli, just as thousands of young men did in 1915. As the local Turkish man sunbathing on the pebbles said, Too many lives lost for nothing.
