You’ve Got That Post-Camino Glow! Said Nobody, Ever

Sweden welcomes me with a trip to the emergency room. Not even hyperbole-ing. I’ve not been home twenty-four hours when I step off a chair and it all goes black. I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the lower back, the pain spreads throughout my body like wildfire, my hearing goes and I collapse on the floor. I come back to. But if I try to move again, the hearing goes again, I break out in sweats again, and my vision goes blurry again.

I guess this is where we say congratulations, if you made a voodoo doll of me. It worked!

Yes, it’s scary. Yes, in a millisecond I see my life as a paraplegic flash before my eyes. Maybe I’ll finally get round to editing those fourteen years of travel videos, I have time to think before I remember my First Aid training and start First Aiding myself.

I can move my arms, so slowly I organise the rest of me into the recovery position. Then I call my father, who’s ten minutes away watching an ice-hockey game. He gets in a taxi. I call the non-emergency medical services. They call the emergency medical services. Two paramedics show up. They take me to the ER. I still can’t move. They inject me with some painkiller. Do a bunch of tests. When the doctor comes to see me after five hours I can stand up, albeit like Santa Claus, hunched over and only if holding onto something. But at least I can walk. Can move my toes, feet, shuffle from the wheelie bed to the sink and back.

He sends me home with a load of non-fun painkillers and one fun one. The fun one has morphine in it. Thinking it’ll make me sleepy, I pop it before tilting my body into bed. After an hour or so I wake up, ecstatic. I look around the room and realise I’m at my mum’s house. “Oh, mum!” I think. “I loooove mum!” Then I pass back out, and sleep for ten hours.

The next few days are not fun. I have pills to combat the physical pain, but they don’t do much to alleviate the shock of going from peak Camino friends and novelty fun to… well, bedridden in my mum’s house. Five days pass and I do not see a soul, other than my mum, who, bless her cotton socks, I do love (on and off morphine) but whom I’m unusually touchy around. Like, teenage levels. Probably because I’ve reconnected with my emo teen heart on the Camino, and my mum likes to say things like, “Well, maybe growing up means doing things you don’t particularly want to do, Frida.”

Y’know. Mum stuff. She means well. She wants me to have stability. But I want to move to Ibiza without a job for no real reason other than I feel like it, so. Things have been a little awkward.

My mother is also a very on-the-go person, and does not like or respond very well to illness. When Covid hit, she was the last person to give up the gym, even though she had just turned 69. She was also (nope, not coincidentally) the first to get infected. Reluctantly, she stayed home for the required period. Got into TV gymnastics. Watched some Handmaid’s Tale. Played online bridge. But before long, she declared that life was not worth living if she could not go out and see people, and that was that. Mum out.

So she does not like me being bed-bound. Intellectually, of course she understands that I cannot, should not move. But emotionally, I’m pretty sure that part of her feels I’m a bit of a sad case. Should stop feeling sorry for myself. Get up, get out, get on with it.

I could be projecting. I was a depressed teen, so stayed in bed a lot. It was a tough time for all of us. My mum has probably got up, got out, got on with it. But quite likely, a version of me is forever stuck in that teenage bedroom, hearing the sound of the first train (04:39) and knowing another night I should’ve slept is a bust.

None of this, as you can imagine, is particularly fun to think about. But life gives you what it gives you. Now, I suppose, the universe wanted me to slow down.

So slow down I do. Finish watching Industry. To balance out the dystopianism, make impressive progress on the sixth and final season of This Is Us. Video call a bunch of people on the days I can be bothered to brush my hair. Imagine myself, not at all dramatically, a little bit like that bed-bound kid in The Secret Garden. Remind myself again to get up, get out, get on with it.

On the sixth day, I try. The anti-inflammatories have worked enough that I can stand up straight. Bending is still a creaky, arm-supported, sad affair. But once I’m up, I’m up.

I got up! So I get out.

Stockholm in November is not Galicia in November. Yes, there’s rain. Red, yellow, orange leaves on the trees. But that’s it for similarities. Most of the leaves in Stockholm have fallen off the trees and formed a brown slush on the ground. The rain is close to freezing, and even though I wear all the warmest stuff from the Camino, so am I.

Stiffly, I start walking towards the open field near my mum’s house. Grass will do me good, I think. Nature cures, and all that.

And then I experience what hippie literature likes to refer to as a Whole Body No.

No, to walking out onto the field. No, to the stressed-looking, fast-walking, grey-wearing people around me. No, to the job my friend has offered me on the island where I grew up. No, to the concert another has invited me to later in the week. No, to everything. No, no, no. To the whole country.

George Bernard Shaw once quipped:

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”

Well, I have the opposite of this. I understand, of course, that there are tons of funny, weird, arty, hippie, anxious, kindred spirits in Sweden. And yet, whenever I’m home, I feel my chest tighten, my shoulders draw up, and my Not Welcome Complex flare up.

I’ve tried to investigate this. I always go home as much as I can. I have lovely friends here – lots of them from Barcelona, London, San Francisco, Bangkok – and when I’m with them, I always think that maybe I could just move back. Take a job. Get an apartment. Live a simpler life, with my family a bus ride rather than a flight away. Who cares if it’s a little chilly.

But something always stops me. The thought of the reality involved in getting a job, an apartment, waking up every day in a country where a glass of basic house wine sets you back €15. I went to the shop the other day to get some tomatoes, an aubergine and 200g of spinach. It cost €9. Salaries are still lower than London, where you get that for €3,50.

But of course, it’s not the money that brings about my Whole Body No. I don’t know what it is. I’ve looked for it, in therapy and through ayahuasca and on long, long walks. I’ve tried confronting it, by forcing myself to fly home, go to parties, stop being such a baby.

Well. Since I accepted my whole ass self on the Camino, I start thinking – maybe I should just accept this, too? Without too much probing, even? Maybe I should just take my body’s word for it. Sweden, no. Just go live somewhere warmer, somewhere more fun, somewhere I feel less shit. I hear Ibiza is a place for misfits. London was, once, too. When I moved there as an 18 year-old, I couldn’t believe how everything I’d felt weird about in Sweden was not just tolerated but celebrated in Shoreditch. It was well nice. And London can still be a great place. Things are just… a little difficult over there right now. And let’s face it, the beaches are shit.

No longer beating myself up about not managing to move back to Sweden would certainly be in line with all that juicy self-acceptance I found on the Camino. So maybe I’ll just try that for a few months.

Thankfully, the field is lined with trees. So in the end I just hide among them, look at the ground, start picking leaves. Chestnuts. Mushrooms. I bring them to my friend’s house in the evening, thinking we can paint them. We talk so much we don’t get around to it.

Friends are the biggest sacrifice of this itinerant lifestyle. I have them, way more than my anxiety would suggest. I’m not as lonely as I keep thinking I deserve to be. But these friends never live where I live. Well, I never live where they live. Or not for long, anyway.

Hence, need for Forever Home. It’s just got to be the right one.

The day after, Fizzy Mucus calls and my bubble of self-pity is finally burst. Though I’ve been feeling like I’m living in a whole different world, I know I don’t. What I found on the Camino is still out there. The world is full of people who want to connect, who want to live differently, who don’t feel at home in boxes actual or metaphorical, either.

On day eight, I start emailing Ibiza. Let’s go fucking find them.

PS. My friend Sarah, also known as the Brit part of CanBrit, has written about Post-Camino Blues on her blog. The first part of her diagnosis reads, “perhaps you find yourself welling up at the drop of a hat,” and I started crying this morning because my favourite childhood comic Bamse has won a big journalism price for spreading such good values. I mean, they do. You can be strong AND kind! But also, she might be onto something. Give her a visit for some tips for getting up, getting out and getting on with your post-Camino life.

PS2. Those leaves we never got around to painting? In line with the rest of my regression, I turn them into an “autumn plate” and leave it as an offering to my mum on her kitchen table. Just like I did when I was six. You’re welcome, mamma.

#posttravelblues #endings #searchingforahome #Dreams #homecoming #travel #Sweden #anxiety #CaminodeSantiago