- Oct 18, 2022
- 10 min read
Drying your face with an actual terrycloth bath towel after six weeks of quick-dry microfiber malarkey – – – wow. I mean I like sex but.
Waffles and I have just checked into El Seminario Mayor, which I’m not sure what it actually is but it’s right in the centre of Santiago in a huge ancient stone building (basically: a just slightly smaller cathedral) and we each have an en-suite bedroom with breakfast included and courtyard views and it’s €25 a night. Oh and did I mention, towels? We couldn’t not. So I’ve just had a shower and a numinous cotton experience and momentarily I’m going to have an epic nap in my own, private, four-walled human storage unit.
I didn’t eat a pig, obvs. Hakuna your tatas. I’ve even stopped eating the cow on this trip, due to their long-lashed, thousand-yard stares judging me through 300k of Asturian countryside. I had a tuna and cheese sandwich (cause I’m still fine with stealing the baby cow’s milk and fish are just not that cute) and a coffee and an orange juice and a chocolate crepe. Then we went to mass, for real this time, in the cathedral that is the endpoint of the Camino de Santiago. It’s built on his bones. Tiago, that is. The Saint guy.
Disappointingly, there was no huge cauldron being swung around the cathedral with frankincense billowing out of it as we had been promised. But there was plenty of pompous talk about sin and old bald men in red robes and hoards of tourists taking photographs of them.
Fancy as the room was, I must say the speeches (Sermons? TEDx talks?) were incredibly basic compared to Father Ernesto’s socialism-infused rallies. Just sin, sin, sin. Forgive my faults, my faults, my terrible, awful faults. I diligently stood and sat when so required but also made sure to perform some reparatory witchcraft during the biscuit bit. The bald dudes can take that after half a millennium of burning our sisters.
Neopaganism is hard work, so afterwards, we go to an Italian restaurant to eat more things and work out who owes what to whom. Our hungover brains do not help an already complicated situation. But finally it is solved, and Beard Braid goes to the airport, Fizzy Mucus and Lil’ Trump go to their new hostel, and Waffles and I decide to stop by “the fancy-looking place in the centre” just to check how much a dorm bed might cost.
Anything up to €20 we’re ready for after having had to walk back nineteen minutes through the pouring rain the night before, while wasted, just to make it to our 36-bed dorm in time for the midnight curfew. €18, that party cost us, and most other albergues are of similar cost and location and Operations Timesheet.
Gotta get ya values down
So imagine our delight when we get the two last private rooms on the “cheap pilgrim’s floor” for $25. I wish I’d gone straight here. Now I’m going to have a nap. Speak soon.
What luxury looks like at km 865
View of the cheap windows and the expensive windows, from the cheap windows
Well, I don’t nap. I can’t. Turns out, having your own private, four-walled human storage unit is… weird. And so, confused by this absence of 37 potential new besties, I dawdle. Read a biography of Eva Perón, watch an episode of This Is Us. Start worrying about the future. The complexities of life not lived in a continuously changing series of hostels, carried along by an endless stream of new friends, new towns, new cafeterias.
I take my bar of soap out of its ziploc bag and realise it’s never going back in. I’ll be here until I leave, on an airplane, a Ryanair airplane at that, so not taking anything that’s not irreplaceable. Personal item life ain’t no joke.
I can throw away the bag. I should, must, will throw away the bag.
Ditto the tube of muscle-relaxing ointment, the cheap Tupperware I’ve been using for leftovers, the tomato knife, the emergency half-bag of freeze-dried mushroom soup. The stolen sachets of salt, little tubs of olive oil and vinegar. There is no kitchen at Seminario Mayor. No more microwave dinners. It’s over.
Over, over, ove-e-e-e-er. Can I feel the soil falling over my head? Yeah a bit.
Thankfully, Waffles messages before I get too dramatic. After all, we’ve got a 9.5h homeward-bound flight combo on Wednesday for just that. So I turn off the emo music, get dressed and head out for a final night of vino with Waffles and Aya Surf Babe.
But first, I swing by the cathedral. It’s finally stopped raining so I’m thinking I’ll try to get a photo where you can actually see where I am.
I go to the very end of the plaza and sit down on the ground, my back against a stone pillar of the building opposite the cathedral. In front of me are loads of people who have just arrived. Taking selfies or asking others to take photos of them, making video calls, chatting to other pilgrims. Writing in diaries.
And I don’t know. Maybe it’s the man who’s been playing the bagpipe in a corner since early morning that starts making me all emotional. Maybe it’s the faint rays of sunlight that are finally, after days of rain, breaking through the grey clouds above. Maybe it’s PMS. Or maybe it is simply the fact that I am finally sat, in silence, without the distraction of so many new and brilliant friends, looking at the physical representation of something I didn’t even realise I’d set out to find.
Not on September 5, 2022, even though that is the official start date on the Camino certificate I was given this morning. And not two weeks before September 5, 2022, either, though that is when I decided to not accept wanting to not exist as my new normal, but to go do the Camino instead, even if it was only so I “wouldn’t have to be anywhere else.”
Looking at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela on the day after finishing my Camino, it feels, instead, like the endpoint of a searching that started even earlier than that. Even earlier, perhaps, than September 29, 2021, which was when I finally quit the job that had seen me compromise my values for months and went to South America, alone, at 34, even though I was terrified that I was too old to do such a thing, too old to volunteer, to “follow my heart,” to throw away a career which, even if not perfect, was still in line with what I had studied and the first time in my life that I’d been able to start saving.
In a way, it sounds so obvious. Of course I’d tell a friend to go and live out her dreams. Of course I’d tell her to be brave, to jump before she looked, and that fortune, as the saying goes, favours the bold.
And yet. When it came to myself – when it comes to oneself, I’d even dare to generalise – we are rarely so fearless. Instead, we tell ourselves to grow up. Be realistic. Stop chasing, start building.
There is something to that. At least the last one, for me, right now. I can’t just chase kicks all my life. But I’m starting to realise that some form of seeking will probably always form part of my life, whatever I do. And you remember that book my inner critic scoffed at, back in Villaviciosa? How to Be a Free-Range Human. Well, I’m growing into it. And I listened to her TEDx talk, too, called The Hidden Power of Not (Always) Fitting In.
In it, Marianne Cantwell describes a group of people who are what she calls “liminal” – which is to say, they don’t belong entirely in any one category, but rather are always floating somewhere between them. And in her book, she gives advice on how they can create a career that’s better suited to who they are as people, whether that be through what she calls a “portfolio career” (many different things) or a “bespoke career” (make up your own job) or an “evolving career” (that changes as you do).
And the thing is… I already have this. I’ve always had this. I just thought – all together now – that it was a fault.
Not something someone could aspire to.
Self-acceptance, eh. If only we could bottle it. I feel like ayahuasca gets pretty close. I mean it comes in bottles and all. But even that “warm hug of the universe” (as people often describe the feeling they get from ayahuasca, and also, um, heroin) only lasts so long. Ayahuasca longer than heroin for sure, and it inspires you to make healthy changes rather than just shoot up again etc. One of many key differences. Anyway. My point is – I’m not sure self-acceptance is a state. One you can achieve, and then just hang out with for the rest of your life. I mean, as they say in Spanish, ojalá. Inshallah. God willing. If only. Learning it once and then being “fixed” would be wonderful.
But for me – for many of us, I think – self-acceptance seems to be something slippier than that. Something you may achieve for a moment, but something that, if you don’t pay attention, can also slip away. Suzanne Brøgger wrote something very similar about insight and if I was a real writer I’d stop and find it but as this is JUST A BLOG I will paraphrase: You cannot just arrive at an insight and think, fantastic, that’s it, I am now enlightened! Because if you do, you regress. You must always keep moving forward, keep seeking; not to avoid staying in place, but to avoid going backwards.
Source: Det pepprade suset. Venga.
And I guess, in the muggy dusk on the day after I finish my Camino, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela represents to me this self-acceptance. And the Camino itself, the pilgrimage, is the search for it. This time.
Because people come back and do the Camino again and again, so it can’t be the cathedral itself that is the point. Then people would just stay there. And similarly, the self-acceptance is perhaps not, in itself, the point either. Rather, it’s to understand that life might just be a continuous searching for That One Thing that will make us feel okay, that will make us feel worthy of love. And that this is alright.
That never feeling okay is okay. That we maybe do not need antidepressants, or microdosing, or (my lord I never thought I’d say this) even ayahuasca.
Obviously, I still love ayahuasca. I will still take it, and I still want to dedicate at least some part of my newfangled portfolio career to helping others find and navigate their own medicine journeys. Antidepressants I am sure can be vital to some. One of my favourite people in the whole world has been taking them for eight years, and is absolutely positive that she would have killed herself without them. She is not “flat.” She is not “emotionless.” She is funny, creative, kinder than almost everyone I know.
As for microdosing, I still believe it’s the future. And I am so, so thankful that I’ve been able to use it to get through difficult times in my life. But I am also glad I didn’t feel the need to do it on this walk.
Doing the Camino has not turned me against medicines. It has not turned me against tools that alleviate suffering, that can give us a preview of what life might be like if we change just a bit the division of our energy, the way we set boundaries, the forgiveness we start working towards. And so on and so forth. Growth still feels possible, and an increased sense of well-being still feels like a good goal to have.
But what the Camino has really taken me to is a place of accepting all the feelings. Even the anxiety. The sense of less-than. The envy, the fear, the manic bursts of delusion and megalomania. And this blog, too. Having been able to share all the madness has defanged it. As the old adage goes, an insanity shared is an insanity halved.
I only shared it on my socials a few days ago, and already I’ve had some beautiful reactions. People I haven’t spoken to in months and months have got in touch to say they can relate; and almost always, the posts they’ve liked the most have been the posts that were hardest to write. The ones where I hesitated, edited, took things out and then put them back in.
This, for my writing self, is very, very empowering. Because it tells me that all you have to do is reveal. Not make up. But accept, and share. Like Simon Amstell said about that time he mooned his grandma:
“I think everything I’ve ever done in front of an audience has been a version of showing my grandma my bottom.”
Or, if we would like to be just a little bit more feminist and community-minded, just a little bit less testes and more titties, we may bring in Adrienne Rich:
“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
Either way, it seems exposing oneself is the way. Maybe Raincoat & Hot Pants was a more appropriate name than I thought. Maybe tumblr was right to ban my emotional flasher account.
At any rate. I sit and think about all these things in front of the cathedral. Feel all these feels. Write all these writes. And when I look back up from my phone, the square around me has changed. 19:30 mass has started, and there are fewer crowds. Barely any locals. Some pilgrims are still there from before, lying on the ground, writing, looking, feeling. New ones show up constantly, round the corner from the bagpipe man to see for the first time this oft-reproduced symbol of their own Camino goals. Their faces light up, they shout, sometimes cry, more often than not film the arrival on their phones.
Maybe for some, the point is to see the bones of San Tiago, buried deep down in the sepulchre beneath the cathedral. Maybe for them, religion has stepped in and provided their life with a purpose that I’m still seeking in people, places, projects. Medicines, other dimensions, online diaries. Art itself. Who knows.
But for most, I’m pretty sure the Camino is just a metaphor for whatever journey they happen to be living through at this particular time in their life, and the cathedral, for all its pretty spires and serious red-robed men, is but a symbol for the realisations they seek.
I finally get up from my seat, foot aching and thumbs numb from typing. I look around at my fellow pilgrims and wonder what they might have been looking for. Whatever it was, I think as I set off for the food court where I’m to meet Aya Surf Babe with her crew, I hope they’ve found it, too.
