Reflections: Almost a Year of Travel, Grief and Love

It’s been almost a year since my dad died.

I’m writing this in the living room at my boyfriend’s flat in Glasgow. His dog is snoring on the sofa with his paws resting on my knee; there’s half-empty boxes of Indian takeaway on the glass coffee table; YouTube videos of Andy Kaufman are playing on the big TV.

I took most of the summer away from the internet. I had very little inclination to post on social media and didn’t feel like writing any articles, or even really writing many words down at all. Instead, I tried living in the moment for a few weeks.

 

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I took myself away this month. Left the internet behind and caught a train to the coast, where I found a van and three friends and my boyfriend, all camped out together in a gently sloping field with a tiny glimpse of the sea. We walked the sands and swam across an estuary while our bags rode with the paddle boarders. We drove down tiny lanes to @endoftheroad festival. We packed up the van again and drove onwards to Bristol, Totnes and finally right to the tip of the country at Penzance. There were tidal waters and dog walks. Banjo playing, camp stove cooking, sleeping in car parks. We showered in the sea. We hung clothes from the van’s curtain rails to block out the light. During all of this I passively chose not to post on social media. Instead, I watched with casual interest as over a hundred Instagram followers decided to leave my account. Amazingly enough, I honestly don’t care! Life online isn’t like real life. Pressurising yourself with an expectation to speak to an audience every day isn’t healthy if it’s not what you actually want to do. Not if you want to be honest. Nowadays I often catch myself waiting for when things will be better, instead of embracing the positive parts of what my life actually looks like right now. Screw remembering the months of crying. it’s much more preferable looking at the sunlight dance on Cornish seawater at Penzance 😍

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When I think back, it’s obvious I’ve taken a backseat from writing for the majority of 2018. Working as a travel blogger is difficult when your offline life is suddenly so much more serious than pretty travel pictures and sunny dispositions. It’s felt like holding a stone in my mouth: all these words I want to say, but so many of them carrying a heaviness I can’t commit to screens, or type, or paper.

Except I have to remember that what I’m going through is a very passive kind of serious. 

This time last year, life was very different. September 2017 was actively hell on earth: panic attacks in London parks; blurry vision, no sleep and a constantly tight chest; dazzling bursts of fear at every doorbell, every phone ring, every moment my dying dad called my name from his upstairs bedroom.

During those months of perpetual high alert, I was terrified to imagine what my life was about to look like. I had no control over any of it, and the worst part was knowing I had to wait until Dad died to begin my grieving.

So why does being one year along from those days matter? Because it’s the first time since, well, everything. It’s my first Christmas without Dad; my first birthday; the first time I saw daffodils again; the first beginnings of summer and the first anniversary of his death.

It’s the first chance to recalibrate what those days mean.

But this past year has also made me the most internally aware I’ve ever been. My periods of crying have been interspersed with intense self-reflection. With each self-appointed anniversary, I ask myself the same questions again and again. What do I actually want from life? What is it that truly makes me happy? How do I ensure I put myself in situations that challenge growth and development in the years to come?

So in the spirit of self-reflection, here’s what my grief-year looked like.

In the first wintery weeks after Dad’s death I drove around Scotland with Jamie, my boyfriend. While I tried to mentally wrap my head around what had just happened, we stayed at a friend’s house beside the coast and walked along frozen sands – before changing temperature completely and catching a flight to Cuba just after Christmas.

We rang in the new year in Havana, and spent early January driving classic cars around the island. I didn’t write about that trip because I was still shellshocked, but it did highlight to me that ‘travel as distraction’ could have a significant place in my healing process.

In January, I came back home to London to find a broken boiler. A disaster I hadn’t anticipated meant spending weeks wrapped up in every layer of thermal clothing I could find, huddled in the living room under a duvet on my ridiculous Ikea sofa bed which prompted many a sleepless night. Cue finally succumbing to a mattress-in-a-box purchase, and a somewhat significant relocation upstairs to my parents bedroom.

Thankfully, I managed to re-arrange the furniture enough to successfully remove the reminder of my parents up there. So I tried my best to establish a routine in my London life – days spent writing at my dad’s desk in his book-lined study, jogging round the park in the early evenings, a relaxed bedtime routine each night.

Despite my fresh introduction into mourning I was still desperate to maintain a presence in the blogging sphere, so I escaped to southern Spain for my first press trip of the year and spent a blissful few days with fellow bloggers in Malaga and Ronda. I’d been nervous about how I’d handle being my professional self, but luckily we had a lovely group, and I realised I could still be a blogger while dealing with Dad’s death. It didn’t make me wholly different from everybody else.

By the time February rolled around, I’d begun to see a pattern to my grief. A few days of confusion would precipitate anything from a few days to a full week of sobbing in my house. These blurred days were terrifying, and I felt completely overwhelmed by the intensity of it.

Because Jamie is based in Scotland I headed for a brief Glasgow visit at the end of the month and promptly got stuck in the ‘Beast from the East’ snowstorm – just days before my thirtieth birthday. We watched the fat flakes fall from our AirBnb window and, after multiple cancelled trains, eventually decided to drive the whole way back to London in the snow. We arrived at the pub I’d booked for my birthday celebrations at just gone midnight. The pub was already closed.

Alongside my bitter disappointment was a strange feeling of exhausted relief. Turning thirty had been something I’d dreaded – how was I supposed to celebrate an occasion that monumental when I’d just lost my second parent? – so I was quietly grateful that the snow muffled my birthday concerns. Instead, the day revolved around comfort food: there were birthday crumpets in the shape of hearts, a pyramid of peanut butter, and a cake from the same bakery my mum always used to get my birthday cakes.

Later in March and when feeling more positive, I booked myself a photoshoot to mark my thirtieth turn around the sun. Me and Alize Jireh, a stunning portrait photographer I found on Instagram, wandered around my local park and she captured a series of images I still look at with reverence – because I look simply, undeniably myself. A happy version of myself.

It was that sense of self I carried with me to a five day retreat in southern Spain. Alongside a group of beautiful women who all felt they were somehow ‘stuck’ in their lives, I shared so much of my pain, cried a multitude of cathartic tears, and physically processed the stagnant energy which had welled up in my body through yoga, intuitive movement, fire rituals and a few wild dances in thunderstorms.

The retreat is something I still plan to write about, because that week was nothing short of extraordinary.

 

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Spring cleansing 💫💮💛 There’s something uplifting about this time of year. Perhaps it’s the daffodils blooming everywhere, one of my dad’s favourite flowers; perhaps it’s the air, which suddenly feels fresh and light; perhaps it’s the extra hour of light each day. Or perhaps I’ve finally reached my limit of indoor bedrest, curtains drawn, sobbing silently into my duvet. Grieving for five months straight has taken so much out of me, but it’s also emptied a space I get to re-fill. Last week I stood amongst the spring blossoms in Peckham Rye with @alizejireh, hoping my years of internal awkwardness didn’t show as she snapped photo after photo of me (this outing a thirtieth birthday present to myself). We talked about how beautifully vulnerable a photoshoot can be, and as I stared out over this green space I’ve known my whole life I felt something inside me shifting, something quiet yet monumental. Spring is the time for a new start. A stronger, more determined, live-your-life-with-passion start. I feel like spring is wiping me clean and making me happy again.💛

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In May I flew to Antigua with forty other bloggers. Again, I was panicked about how I’d cope with being surrounded by extroverted characters and camera lenses at every turn – but I’d forgotten that these guys aren’t just my friends and my tribe: they’re also my creative inspiration.

Buoyed on by Antigua, I had a burst of travelling ability and headed for a blogger’s conference in Rotterdam, visited my old flatmate at her new place in Amsterdam, went sailing around Mallorca with a burgeoning charter company – and then I collapsed in London again. Miserable, dumbfounded that I could still feel as much as I was feeling. The unfortunate payout of using travel and movement to escape your grief? When you stop moving, it hits you full force.

So I embraced that pain, and got tattooed.

At Shall Adore studio in Shoreditch I spent five hours with a fantastic artist named Francis, and while he carefully pressed a needle tip into the skin of my forearm we discussed music and politics, death and reincarnation, love and travel. A few hours in I explained how I’d lost my dad recently, and Francis said something thought-provoking.

“However much we grieve, those people we’ve lost will never come back. That will never change. And so it’s a choice… It’s up to us to use these experiences as education.”

 

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And in position. 🙏 Thanks again @florabaker ✌️&❤️ Made at the ever beautiful @shalladoretattoo #tattoo #tattoodesign #handpoke #handpoked #handpokelondon #handpoketattoo #stickandpoke #machinefree #machinefreetattoo #fmdtattoos #geometry #sacredgeometry #geometric #dotwork #trinket #seedoflife #vesicapiscis #black #ink #london

A post shared by Francis Merlyn Doody (@fmdtattoos) on May 18, 2018 at 3:42am PDT

The summer passed by in a heatwave haze of road trips and music festivals: first Jamie’s festival in Scotland, then Wilderness festival for a friend’s hen do, and finally End of the Road festival with a group of friends. I had panic attacks when the crowds were too big and my inability to control the situations felt too huge, but somehow I muddled through.

And that brings us right up to the present.

I know all this reads as something of a list, but it’s necessary for me to write out my accomplishments and activities of the year like this. Because while they’ve been outwardly positive, I’ve been internally battling a very different problem.

My mental health this year has been a minefield.

I knew Dad’s death would take its toll on me mentally. What I hadn’t expected was the triple onslaught of grief, anxiety and depression, all reducing me to someone unable to function the way I used to.

In the years after my mum’s death I started to notice I was more anxious. Back then it manifested as anxiety about crowds, steep drops, and falling down the stairs. Now I understand that anxiety stops me from leaving the house because choosing clothes, shoes, jackets and bags overwhelms me. When I have to make a phone call, my heart thumps so hard in my chest that I think I might vomit.

Then there’s the lethargy, the apathy, the emptiness. Days at a time where I don’t go outside, and have zero drive to do anything at all. Sleeping late, staying in bed, ordering food online, avoiding the shower, crumpling to the floor to sob heavily at unexpected moments. When this comes over me, it feels like I’m losing my mind.

Eventually I stared at myself in the mirror and firmly said, “You really do have Depression, you know.” Naming it, not to mention capitalising the damn word, took some of the power away. It made things a lot more clean to look at.

Because how many people do you know who’ve lost both their parents and are still mean, cruel and horrible to themselves? 

That’s not to say I magically got better after this mirror-moment. Over the last year I’ve had therapy sessions, been referred to an online CBT course via the NHS, and had so much trouble sleeping that I eventually spent five minutes with my GP, only to be prescribed one pack of sleeping pills and another of anti-depressants (I haven’t taken either of them yet).

But, much like a seesaw, I’ve begun to determine the delicate balance between sadness and semi-ok-ness.

Thanks to my therapist, I can more easily identify the differing characteristics of my depression, my anxiety, and my grief. I can feel how they rise up in my body and mind, so when the slithering depression serpent winds around my shoulders or the scrabbling, erratic anxiety critter judders in my ribcage, I know neither of these sensations are grief.

They are merely mental disorders, precipitated by the trauma I’ve been through.

They are not who I am.

When you’ve suffered such loss as I have, it’s too easy to see everything around you as acutely serious and fundamentally sad. There’s a voice in my head which always deflates a positive situation by reminding me, in a whisper but loud nonetheless, “It doesn’t matter how good you feel right now. Your parents still died. You’re always going to be without them. You’re always going to be alone.”

Investigating my mind has revealed some interesting facts. I’ve learned that I often allow my mind to take over and make situations feel more severe. I call it the ‘Eeyore complex’, where I almost seem to desire the act of wallowing in my misery – and yet when I put myself in scenarios that I worry will be too challenging I generally feel more positive than negative.

So for the rest of this year, I choose travel.

As October begins, I’ll be heading to Bali for a month with Jamie. Being abroad for the anniversary of my dad’s death on October 20th is both scary and life-affirming: I don’t want to be holed up in my London house crying that day, and I know ultimately he’d much prefer me to be living life to the full.

We’ll be back in the UK in November, but in December we fly off again – this time to Ghana with some friends. Jamie spent time there when he was growing up and another friend has travelled there a lot too, so we’ll explore the country until sometime in January. Again, I’m a little worried about being abroad for the final month of the year, particularly as it’s one that I have a difficult relationship with. We were told my mum was terminal on Christmas Eve 2008, and her death a few days after the new year has cemented my hatred of the holiday ever since.

Still, I’m hoping I feel strong enough to break with the memory of old traditions and embrace new experiences instead.

As for 2019? Well, it’s going to see me heading northwards to Glasgow, where I’ll finally move in with my boyfriend and begin a new chapter.

And then I’m going to love my life again.

Seriousness is overrated. However much my depressive, anxious mind finds solace in the bad, I know inherently – deep inside my bones – that it’s so much easier to enjoy the simple, positive things. I’m not foolhardy enough to believe that passing the ‘one year grief mark’ means everything gets better from here. But I do feel things shifting within me.

Things ARE better. Yes, I lost my dad, and that’s never going to change. But I’ve made it through an entire year without him, and I’m still standing. When last October began I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and I guess I’ve come full circle to a place in time where I still don’t quite know what my future looks like – but I do now have the ability to make my own decisions again.

And the simple truth? I am so damn excited to go exploring again. I’d all but forgotten that feeling: a heavy backpack slung over my shoulders, another one hanging in front of my chest, eyes wide with the realisation that my senses are absorbing everything they can.

I’ve forgotten the desire to grab a notebook and pen and scribble down phrases which appear unbidden in my mind.

I’ve forgotten the freedom which comes with being in a new place and a new country.

But after a difficult year, I finally feel ready for all these feelings again. And I can’t wait.

How has the past year been for you? Are you excited for what 2019 holds?