I believe we always end up where we need to be. I could never explain why I spontaneously decided to come back to Paris, but when I arrived I knew I was exactly where I needed to be. It’s been a little hard to believe that I am here. Some days it feels like a dream and other days it feels like I never really left.
I almost talked myself out of the trip. At first the obvious reason was for fashion week, but when I looked at my user engagement for Fashion week posts it didn’t make sense to travel all the way to France for something nobody seemed to care about, even if I loved it. The idea to come to France flew in and out of my mind for days, but mostly it felt far-fetched. Until the idea visited me again one morning, I went over all the usual reasons why it didn’t make sense, in attempt to talk myself out of it as I had been successfully doing all week. Then I realized something : every reason I came up with to not come to Paris had little to do with me and more to do with creating content for Instagram. People don’t seem to care about photos of fashion week, so why spend more money on a plane ticket for it? They engage very little with my content, so what sense does it make to come to France for more? It breaks my heart to learn that at some point I stopped living for me. That things were heavily centered on content and content engagement that I forgot about what made me happy. In that very moment, I explored another idea…What if I didn’t go for content? What if I took a real vacation for once? What if I went for me and only me? I could skip fashion week shows if I liked. I could avoid touristy, instagrammable areas if I wanted. What if I just went back to me to heal myself out of the monster of content engagement because I had so, clearly, lost my way? There was something so freeing, so relieving, so restoring about that idea that I let out a super loud giggle like a child tickled with so much joy.
I made new goals for Paris that morning –
I am going to walk the streets I missed. I will breathe the air again. I will eat delicious food. I will buy all the things only found in Paris that I am running low on supply on like my Cadum soap. I will replace my candle at Laduree. I will breathe the air again and I will spend precious time with my friends and family there. That’s it! No chasing. Just resting–a real vacation.
What I didn’t know when I arrived in Paris was that I had accidentally stumbled on my 10 year anniversary in Paris. 10 years ago when a beautiful journey unfolded. When I discovered the art of photography. When I fell in love with this city. 10 years when I breathe the air and walk the streets.
And somehow and just like that I realized why I needed to be here so badly. I need to reencounter my old self and be reminded about what it felt like to live for me. To be reminded about what I loved most about photography. My old self and new self would juxtapose in a surreal “then & now” but our worlds would also collide; pouring healing where each was empty, filling, overflowing, restoring until I, am whole again. Because my old self was not the only one that had something to give me, I too had much to share with her on tales of hope and her strength and the beautiful journey that lay before her, like how we would lose ourselves and find it again….