Where I Go to Remember Myself

There is a city that has quietly accompanied me for most of my adult life.

I first arrived in Paris when I was twenty-three, just out of the army, my heart broken in the way only a first great heartbreak can break it, completely, with no idea who you are on the other side.

I didn’t come looking for healing. But one afternoon I stood near the Louvre, looking up at all that stone and history, and something in me went still. I understood, without yet having words for it, that I was standing in front of a lineage, generations of people who had given their lives to looking closely at the world and making something of it. I had goosebumps. I wanted in. It would be years before I understood that this was the moment I decided to become an artist.

Since then, life happened. Love. Loss. Beginnings that looked nothing like what I’d planned. And every time something in me needed repairing, I came back to this city, not as a tourist, but as someone returning to a place that knows how to quiet the noise long enough for me to hear myself again. It was in Paris that I once admitted I couldn’t lie to myself anymore and walked away from a secure, well-paying job to build a therapeutic practice from nothing. That decision came from this city. I’m not sure I would have had the courage anywhere else.

This year has asked a lot of me. A show I loved closed. Another, planned for next year, fell apart. A relationship I had given real love to came to its end, and I had to learn, in real time, how much of my worth I had quietly tied to being chosen. Work has gone quiet, the way summers do. And underneath the parts that looked, from the outside, like success, there is real fear. Where do I go from here? What am I worth, on my own terms. Who am I now, on the other side of all of it?

In a few hours I’ll board another flight to Paris.

I know the city won’t answer these questions for me. It never has. But it has a way of helping me hear myself well enough to start finding the answers on my own.

That has always been enough.