You do not walk the Camino to find yourself. You walk the Camino to lose yourself.
Eight years ago I was living in a neighboring country. I had made every change I could think to make – or so I told myself. I had left Sydney. The version of her who was comfortably kept, who had a black card and a person who had started as a client and become, over years, something harder to name – an exclusive arrangement, at least on my end. I had what looked like freedom from the outside. I believed it too, for a while.
What I was actually leaving was who I was becoming. The relationship had shifted – gradually, the way those things do, so that by the time you notice it you’ve already been living in it for some time. What had been genuine, deep friendship and real mutual support, had become something I recognized too well from watching others in the industry. Transactional. I hated seeing myself reflected in it. I wanted to know who I was when the exchange wasn’t structuring everything underneath. I wanted a love I had chosen because I wanted it, not one I had arrived at through proximity and negotiation.
I arrived in a small foreign mountain town full of artists and people asking the many of the same questions I was asking myself. The kind of place that draws people who have packed up whatever they’d been and come somewhere quieter to find out. I had intention when I arrived. Then I invested in a bar, and in the man who needed a cash infusion to keep it open. I had overcorrected so completely in my determination not to be transactional that the roles had simply reversed. I had stopped being the one with the card — I had just handed it to someone else. Just a different shape of the same dishonesty, with enough lighting change that I failed to recognize it.
One day – still running, if I’m being precise about it – I decided to fly to Spain the following week and walk the Camino de Santiago. The French way, through the Pyrenees. Eight hundred kilometers. I went alone and I took my time. I didn’t fully understand why. I had gotten good at moving toward things before I could talk myself out of them.
The first night, in a little French village, I sat at a table with other pilgrims. Everyone had arrived with a reason – something they could articulate that they were walking toward or away from or trying to settle. When the question came to me I was genuinely surprised to find I had no answer. No intention I could articulate. Just an instinct that had said go, and I had gone. That has often been how it works with me. The reason comes later, if it comes at all.
I walked through small towns and long stretches of heat and then rain. Through forests. In the evenings I slept in albergues, large rooms full of strangers who were briefly, specifically, not strangers at all. Somewhere in all of that I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Peace, maybe. A kind of quiet strength. I was doing something hard and I was doing it alone and it was asking something real of me. What exactly I was working out, I hadn’t quite understood yet.
That came later. After the loneliness had its full say, and after I let it. Running from something wasn’t the answer – I could see that clearly by then. But neither was staying somewhere comfortable and inauthentic, telling myself the familiar story. Both were just avoidance. One moved, one stayed still. The effect was the same.
The Camino begins when it ends.
This time, choosing to be Sydney – for its pleasures, for the freedom it gives me to grow and explore everything else I am – it’s lost the feeling of transaction. What I have now with the people I spend time with feels like mutual understanding. Like support that goes both ways.
The end was the beginning. And still I walk.