Paris is Always a Good Idea

by Jenn McKinlay

“Being great at your profession doesn’t mean you’ve grown personally.

I knew this was the right thing to do. My life had become as predictable as gravity, and it was time to shake it up.

“I’m sorry, are we comparing dick size here?” I asked. “Because I can assure you while my anatomy is different, if it’s a pissing contest you want, I’ll win.”

For the first time in forever, I felt as if my day was wide open. This was not a feeling I ever had back home as I raced from one meeting to the next, my weekends full of events and my life in a constant state of hurry up and wait.

I’ll do everything I can to find the lighthearted, fearless me of my youth, as opposed to the sweaty, panicked, borderline-hysterical woman I am right now.

Letting people help me was always a struggle for me. Control freak! Also, I didn’t like to put people out, okay, and perhaps I felt that no one did things the way I would, meaning the correct way,

Normally while traveling, I could switch off my expectations and downshift into a sort of travel Zen; things would happen when they happened, and there was no need to get upset.

Bad things happened to everyone. Full stop. The only grace to be found was in how you handled it.

The control freak in me is struggling with letting work go.

Grief. The bottomlessness of it had been what surprised me the most. Every time I thought the feeling of loss couldn’t get worse, a birthday would roll around, or a holiday or a special event, and the realization that my mother wasn’t there to be a part of it would send me spinning into bereavement like a drunk on a bender.

“You’re a woman who has suffered tremendous loss and found the courage to keep going.

It felt as if I were ripping a part of myself out, root and stem. On a torrent of tears and sobs that shook my shoulders and left me feeling weak, I reached deep inside of myself and felt the pain, the sadness, the anger, and the grief, all the emotions that I’d been hanging on to for so long, as if they would keep my mother with me. Jason was right: they didn’t. But it still felt like a fresh loss.