How to start a life from scratch.

Step One: pack your suitcase.

This is not advice. I don’t take it or give it unless asked.

You pull a large suitcase from the basement of your sister’s house. Your mom brought it over the other week because you told everyone that you’re going back to Lisbon again, the last place you fell apart, and the next place you’ll go to start over once more.

You don’t know what to pack because your mind still isn’t right, but she’s fighting to get through the fog and you trust the process because you have no other choice.

You sit on that basement floor and sort through clothes and shoes you haven’t seen in years, remembering the times that are attached to the shirts and sweaters you pack inside. You try to picture your life on the other side of the ocean, but it’s hard when your head feels like it’s on another planet. But inside, deep down, your gut - your guide - is telling you that where you’re standing right now isn’t home anymore, and you have to go make a new one. So you do.

You hug everyone goodbye. You kiss your nephew’s round, soft cheeks and smell his baby scent because it’s the most perfect and pure fragrance you know, and you need all the magic you can get for the uncertain road ahead. You take a picture with him and, when you look back at it someday, you see the image of a woman holding a baby who hasn’t slept a full night in months and spent about that much time in bed being a ghost. What you’re about to do, get on a plane with no plan and a prayer, is for her - the girl inside - the person you will never stop fighting for.

Anxiety runs through your veins faster than blood, and you walk around the Toronto airport in loops just to keep yourself busy before the flight takes off. Your passport photo is someone that doesn’t look like you, but it is you. You’ve just renewed it for the next five years, and you realize that every time you’ve taken a new picture for it, you haven’t looked like yourself because it’s expired during a time when everything is falling apart. You think about the coincidence of it and wonder if that means something, an omen, but you tuck the thought away for later. You don’t like that the photo is a reminder of the hard time you’re going through, but you have faith, you always do, for no reason other than past evidence, that you will be okay. You will wake up.

No one you love thinks this move is the right one, and your father on the other side of the ocean tells your mom it’s a bad decision to come, she tells you this, but you go anyway, because they’ve underestimated your will to survive before. You decide you’re not trying to prove anyone wrong, only doing what feels right in a world of impossible mistakes.

You haven’t had any alcohol in six months, because the state your mind doesn’t allow your body to metabolize the poison, but at the airport you test your consciousness with a drink, and you sit at an airport bar with a glass of sparkling wine and your laptop to try and write.

When you’re in the mess, the writing doesn’t come easily, and that’s the thing that hurts the most - you lose yourself and your words, and putting sentences together feels like an impossible task, a math, but you try. Expressing yourself, something that has always come naturally, feels like a foreign language to you now, but you teach yourself to write again, one word at a time.

You have no idea that you’re about to enter an era when writing and telling stories will become the centre of your world for the first real time in your life; the discovery of that is coming and it will be the greatest prayer ever answered, you’ll see.

Next to you a good looking man sits down at the bar. Of course you notice, but don’t say a word. You’re aware enough to know that you’re still a little unhinged. He’ll be your muse for the next hour, and you’ll write about what you see and what he says. Start there, you tell yourself, so you do.

He starts the conversation: he’s from Romania and has been living in Toronto for work - hard labour - to make money for his wife and kids who he’ll be reuniting with on the other side of the ocean, an immigrant story in its purist form. He starts over all the time, he says, but not in the same way you’re doing right now, totally from the bottom. There is no one waiting for you on the other side of the ocean, and you have $700 dollars to your name.

Somehow you’ve just been hired as a senior writer for an AI company that recruited you; you’re tasked with training their machines to give lovely human responses to hard human problems. Your job is to write yourself into a machine and teach it exactly what you’re trying to do: learn about the world. You have no idea how you got through the interviews, but you’re a good writer, they say, and you’re working for a company that will change the world.

The man next to you is younger, with a wife and two kids, a life you can’t even imagine. You’re at ease because he’s not flirting, he’s just lonely that evening, like you are, and so you listen to his story and ask thoughtful and curious questions because you know how lonely feels; even if you can’t fix your own sense of not belonging, you know from experience that being there to listen is the kind thing to do.

You talk for an hour before his flight - you talk so long that he almost misses his boarding call. He wants to pay for your drink and does, to thank you for listening, for being in that seat at the right time; you hug one another and wish each other a positive return to new lives, knowing you’ll never see each other again. He will never know he is a part of the story you’ll tell someday.

You told him that you’re Portuguese, born in Toronto, and Lisbon is the great love of your life and has been for 20 years. You say you’re going back to start over, that it’s a risky move. Even though he doesn’t know you, he tells you he believes you’re the type of person who can do anything you put your mind to. He doesn’t know that your mind is somewhere else, on a planet with no name, but you believe him anyway and take the vote of confidence he leaves behind with his phone number you’ll never call.

You forget his name a week later when you’re renting a room from a lovely French girl while she’s out of town, but will never forget that conversation where you felt yourself come alive again, able to hear outside of your own head for the first time in months. The last time you could do that was in March, when you were awake to experience the lobotomy-like feeling that takes over when you’re losing your mind to no sleep and stress. It’s now September, and the awakening isn’t unfamiliar because it’s happened before: your whole head feels like a glass jar of echoes that drove you mad, with the lid opened just enough to let you breathe.

You have the apartment to yourself for a couple of weeks, and you’re grateful for the peace, because the process of awakening looks like chaos from the outside: awkward and anxious, forgetful and vulnerable, relearning simple things, like making coffee and meals, tasting food for what feels like the first time, and pacing around the living room so you can orient yourself and feel your steps; cortisol runs through you as you walk the city in fast loops just to calm down. Sleep is still your enemy, but you’re not afraid of monsters anymore. You’ve seen them all.

You start small, sticking to streets near the apartment at first, then gradually opening up the loop to more parts of town. When you left Lisbon last, the city looked like a movie set: unfamiliar and odd, strange light and sounds, the result of losing sleep slowly and then all at once. You realize the Lisbon landscape is coming back into view all around you, familiar and almost comforting - and you let it be your church, your mother’s rosary around your neck.

The long and steep staircase by your apartment will be the mountain you push yourself to climb everyday. At the top is a mirodouro - a viewpoint - where you can see Lisbon reach out into the ocean, blending seamlessly into the sky. Even if your body doesn’t feel like home right now, this view will be the first window of your new house.

Those stairs are your nemesis every morning, but you climb them anyway, a slow ascent at first, then gradually over weeks, a breathless run to the top.

Your body aches and it feels like learning to use your legs for the first time, but it’s okay, because the view that saves you is there; you feel closer to god, and you are.

Your new job is going well, but it takes hours to read a few paragraphs and nothing seems to stick to your brain as it’s defrosting from the months you’ve just been through - the thaw is the most painful and transformative part of it all, you know this, so you stay the course and have faith that you are exactly where you need to be - at the beginning.

At first, you find it best to avoid certain places in the city, streets and landmarks that hold memories you don’t need to revisit now. You don’t want to run into people or past versions of yourself you left behind. Eventually, you know you’ll be strong enough to go to those spots and use your favourite kind of therapy to heal: exposure. Making fresh memories in old places to give them new meaning works, but it’s not time yet.

The one suitcase you brought is stuffed with clothes you need to figure out how to make outfits from, a puzzle of threads; clothes are an expression of who you are, but you don’t know who you’re going to be just yet.

As you unpack your suitcase one afternoon, you discover that your sister and your mother have put things inside they know you need and will make you happy: a rosary from your mother, a face cream from your sister who learned from you that moisturizing every day is important - something you learned when you were 12 from no one; your favourite toothpaste and a new toothbrush, eye gels and small soaps, and samples of perfumes because they know how much you like a new scent for your journeys. Your sister has given you a dress she thinks might come in handy for when you’re ready to go out again and show yourself off - it’s a Starting Over Starter Pack in that luggage, your treasure chest to navigate a new version of a place you’ve loved for so long.

There’s much more to this story, not just about a flight, a move, a room in an apartment, a new job or climbing impossible stairs to remind yourself what you’re made of; this is the story of an awakening, of a woman starting again-again, at 43, because what other choice do you have when you choose to be alive?

This is a story to be shared over time, not advice, not an opinion, not even a story more important that the start-over story of anyone else, just another example of how you can fall apart, lose yourself in yourself, and return safely to the place where you left yourself behind to start a life from scratch.

Part two coming soon.