Darkness. And then a slow ringing, swelling like the sound of a slowly approaching train. Then came the throbbing—above my ears, on my forehead, all over my thoroughly jostled head.
Blood was pooled into a slick glob on the brown marble floor, like a Rorschach test with no answer. My nose throbbed, likely the source of the bleeding. I could barely see. I blinked, confused, hoping this was all just a horrific dream.
Where the hell was I? What happened?
I remember my clock lit up, showing it was 4 a.m., when I awoke and urgently needed to use the bathroom. Must have been that burger I’d eaten for dinner, overwhelming my system from the colonoscopy I had earlier in the day. I had one every two years to keep my colitis in check, and that burger kept me motivated as I liquefied my insides to clear the way for my gastroenterologist’s microscope.
Vasovagal syncope, the ER doctor called it, a reflex where your heart rate and blood pressure suddenly drop when you’re feeling pain, standing up too quickly, or too stressy. One heck of an evolutionary glitch, if you ask me. We perceive a threat, and instead of going into fight or flight, the body thinks, “Oh, I should play dead! Maybe the predator will think I’m not worth eating.”
This vasovagal hoo-ha can happen from things like seeing blood or getting bad news. And apparently, also from a strained bowel movement while still half asleep. Good God. That’s what caused me to fall on my face and break my nose in the middle of the night?!
My ER doctor seemed satisfied with his less-than-cursory assessment of my bloody nose. In my frenzied state, I asked if I had a concussion. “Unlikely. You’re lucky your nose broke the fall,” he smirked.
Turns out “unlikely” was entirely untrue. And “lucky” was far from it.
The next morning, in an attempt to return to normalcy, I cautiously ventured out to grab my usual Wednesday morning vanilla latte from the Starbucks across the street. Within 10 feet of the door to my San Francisco apartment building, I found myself inexplicably crippled, like my mind was a piece of paper being angrily crumpled and jostled into a wastebasket. I frantically hurried inside, terrorized by shock.
Shirin Ahmadi
And then, silence.
For the next three months, my brimming-with-activity life suddenly came to a screeching halt. And I became no more than an echo-chamber of quietude. In what was now a thoroughly concussed state, confirmed by another doctor, I could do no more than sit, alone, silent, in my dark curtain-drawn shoebox apartment.
I was unable to wear glasses on my broken nose for the first four weeks, and then unable to avoid the long-suppressed voice of truth that now weaseled its way into every crevice of my thoroughly rattled brain.
A voice within
I knew this voice intimately. We had a long-running unrequited love, one where it would whisper honesty, and I would chase it away with a mallet.
I remember the last time the Universe conspired for me to confront it. I was 24, lying on the bathroom floor, tears falling uncontrollably as I realized my husband, a Marine, would be coming home. I should have been happy, I should have been ecstatic. But that voice. That voice knew, deep down, that his return would mean once again becoming the obedient, supportive wife, not the budding JD-MBA candidate who, in his absence, dared to dream, dared to think that maybe she could build a life of her own choosing.
And so, I laid there, on a different bathroom floor, and I cried, accepting the merciless truth of the divorce I knew I needed to claim.
By my 25th birthday, on the other side of my first marriage, and on a solo trip to Montreal, I finally started to feel the ground beneath me once again and an openness toward whatever the Universe deemed me ready to receive. And receive, I did. A gift from a waiter at a small Parisian restaurant in the form of a book called “The Pilgrimage,” by Paulo Coelho.
Shirin Ahmadi
It was about Coelho’s journey on the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route across northern Spain. As a Pakistani Muslim American, I knew the concept of pilgrimage intimately. And along with that knowledge of the practice developed my severe allergy to it.
But this sojourn felt different. This so-called pilgrimage welcomed the spiritual but not religious among us, the dabbling-with-mysticism variety of no-longer-Muslim. I knew immediately that it was a sign, a nudge, a beckoning to one day walk this Way.
But that was six years ago, and I was no longer that young, open-hearted, whimsically free-spirited 25-year-old girl. I was a 31-year-old woman, starting over yet again in a city I didn’t care to live in, underpaid yet again in a job that couldn’t be further from any semblance of passion or fulfillment, and fresh out of yet another bet on the wrong relationship. Six years of floating through whatever unfinished emotion led to the big “it” that would finally make everything make sense.
Instead of metaphorical zombies following me to the next job, the next city, or the next man, I wanted to pursue my real dreams: to one day become a writer, and to one day walk the Camino.
Starting the walk
As the Universe would have it, amid my concussed existential spiraling, there appeared the buried corner of a tiny fleck of wisdom. In my endless loop of podcasts and audiobooks, half of which I just put on to quell the growing sense of loneliness, came Mel Robbins’ voice: If you can take one small, even microscopic, step every single day toward a more meaningful goal, at some point you’ll be far closer to your dream than you ever imagined.
Well, here I was, with all the time in the world and literally nothing left to lose. One step, huh? How hard could it be?
So, I started. One step, each day, toward maybe becoming a writer, toward maybe walking the Way. I began to gather the scraps and bits of stories I’d haphazardly strewn across notebooks and loose-leaf pages over the past three decades. I bought a guidebook to Santiago.
Shirin Ahmadi
This all sounds very natural and easy. Let me tell you. This shit sucked. I wasn’t just cobbling together forgotten pieces of my life that I’d discarded on the side of the road. I was uprooting the dirt and eons of sediment I’d piled on top of the coffin, where I at some point decided to unceremoniously bury that young 25-year-old dreamer. It was painful. No. Brutally agonizing. But it was a step.
And as I took more steps, I began to also regain the mental clarity I had before The Fall. But the voice was not done. The voice wanted more. It knew if it quieted down now, I would just end up in yet another six-year cycle of floating.
And so it got louder. Like a knot that tightened every time I tried to pull it. Louder and louder, anxiously screaming even as my life’s normalcy returned—every time I walked to our local bar on Friday night, every time I got on a plane to visit a friend, every time I entered a nightclub to see my favorite artist. What if I fall? What if I faint again? What if, what if, what if? I was losing my mind—ironic, given I had just regained it.
No matter what I tried, this incessant anxiety would not cease its gripping. Grounding exercises, breathing techniques, positive self-talk, even MDMA therapy. Nothing worked. The baby steps were no longer enough.
Shirin Ahmadi
And then the voice yelled once and for all: Before I make you collapse into a puddle on another bathroom floor, Go. It’s time. The Camino. You’re ready.
And so I began. I trained. I quit. I trained again. And then, I walked. I walked 73 miles across six days, through a torrential rain in the Galician Fall. It was just one week, but it was the week that changed everything.
I didn’t upend my life or quit my job. I took one week of vacation and promised myself that I would write down everything I learned along the Way.
I walked the Camino to quiet my anxiety. Instead, the quietness along the trail allowed me to seriously confronted the childhood I’d locked inside a box since I was 4 — a mother whose undiagnosed storms came with tiptoes and eggshells, a father who never made it home in time for dinner, and a version of myself I’d been performing for everyone else’s comfort.
Walking didn’t fix me. It just made me finally stop running.
