four days in paris
It was not a mid-life crisis. I felt very comfortable with my career and my family. I felt completely at peace with who I was – who I am – as a mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, physician, and human.
It was that I felt unlinked. Disconnected from myself. In being so many things to so many others, I needed to rejoin all of these elements of myself and remember who I was – who I am – at the core.
To do this, I needed to be alone.
In early January, shortly after the new year, I traveled to Paris for a solo vacation. I was only in Paris for four full days, but those days were fulfilling in a way I had never imagined possible.
I began contemplating the idea of a solo vacation about a year before. I do a fair amount of travel for work – committee meetings and medical conferences, mostly – and I’m typically alone for these. However, my work trips are not vacations, and any free time is typically filled with networking or catching up with friends. My days are structured, with committee meetings and working lunches or dinners, or with conference sessions in chilly meeting halls, one after another. Often, by the end of the day, I’m ready to order room service for dinner and not leave my hotel room until the next morning.
With the encouragement of my husband, I booked airline tickets to Paris. He didn’t really understand my desire to travel by myself, but he knows that, unlike him, I am an introvert and that I cherish being alone.
I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at 6 am on a Thursday morning. It was still dark as my driver navigated the highway and then the streets of Paris on the way to my hotel on Rue Saint-Sulpice in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. We spoke about the workers’ strikes that had been going on for weeks and the difficulty getting around the city since they began. In one neighborhood, vehicles were forced to drive slowly through a group of protesters soliciting donations from the drivers of the cars attempting to pass. My driver rolled his window down and passed some bills to a man with a megaphone. This elicited cheers and we were allowed to pass.
Like that first drive into the city, so many moments from my time in Paris are ingrained in my memory of those four days.
