Solo Holidays

Reflecting on the past, present and future

The first Christmas after my mother died I went to Hawai’i. A family friend worked for Alaska Airlines and gave me two guest passes. I flew on standby and stayed in the cheapest hotel I could find, right in Waikiki.

I was the first of many solo holidays, and like all my solo holidays, it had its challenges. Like all of my solo holidays, I became closer to myself, and learned to be more gentle with myself.

I was thirty years-old and learning to live without my mother. Really, I was learning what it was like not to have any close family at all. I look at this picture of myself and feel a lot of compassion— I hated my body and hated the way I looked. I didn’t feel like I belonged in the world. On this trip I went to a bar and slept with a stranger; something I’d done many times before. But unlike the times before, sleeping with a stranger no longer worked in the way it had before my mom’s suicide. Before, I’d sleep with whoever, and the act of false intimacy scratched some kind of itch. …