Vacation As Therapy: I’m An Escape Artist

I'm an escape artist. It's what I do best. Every time something in my life falls apart, I run. It's the only therapy that truly works for me - although my therapist tends to disagree.

I once read that the best way to get over a broken heart is relocation. I may have taken it a bit too literally. The first time things ended with the love of my life, I quit my job and ran to Boulder for three months, then San Francisco for a month. When I returned to New York City, my insides still in pieces, I swiftly got on Craigslist and found an apartment swap opportunity with a woman in Paris. I left the day after New Year's and spent the next six weeks in a foreign city, where I'd never been, alone. And as I awoke every morning in the mostly empty, several hundred-year-old apartment that lacked a television and even a box spring for the mattress, I felt healed. The neighbor across the way was a composer, and when I fell asleep to the sounds of his piano and the chatter of the French artists who would gather at the gallery downstairs, I felt renewed. My therapist, despite her efforts, could not have helped me like the City of Lights did in those weeks.

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It was while I was abroad that my love decided to come back into my life. And I resumed our tumultuous madness with caution, but it was not meant to be. A few months later, I would find myself under the vast starry nights of Big Sky, Montana, then on the banks of Big Sur, before taking up temporary residence once again at my sister's home in Boulder. Even as I write this, I sit on a beach on the coast of New Hampshire, because he did it again. However this time, my job doesn't allow me to run. My escape artist ways seem to be over for now.

My friends, family, and (especially) my therapist find this behavior an unhealthy way to deal with the issues that pop up in my life. As they've all pointed out: I'm not actually dealing at all; I'm running. My sister has even told me that I am no longer allowed to hide away in her cookie-cutter world of suburbia. Next time I end up there, she has warned me, I'm there to stay. (She's never cared for my choice of New York City as a home base anyway.)

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But for me, relocation, or rather an extended vacation, is still the ultimate therapy. I can subtract myself from a situation, and there's something empowering in that. I have picked myself up off the floor on which I have fallen, packed my belongings and taken my wounded pride and broken heart to another part of the globe. It extends far beyond out of sight, out of mind. It's more of a new beginning, a chance to regroup far from my daily existence and focus on how I'm going to carry on and survive. I've realized that sometimes there isn't enough bleach to scrub a memory away from my life; there isn't enough burning of sage to cloud fact. But a plane ticket in hand and locking up my past behind me as my luggage and I tumble down my building's five flights of stairs - that's where I find my solace.

Perhaps I should never have read that quote about relocation. I don't even remember who said it or even where I stumbled upon it. For all I know, I came up with it myself as an excuse for my actions. I admit I'm not good at coping, dealing or even being remotely rational when I should have learned how to be by now. What I do know is that removing myself is what I do best. Vacating the premises, as they say, is where I excel. It may be far more expensive than once-a-week sessions with my therapist in Murray Hill, but until you've awoken to the Sunday bells of Notre Dame, you don't know the true meaning of emotional repair.

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