An Epiphany in Santorini
Part memoir part self-help wisdom
April 11, 1992
Rob, Paula and I walked to the bakery and the market to buy food because we were going to use the kitchen at the hotel and have a cheap meal. We bought spaghetti and beers. But we felt so bad asking the man to use the kitchen that we ordered Greek salads, and he cooked our food for us so he charged us for that too. It was, of course, a classic situation we would get ourselves into. Afterward, we went back to our room with the radio one of the staff lent us, and we played drinking games and got drunk. Then we went to the Disco Florida and had a really good time. There weren’t many people there but we had fun anyway. Rob danced on the bar for a free drink. Then when we wanted to leave, they wouldn’t let us so we didn’t get out of there until about 4am. They were doing strange things like feeding us bananas and trying to dance on the peels. It was classic. When we left, Doug, Rob and I laid down in the road to look at the stars. What a picture, the three of us laying in the road with our feet in the air.
I was in Santorini, Greece, on the last leg of a four-week adventure through Europe. I had just turned twenty-one, was spending a year abroad at the University of Leeds in England, and having the best time of my life. The friend I was traveling with had to leave suddenly due to a family emergency while we were in Italy, about to leave for Greece. So there I was, with a couple of Canadians we’d met in Salzburg, about to complete my adventure without the security of someone I knew.
That’s how I began my journey to England as well, the August prior. I left the country for the first time ever to go live somewhere I’d never been, with no one I knew.
The academic year before I left for England, I found myself in a deep darkness—drinking excessively and dangerously, getting into precarious situations, working two jobs while trying to keep up with school. My favorite aunt had passed away, and I had underlying emotional issues I was too scared to address (obviously). Two of my friends had gone to England for a semester the year before, and I felt a strong pull that this would be exactly what I needed to fix my life. I needed a change. I needed an experience.
In so many ways, it was a rebirth. I was new to myself again. I did things I’d never done and navigated a new world on my own. I built a sense of competency and saw what I was capable of. It shattered the limited image I had of myself.
I built new relationships, which was huge for me as someone who came from a very close-knit high school experience and even lived with high school friends in college. I took risks and had fun. I’d been working all through high school and college, so it was the first time in a long time I got to just be a college kid. I never had to miss out on adventures because of work, as was so often the case back home.
That year was one of the best years of my life because, for the first time, I got to discover myself without anything familiar to tell me who I was. Before, the definitions of myself and my identity were shaped by the containers I grew up in. I was told by my family who to be, and then I compared myself to my friends and took on identities that could make me more like them.
When I found myself lying in the middle of the one road that ran through a small town in Santorini with two Canadian guys who had become my friends, staring up at the stars with our legs in the air, sharing our inner worlds and creating indelible memories, I realized life could be amazing and wondrous—but only if you risk your small experience of yourself and choose the unknown. Easier said than done, but sometimes you can touch that undefinable thing that sits at the center of your heart, telling you to reach beyond what you know.
It told me to do this wild thing—something my family didn’t really understand—of living in another country, away from all my anchors. It told me to go on the adventure of hitchhiking through England, to ride on the back of a motorcycle for the first time with a cute guy named Trevor on a Greek island, to spend my 21st birthday in Amsterdam, and to ditch studying for exams and take a last-minute flight to Israel with my two English besties. I said yes to every adventure that year, big and small, and I lived full out.
That year is a touchstone for me that I often go back to. I've taken many detours since then, but I’m getting my train back on the track of living what’s fully possible when I surrender to the leading without overthinking it.
I’m writing this as an appeal to myself from my own heart.
Adventures await—in the everyday mundane as much as in the grander avenues. It’s the spirit more than the details. Say yes.
*Note: It’s important to face our pain. Duh, my whole Substack is about that. So I am not saying run off on a traveling adventure in lieu of facing yourself. What I am saying is that it helped me get unstuck and as a result of how that year transformed me, I came back and was able to make the changes necessary in my life. I got deeper into relationship with myself through the experience, and that’s the whole point of everything.
From my heart to yours…
