Welcome to Venice

Love in the City of Venice

In 2017, I planned to take my first solo trip to Venice. I had my flights and hostels booked, even rented a car for a side trip to hike around the nearby Slovenian Alps. And then I bailed. For bullshit reasons I have since conveniently forgotten, I chose to eat the cost of the non-refundable deposits rather than go. 

Venice has haunted me ever since.

I started solo traveling about 12 years ago, but I’d never stopped in a “romantic” city by myself before. On some level it was a desire to not be That Girl – the singleton awkwardly eating dinner alone while surrounded by couples, coupling. On another I didn’t see what such a city could have to offer a solo traveler. But I think the real reason was that I’ve never wanted to deal with my relationship with myself.

You see, The List of People I Love is a long one. It began with family, grew to include best friends and neighbors, my pets, my friends’ parents, my friends’ pets. As I started moving across the country and then the world I made ever more connections, tacking names onto The List.

The problem was never that my List has grown too long. In fact, I think that loving widely and deeply is the answer to most of humanity’s ills. The problem was that at some point along the way, I had struck my own name from The List.

I know at one point I loved myself. The childhood that lives on in my memory is a golden ball of light and giggles, an overwhelmingly happy time spent running around a sprawling network of neighborhood backyards. I loved immediately and easily and don’t remember questioning anything, much less myself. At some point, though, I fell off the false summit of childhood glee. Self-doubt, teenage shame, and social anxiety started to poison the infinite spring of kid-love that I’d taken for granted. What started as a series of thin fractures in my self-love slowly eroded away into canyons, and in time I woke up and I was 30, wondering how on earth my foundation had become so thin.

By this point, you may have guessed that this is not shaping up to be a fairy tale. Spoiler alert: I did not go to Italy and have a romantic affair with a Venetian prince.

But I think at this point in my life, finding love within is more what I need. I need to work on being my own source of validation and happiness, and stop demanding that others provide it for me. I need to accept myself, and to simply learn from my mistakes rather than endlessly beat myself up over them. And anyways, can I ever really accept love from other people if I don’t fully love myself? Or give love, for that matter?

So this year I finally took me, myself, and I on a “romantic trip to Venice,” to do some deep soul-searching into these and other questions. It’s a work in progress. It’s not like romance, which slaps you across the face and refuses to leave your side for a long time thereafter. It’s one of those things that I have to intentionally work towards every day. I’m not sure how much progress I really made in Venice, in between taking photographs and walking twenty kilomteres every day and jittering from espressos and gelato-sugar. But one thing did become clear on my last night, as I sat comfortably eating dinner alone. Not once on the trip had I worried about what anyone else thought of me. Accepting myself had made me immune to the perceived judgements from others. For the first time in a long time, I was okay to just be.

(And, just so you know, there was one perk to eating alone: I got a lot of free tiramisu from the waiters.)

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