Paris as a destination has long been fetishized. A hub for dreamers, romantics and intellectuals, the city is firmly anchored in the world’s collective consciousness as a place that plays up beauty and pleasure in ways no other location can. It inspires and isolates, educates and infuriates and depending on the emotional state in which you find yourself when you visit, it can also foster life-defining change.
One of the women I admire tremendously (from afar, alas, as our schedules didn’t align for us to meet when she was in France in the spring) is Felicia Sullivan, a spectacular writer and powerful voice for women. I followed her travels earlier this year on her blog Love.Life.Eat. with great fascination – a need to bonfire the past was, among many reasons, a driving factor behind her visit. It wasn’t to fall in love or gawk at iconic landmarks but to find herself. Here, she shares how Paris offered just the medicine she needed.
When I first came to Paris, I fell in love with the idea of the city. A city that was somewhat like New York, but wasn’t with its buildings that had the advantage and patina of age, cafes that invited one to linger, and food that was delectable and sweet. Back then, Paris was awash in color, and, at 25, I saw it as a refuge from my life in New York. New York was where I had lost my mother to another man and her drug addiction. New York was the place where I felt lost. New York was the center of many addictions of my own. Back then, I created a Paris that perhaps didn’t exist because I needed beauty, I needed quiet and the idea of escape.
Eleven years later, I built a second life for myself, because I couldn’t endure the unremarkable one I was living. I had existed only in the space between my apartment and an airplane. I was no longer someone who created, I was someone who distributed and consumed, and I was anxious for quiet. I needed a time zone and distance to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. At thirty-six, I’d followed all the rules. I went to college and graduate school, mailed in my monthly student loan payments, and worked hard for the successful job. Yet, I was miserable, comfortably uncomfortable. Sleeping my way through my waking life. So I returned to Paris to close my eyes and get quiet. Without the pull of work and a seemingly endless inbox, I thought I might be inspired again. I might find my way back to myself. The shape of something new and exhilarating might reveal itself because I had the privilege and luxury of time.
I tend to always travel alone. Having been alone for most of my childhood, I don’t feel the chill of being alone, and am rarely ever lonely. I spent my days in Paris discovering food and art. Whether it was tearing into hot loaves from Poilâne or indulging in whipped chocolate mousse at Chocolat Chapon, or spending a day in d’Orsay entranced by an exhibit on macabre 18-20th Century art, I finally like felt a semblance of the woman I used to be: the woman who spent weekends in the kitchen and gathering with friends, the woman who wrote books, short stories and published a literary magazine. I felt less like the woman I had become: irritable, abrupt, tired, the friend who always cancelled or rescheduled because of work. In Paris I felt less like the woman who apologized. In that time and space, I started to create what would become my second book, my first serious attempt at a book within the past four years.
Paris was the place where I’d made a decision to resign from a job that was slowly killing me from the inside out. Paris was the place where my novel, Mammoth, was born. Paris was the place where I decided to architect a life of my own design, which would include writing, baking, and marketing.
Paris will always be the place I return to when I need to wipe the slate clean. When I need to be inspired by art. When I need to spend a whole day with éclairs, baguettes, cheese and buckets of chocolate. Although I’m 37 and have no illusions of the fact that Paris is a city with its own inherent flaws and challenges, that it’s not the tranquil idyll that I imagined in my 20s, it’s my creative and culinary home away from home.
Do yourself a favor and dive into Felicia’s work on her blog Love.Life.Eat and follow her on Twitter: @Felsull (I guarantee you’ll learn something new everyday!).
