Who knew I was this anxious?
In July of 2026, I walked the Camino Primitivo: a two-week route over the Cantabrian mountains in northern Spain and down into Santiago de Compostela. This was the first time I’ve walked for any length of time without a group, staying mostly in hostels, and carrying all of my stuff with me (versus with help from luggage porters). Over the next little while I’ll be sharing snapshots of this experience.
Walking Day 1: I put my passport in my pack this morning, right? Surely I did. No way I didn’t. I would have seen it still lying there unpacked. But my purse is a dark color, blends in easily, and my mind could have gone somewhere else for a split second. Let me just pull over, take my pack off, and check.
Day 2: My phone charger! Surely I left the pouch with all the wires back in the hostel. I must have. I was in such a rush to get out of that crowded place that I never looked back. I won’t be able to get another one for at least a week. I’m screwed. Let me just leave this awesome conversation I’m having, pull over, and check. If they’re there I promise I won’t worry about anything again, and I’ll never leave anything behind.
Day 3 (having learned to whisper to myself as I pack each item, “I am watching myself put my charger in the pouch. I am watching myself put the pouch in the backpack, stuffed down the side next to the towel.”) Could I have left a pair of underwear (one of precious three) drying on the rack? I didn’t go back to the bunk to look under and around it before I left this morning. What am I forgetting? Maybe I really left my charger behind this time. Let me just pull over and check real quick.
Still Day 3: OK, everything is for sure in the pack, but it’s pulling on my shoulders. The weight must be distributed wrong. Let me just pull over and rearrange.
15 minutes later: Did I put everything back in when I redistributed? I forgot to do the thing where I narrate each item. Could I have left my purse behind? If I did, surely someone else will see it when they walk by and get it to me. Unless it somehow fell backward off the stone wall. Shit. Let me just pull over and check.
15 minutes later, ohhhh still day 3 my friends: This thing is still pulling on my shoulders, no matter how I adjust the straps. Shit. It’s the wrong pack isn’t it? I’m stuck with the wrong pack for two weeks now. Let me pull over and see if I can make one more adjustment.
To an extent this was part of the first several kilometers every single day,. The “What Did I Forget?” Shuffle, followed by the “I’m So Uncomfortable” Revue.
It went on and on.
New layers of anxiety kept emerging. Stores of anxiety. I seriously couldn’t believe how much was in there. Bigger me watched in awe as metric tons of the stuff was triggered, blown to the surface as if by depth chargers, poured out into the fields, given to the trees, tipped out onto the dirt.
Over and over, my identity as a chill human blown to smithereens. My ego not one bit psyched about that.
It only deepened as I walked. As surface anxieties burned off, it revealed material that lived closer to the bone. The fear of being parted from my belongings evolved into fear of being injured, undone, left behind. These aches aren’t just muscles coming online, said my mind. They’re the start of long-term injuries: ones that will ruin this walk. Ruin me. Terror arose over wellbeing, over rejection, over my very survival at times (not that it was ever under actual threat).
Still, achingly slowly, over kilometers and days, the loops started unlooping.
In fleeting moments I found that I was 100% present to what I was doing, from packing up my essentials in the pre-dawn dark (and they were essential; I wouldn’t be carrying them otherwise), to uttering a word of gratitude for each steady step I took on a slippery downhill slope. I watched the gratitude extend to my feet, knees, hips. Heart, lungs. Eyes. Every cell of me. Then out to every person who loved me, who hurt me, who made me. For every rock and plant participating in that exact moment.
Old, petrified hurts that had been curled up in me for decades woke up, made themselves known. They asked me to come out, asked me carry them in my arms like children, then to let them down so they could walk next to me, tell me things, run ahead and point at cool slugs and rock formations.
I spoke aloud to them, listened as they spoke to me.
I heard myself praying. I heard myself singing.
It was not comfortable, none of it, not for a second.
Those feelings of openness would contract back into anxiety and fear, open out again, go back and forth, like breath.
Between breaths, though, there were bigger and bigger spaces. Inside those spaces, I really got—maybe for the first time in my life—why it’s so cool to be alive.
More about all this in future dispatches, but this feels like important groundwork to lay (and to remember for myself): the hours, days, kilometers of sheer anxiety I trudged through. Its voice was sometimes chirping, sometimes booming, but never gone. I know this is nothing remotely revolutionary; indeed, it’s what’s meditators have found since the dawn of the practice. I’d just never experienced it, at least not this powerfully. Learning to be with, work with these voices (usually because we don’t have a choice—I certainly didn’t) is what changes things.
And man, did things change.
