CHANGING COURSES

My chips were down. My heart was broken. My fortune had been stolen. I'd been betrayed, and dishonoured, and dehumanised.  I'd become a snivelling wreck of the woman I'd spent decades building to. I wanted to run away, most importantly, from myself.

So I left the man who caused my ruin. I sold my home. I farewelled my friends. I closed my business. I sold my car. I fled my city. I left my country.  I took off for a year, with only 11 kilos of clothes and a laptop and decent camera, to learn to write, journal, and photograph, while I followed where the road would take me. 

The long and winding road, definitely. 

This was to be my year without clothes.  Without expectations. 

Half way through it, I found myself working for an antique dealer, who installed me in an apartment, and I was enrolled in a language school in Venice.

I'd gone from the pits in Nepal where I spent two months, cold and miserable, to traipsing around Morocco, Turkey, England and Italy, with my bestie Luda, where I miraculously landed the several months gig working as a jewellery designer for the antique dealer in Venice. 

If you had asked me what I wanted most in my life at this juncture ... it would be this. Io sono eccitato. I have enrolled at the language school, I have an apartment near a canal.  I have the world at my muddy feet.

I will be working with and living under the generosity of two wonderful people - Giorgio and Sylvia, whom I met by a series of serendipitous events over the past few months.  If I could try to imagine anything more wonderful for this stage of my life ... I'd fail.

I have no idea what the next months will unveil ... but five months ago, in Nepal, I wrote the same thing and a world of adventures are between then and now.  I am alive, happy, putting on weight, and my fingers are bruised from all my wood touchings.

I think all this would make a great film - Write, Click, Recover!  What do you think? Anyone know any producers out there?

Bling, bling, anyone home?