Permission to Feel Everything
On the night before my birthday in 2023, I succumbed to my inner chaos and sobbed in the shower. It was easy to surrender to the rush of water, cold and harsh, as I muffled my tears so as not to wake anyone. It was cathartic. In the shower, like on a plane in flight, I was vulnerable and unreachable. Safe from the outside noise, but exposed to my closest demons. An image conjured straight from a film or a Filipino teleserye. The drama.
Not that my anxiety had any reason to come out. My partner and three close friends were under one roof, a Venetian Gothic rental, on the Venice leg of the two-week vacation we’d planned for my birthday. The day before was spent gallivanting on vaporettos and marveling at bread baked inside the large, empty shell of an invasive snail. The following day promised a jazz show and a dinner by the Venetian Riviera. What was there to cry about?
The summer my partner and I took our friends to Italy was a time when our New York City work lives felt like levees near bursting. Some of us were in between gigs. One had left her nine-to-five. I was in purgatory, unsure of whether to leave or stay in a newsroom job I struggled to keep.
While the catalyst for my first friend trip abroad was my birthday, I wanted it to feel like a collective, escapist balm. We couldn’t afford another lesson to learn. We didn’t want whatever it is that makes many of us God’s strongest soldiers in the army we never enlisted in. Life, however, had other plans for my attempt at blissful ignorance.
This trip showed me the price I had to pay to experience joy fully: to contend with what travel and migration meant as an immigrant (I was born in the Philippines and live in New York) and what it takes to dismantle the myth of being undeserving of the love I seek.
TO MIGRATE, TO TRAVEL
I had the idea for this two-week vacation while on a different trip in 2022. My partner and I were in Pienza, Italy, a hilltop town overlooking the Tuscan countryside. It was my first time in Europe and the act of hopping on a plane for personal amusement was foreign to me. I traveled based on a list of reasons that I categorized under the immigrant holy trinity: migrating, seeing family, or going to a funeral. When I moved from Manila to Ohio and eventually to New York in my teens, to travel anywhere by foot, bus, train, or plane felt like I had learned how to drive (preposterous) or had grown wings (impossible). I grew up in a single-parent household where we didn’t have the time or the money to go anywhere.
So when I was overlooking the same Tuscan countryside my mom and I saw in the movie Under the Tuscan Sun, it was hard not to gawk at the olive and cypress trees scattered throughout the gold and green rolling hills. I stared at the clouds, like chunks of thick paint, against the canvas of a crisp blue sky. I wanted my friends—cherished chosen family, keepers of my heart—to see it, too. More than anything, I wanted them here with me; thus the seed of a future trip was planted.
It was apparent to me then why Diane Lane’s character, post-divorce, hopped off a gay tour bus to buy a fixer-upper near a different Italian hilltop town. I also understood her urgent desire to fill up the empty halls of her dusty villa. I wanted to hoard this feeling of tranquility, trap it in a box, and ship it to my friends to protect it from grief. This grief was the scary kind, the one that can sap the color from the scenery and replace the cypress trees with stand-ins of people you care about and left behind. While most of my loved ones are still alive, I have a complicated habit of turning them into ghosts, envisioning them in places I’ve traveled to, convinced that wherever I am will forever be somewhere they won’t be.
Perhaps it’s the immigrant in me that sees peace and joy from a place of scarcity, anticipating its eventual end and being unable to experience a moment fully. Maybe I can credit my Filipino upbringing, too, which urges me to always be grateful, aware of the condition that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away (I am, clearly, a recovering Catholic).
In 2023, against that immigrant mindset and in pursuit of my own, I returned (groundbreaking) to Pienza and brought my friends to the place I imagined them in (unprecedented). We walked the same path I walked on my first visit, sat on a bench, and marveled at the view they had seen on Facetime. The moment was like the scenery before us—unreal, captivating, and untouchable. The ghosts and grief I once projected gave way to a new reality; my friends were here, finally, not waiting for the metaphorical box of this moment to arrive in the mail. If migrating, for me, was about what is lost forever and who is displaced, then traveling (as I’ve come to understand it) is about what can be gained when the privilege to return is promised again and again.
In that hilltop town with my loved ones, I traveled for the first time.
TO BE SEEN IS TO BE LOVED (AND DESERVING)
The days that led up to the Venice Shower Cry of 2023® were quiet and full of laughter. We easily settled into the places we visited even though the ensemble of friends I gathered had been strangers to each other.
At a farm in Tuscany, we watched boars chew on the same patch of grass as we fed baby goats leftover bread. Before breakfast and dinner, the farm dogs and cats kept us company.
In Venice, when we settled in to watch Queen Charlotte, the bug spray did its rounds as we shielded our bodies from the Italian mosquitoes. Our happy hour was “Supradyn” hour, a concoction of water and a powdered vitamin supplement. Gelato marked the end of the day.
On the night of my dramatic shower cry, unbeknownst to me across the hall, two of my friends were crying, too. They were simultaneously writing letters to me and blowing up balloons to decorate our Airbnb. Later, I woke up to flowers and a gift from my partner. While getting ready for a night out, my friends did my hair as they gently talked me out of my body dysmorphia. At dinner, we cackled about how preposterously wonderful it was. Afterward, on our way to a jazz club, we quipped that ten Venetian minutes is actually twenty. When we got home, I was sung to in front of a birthday cake that we later ate on the floor, prodding it with forks.
This is what the Venice Shower Cry of 2023® was about: getting exactly what I wanted, experiencing the love I’ve dreamt of and being remarkably unprepared to receive it.
I squirmed and sobbed while they sang “Happy Birthday.” I woke up to the balloons before anyone noticed I was awake and ran to the bathroom to sob. I held back tears at the sight of my friends laughing, seemingly about nothing, in beautiful places. As for the letters they wrote on that fateful night? It took me over a month to read them.
When people find a new way of saying “I love you,” it’s both exhilarating and nerve-wracking. An excerpt from my friend LD’s letter encapsulated what this trip meant to me:
Whenever I feel undeserving, I will always remember that the universe has already given me you. If I have been entrusted with a soul so pure and special, surely the world can be mine if I so choose.
Before I met you, there was a large and heavy block in the way of my connection to the world around me. You make me feel like it is okay to simply feel.
I rarely reread this letter because it unearths a unique wreck of emotions each time, but it remains one of my favorites. It’s a reminder that being undeserving in this world is a myth that can be debunked by the courage of facing ourselves, in all our faults and glory, and the strength we find in the safety of our closest, forged relationships.
In the two years since, the Italy trip remains a cog in the machine of my life.
I’ve dusted off my passport to return to places, like Todos Santos in Mexico, and to explore new ones, like Ísafjörður in Iceland. I’ve gone on birthday trips and even hosted a party (I still do not like being sung to).
As for my friends, they’re now each other’s friends. We haven’t been on a trip since that first trek to Italy, but the days we spend together in New York City are frequent and intimate, like living with a roommate you like. Think: doing laundry, holding hands, voice notes like diary entries, and admitting when our sorrows weigh the heaviest.
I continue to cry in the shower, but nowadays I cry in open spaces, too. In the subway. On a bench. After a show. When food is too good.
Like LD put it in his letter, I simply feel.
