Bruised and Glorious

Winner of the 2024 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Safiya Sinclair

i

In the summer of 2018, less than two years after my brain operation, I embark on my first pilgrimage—the last 392 miles of the Camino Francés, which I will hike in three weeks.
            “Don’t put yourself in a straitjacket,” I whisper on my first day, hobbling through La Rioja’s exposed countryside in northern Spain under a sun so sweltering that it seems to harbor a personal vendetta against me. My ill-fitting waist straps dig into my hips. Each step intensifies the heft of my pack, which should contain 10 percent of my body weight, roughly thirteen pounds, but—because of my portable pharmacy of forty-plus prescription medications—comes in at a whopping thirty. I flew to Madrid from Portland, Oregon, took a train to Logroño, and, after getting lost for three hours on a golf course populated with impossibly beautiful Spaniards in white, have somehow turned a fourteen-kilometer day into a fifteen-miler.
            This morning, I discovered that instead of my merino wool socks, I’d brought flimsy, novelty animal ones. In my defense, I packed in the midst of the eighteen-month debilitating headache and brain fog after my craniectomy, which left me a “zipperhead,” with a scar running from hairline to neck. The thin socks make the cushioning of my new trail runners irrelevant, and I can already feel the sting of blisters forming beneath the grinning owls, which look increasingly deranged.
            This isn’t the pilgrimage I was hoping for.
            Still, as I stab the dirt path with my hiking poles, propelling myself forward, I’m buoyed by the yellow arrows marking the trail. On this five-hundred-mile pilgrimage, these bright arrows, painted on rocks, pavements, and concrete walls, signal that I’m still on the Way. Some are barely visible, others lovingly arranged by pilgrims from piles of rocks. In the 1970s, parish priest Elías Valiña Sampedro, from the enchanting village of O Cebreiro on the Camino, marked the route with these yellow arrows—now as ubiquitous a symbol of the pilgrimage as the scallop shells appearing alongside them.
            I love these arrows. I live for them. After hiking a few twenty-mile days in a row, I will start to hallucinate arrows. Even migrating birds will resemble arrows.
            The beauty of the Camino Francés is that these arrows never take you backwards. When you see them, you know you’re going the right way. You can get lost, as I will in the mountains, 240 miles into my hike, wearing a hiking boot on my left foot and a flip-flop on the other to accommodate the swollen, mutilated, infected, blister-ridden monstrosity of my right foot. But the arrows guarantee that I’ll find my way back. For those of us who feel irretrievably lost—displaced from our ancestral homes, our bodies, even ourselves—these arrows are an exquisite gift.

ii

As my feet blister and my body falters on the exposed trail, I brace myself for its next betrayal. For more than twenty-five years, I’ve lived with chronic illness—ulcerative colitis, migraine with aura, and life-threatening allergies. I trudge through the Meseta and kick up dust on a trail unsheltered by the sun, my body rebelling with each painful step, and am reminded of the many times I’ve felt displaced—not just in the world, as an Indian-American woman, but in my own skin.
            Autoimmune illness turns your body into an enemy that wages war against itself. For those of us born to colonized ancestral homelands, illness can feel like another layer of colonization. Author Porochista Khakpour, in her memoir Sick, describes her struggles with late-stage Lyme disease: “To find a home in my body is to tell a story that doesn’t exist. I am a foreigner, but in ways that go much deeper than I thought, under the epidermis and into the blood cells.”
            I found sanctuary in my imagination and, as I pursued an MFA and PhD in creative writing, wrote my way into a homecoming—even through hospital-acquired superbugs, antibiotic-resistant infections, and surgeries. But my December 2016 craniectomy for Chiari malformation—a congenital, degenerative condition in which your brain grows into your spinal canal—splintered my mind. I lost my ability to make meaning through storytelling and felt exiled not just from my body but also my mind.
            My neurosurgeon had warned me that the operation, which involves cutting through cerebellar tonsils and removing bone from skull, was the most painful one he performs. But nothing could have prepared me for the soul-splitting torture that followed. My initial elation over surviving the risky operation when I woke in the ICU, beaming at my parents and then-boyfriend, gave way to horror as I sank into an impenetrable brain fog that refused to lift.
            I left the ICU a week later with a prescription for two hundred Dilaudid pills, a pain medication ten times stronger than morphine. It soon became clear that the surgery hadn’t just fogged my mind. It had obliterated its functioning. Still, I feigned recovery, going against my neurosurgeon’s advice and returning to work less than a month later.
            In my mind, my illness needed to have an arc: from struggle to triumph. But such narratives are dangerous. No one tells you that we outlast triumph, that the euphoria of waking up alive after a risky operation doesn’t last. Fleeting victories don’t bookend our lives. Months after the operation, my pain seared.
            But my frailty felt like failure, so I performed in public and drowned in private. I graded essays even as screen time made me vomit. I faked my way through teaching, piecing sentences together, only to forget what I’d said. I stopped taking painkillers to get through work, then crumpled into bed every night, writhing in pain as the world spun around me. Meghan O’Rourke puts it beautifully in The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness: “When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living.” I ran myself ragged at work to avoid facing the truth: I could barely think, much less tell stories, and without this ability, I felt lost.
            In the spring of 2018, my university awarded me the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, which I’d earned through hard work and grit. But it felt like a farce. I was living an inauthentic life, barely surviving, never thriving.
            Disconnected from my own psyche, I lost myself in hiking. Every day, I charged through Forest Park—one of the largest urban forests in America—armed with hiking poles and EpiPens. I reveled in the glow of green moss, the crunch of leaves underfoot. The trail spans 5.4 miles with a 950-foot elevation gain—steep enough to quiet my mind. I’d hike to the viewpoint overlooking Mt. Hood and exhale. My connection with nature freed me, momentarily, from suffering.
            But those hikes, though profound, didn’t force me to face my mourning. After the craniectomy, I’d forged ahead, abandoning my shattered spirit and leaving it utterly alone. I needed to walk through my grief, struggling over mountains and deserts, dull and breathtaking landscapes alike, to nurture my broken self. At night, I dreamt of movement, of skiing from the highest point of the universe, bearing witness to cheetahs and whales—creatures born to move—along the way.
            I dreamt of the Camino.
            The Pacific Crest Trail, practically in our backyard, offered the mileage and nature I craved. But the Camino called to me for reasons I didn’t yet understand. I trusted that during my long, grueling days in the Meseta, I would walk my way into why.

When I told my sweet mother about the pilgrimage, she sighed. I needed to rest, she said, especially after my battery of tests that week: a suspicious mammogram, abnormal ultrasound, and breast needle biopsy that, blessedly, came back benign.
            “Why not Hawaii?” she asked. “My treat.”
            I tried to explain.
            “You know, my friends’ daughters go to the beach,” she said wearily. “But not mine. You think you’re Forrest Gump, running around the world.”
            I laughed. This was her blessing.
            Without mental coherence or the capacity to withstand screen time, I couldn’t write, so I left my laptop and notebooks behind when I boarded my flight to Madrid. I no longer knew who I was without my intellect or imagination. I only knew I had to accept the legitimacy of merely existing and find new pathways to joy. When you can’t exercise your mind, you must exercise your soul.
            Here, on the trail, I am mired in discomfort. When walking becomes a struggle, as it inevitably does on the Camino, you funnel all your energy into moving forward. You have none left for angst or the whiplash of jerking between past and future. Pain silences your looping inner dialogue, forcing you into a state of absolute presence, of ecstatic flow. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. . . . The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

iii

Late in the day, I cross paths with pilgrims from all over the world. We greet each other with the customary “Buen Camino,” or “good journey,” and walk together through lush vineyards and olive groves, all of us unkempt, fresh-faced, exhausted, and exuberant.
            “Cute socks,” says a thirty-something woman with short-cropped blonde hair, a Camino buff, glasses, and a luminous smile. “Love the owls.”
            I shake my head, smiling. “They’re not as innocent as they look.”
            She’s a special-education teacher from Seattle who never hiked a day in her life before she crossed the Pyrenees on her first day of the Camino. She came here to raise funds for a charity—she’s Catholic, like at least a third of the pilgrims walking the Way—but also to nurture herself after burning out, badly, from teaching.
            When she asks me why I’m here, I hesitate. Few people voluntarily walk hundreds of miles unless they are grieving something: a death, divorce, illness, or major transition. Nearly everyone here feels displaced—in body, mind, or soul. I brought my broken body and spirit here because I’ve lost my faith in myself, and in my sense of home.
            From a young age, I felt unwelcome in America. As one of a few minorities in a class of 1,500 students in the Bible Belt, color was a liability. Because of my distinctive birthmark—black, oval-shaped, hairy, and centered on my forehead—I was relentlessly bullied by classmates. “Three Eyes,” they would call me, lobbing spitballs at my head, as I tried to will myself invisible. At my hair appointments, I asked for long bangs and hid behind them in class. Though I am now a tenured and full professor of English literature and creative writing, I spoke only Bengali until I was four and nearly flunked kindergarten, struggling to learn English as classmates locked me in the bathroom, refusing to let me out until I got that “thing” off my face. In elementary school, I failed fitness tests while classmates stomped on the bleachers in unison, jeering while the three gym teachers did nothing. I’d excuse myself to the bathroom, hunch over the toilet, and vomit.
           Every night at home, I tried to summon the courage to ask my parents for surgery to remove the birthmark and stop the bullying. I never could. The racism I experienced subsumed me with shame, turning me silent. Life felt like the looping track where I’d failed my fitness tests—arduous and going nowhere. It was only at night, huddled under the covers, scrawling stories in my notebook, that I inhabited myself. Imagination became my refuge. Without it, I feel unmoored.

iv

Midway through my conversation with my new friend, the sky begins pelting us with rain. We set down our packs and cover them, as if they’re toddlers we must protect, before putting on ponchos. Soon, we’re having an animated conversation with other pilgrims about blisters—how many we have, whether to pop them, and how. But as a fifty-something, generous-bellied, bald Englishman with a green pack passes, everyone goes quiet.
          “He’s everywhere,” my friend mutters. “You can’t get away.”
            “These fucking flies,” he snarls in a thick English accent, swatting at the air. “They won’t stop raping me.”
            I widen my eyes and hang back as he plods ahead. My friend glowers at his back. She had the misfortune of starting the pilgrimage with him at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, she says. Within twenty-four hours, he’d managed to offend everyone in their orbit. I can see why, I say, marveling at how efficiently he’s repelled me too.
            As the downpour intensifies, I charge ahead, sloshing through the mud, until I at last glimpse the distant, glowing steeple of Navarette’s sixteenth-century Church of the Assumption. I race into town, my fluorescent-yellow poncho billowing, my pack jostling behind me, and take shelter in an albergue: a dormitory-style hostel for pilgrims. The back of my head throbs. I notice a flyer advertising two private rooms and ask the owner if one is available. It is, he says, as he takes my passport, stamps my pilgrim credential, and grabs a towel, sheet, and pillowcase from a disheveled stack. But he won’t be giving it to me.
            “Sorry. You need to get used to sleeping with the other pilgrims,” he says, taking my eight euros.
            I’m desperate to change his mind. Then, the Englishman walks in and barrels past me. Now I’m near tears.
            The owner rises. “Tour,” he says. I follow, trying to explain in broken Spanish that I suffer from ulcerative colitis, a bad stomach, a bad brain. He nods as if to appease me. We reach a curtain, which he sweeps aside to reveal a lone commode, flanked by two shower stalls.
            I stare at it, then him. “How many people are sharing this bathroom?” I ask faintly.
            “Maybe—eighty?”
            Even before beginning the Camino, I worried about managing my ulcerative colitis without my home regimen of blended greens, probiotics, and enemas. But this? Impossible.
            “I leave you now,” he says, adding “Buen Camino!” before walking away.
            I stand there, glaring at the toilet bowl as if my wrath will cow it into cloning itself. Then I trudge into the co-ed dormitory and stop short at the sight of eighty bunk beds crammed together.
            I am deathly afraid of bunk beds.
            If I had done my research, I wouldn’t be in this situation. I consider my options: If I pick the bottom bunk, the top one might collapse and crush me. If I take the top, I could fall and end up with another traumatic brain injury.
            My TBI came about when I fell off the summit of South Sister mountain and then tumbled off a rock cliff as I crawled down to safety, bloodied and concussed. Six months later, during a winter storm, a car T-boned mine three times. I’d prefer that my third concussion come with a better story than “I fell off a bunk bed,” so I toss my rain-stained backpack onto a bottom bunk and settle into this safety hazard of a bed, peering up at the scaffolding above.
            As my friend walks into the dormitory, drenched, we exchange weary smiles. Then her face changes.
            “Fancy seeing you here,” a voice booms.
            The Englishman. He’s fast approaching from the bathroom.
            He’s addressing my friend, not me. I cover myself with a paltry bedsheet, peeking out as my friend throws down her pack, exhales sharply, and shoots back: “Is it though? Is it really fancy?” Then she storms to the toilet, while I turn to face the wall, holding my breath as the ladder creaks.
            The Englishman is about to be on top of me.
            My body tenses instinctively. Those of us who are immigrants, survivors of racial abuse, or chronically ill often feel unsafe, resenting our invisibility but fearing the violence that visibility can attract.
            But my body also clenches in the presence of strange men. My first sexual experience was in college. I got drunk at a friend’s house, passed out, and woke drenched in sweat, my insides raw. Later, in the shower, I had flashbacks of a man leaning over me, his hands invading my body. A decade later, in a new apartment in Spokane, Washington, where I’d moved for a tenure-track position at Gonzaga University, I woke to find a crowbar in my bedroom doorway, my phone missing from the nightstand, and my front door busted. It was the second time that week I’d been robbed while asleep.
            I live in a perpetual state of hypervigilance, always struggling to sleep. Letting down my guard in a dormitory full of strangers feels impossible.
            But as the sun sets, exhaustion tempers my fear. I’m half asleep when my friend, newly showered, walks by and invites me to dinner. I’m tempted. Then I catch sight of the flimsy bathroom curtain and imagine myself huddled on the toilet with bloody diarrhea as a line of pilgrims stand outside, waiting impatiently.
            I say no, then regret it as my stomach growls. Darkness encloses the room as pilgrims trickle in and out. A ladder groans. My eyes flicker shut.
            “You again,” a voice says. I open my eyes and flinch. The Englishman looms over me. I clutch my money belt, terrified of being robbed or worse. I remind myself that we are surrounded by pilgrims.
            Still, he won’t budge. As he towers over me, my hands clench into fists. Then he sighs, turns, and collapses into a tiny chair near the window. I exhale. “I have to tell you something,” he says.
            I brace myself.
            His shoulders slump. “I’m going to snore,” he says. “It’s going to be very bad. You’re going to hate me.”
            His forehead puckers. He looks so perturbed that I can’t bear to tell him not to worry—I already hate him. His snoring can’t be that bad, I say.
            It is, he says, slouching in the too-small chair. “Just throw something at me. Everyone else does.”
            “I would never,” I say, leaning forward. “You can’t help what you do when you’re unconscious.” He could control his obnoxiousness, I start to add, but he looks so morose that I don’t.
            “Clock me in the head,” he says again as he struggles up the ladder. “I won’t mind.”
            His snoring is that bad—a cacophony of snorts and screeches, almost inhuman. But I barely hear it, suddenly concerned about what minor crimes I might commit while asleep.
            I am a monster when I sleep. I babble, steal sheets, grind my teeth—but worst of all, I sleep-hunt for sugar. Once, at my friends’ house in Colorado, I sleepwalked downstairs, licked the icing off their son’s half-eaten birthday cake, and smoothed the rest into a bad combover. My friends never mention the incident. But we all know what happened.
            I stay awake, terrified I’ll ransack my fellow pilgrims’ packs and steal their candy. I return from the bathroom to find the Englishman curled into the fetal position on the top bunk, his bare feet tiny, smooth, strangely childlike. We all feel exposed here, I realize, reeling from the dissolution of boundaries between public and private, as afraid of ourselves as we are of one another. And, at last, I surrender to sleep.
            The next morning, I half expect to wake to a crime scene, with yellow tape encircling candy wrappers strewn on the floor and police interrogating me about my sugar-stealing spree. Instead, I’m surrounded by pilgrims slowly packing up their belongings. It’s 6:30 AM, and, like most albergues, this one asks that pilgrims leave by 8:00 AM. I crawl out of the bottom bunk and strap on my backpack.
           “How bad was it?” The Englishman sits up in bed, his small, bare feet dangling from the top bunk.
            I smile. “Didn’t hear a thing,” I say, heading out with the other pilgrims. “Buen Camino.”
            I will cross paths with the Englishman several more times, and though his obnoxiousness never subsides, witnessing his childlike vulnerability that night softens me. Because of it, I come to understand his acerbic humor as his armor. And, as I learn about his houselessness, I even admire his resilience in the face of struggle.

There’s a beauty in knowing that countless others have struggled here before me, that we all share the same name: peregrinos, or pilgrims. That same morning, I walk alongside a nineteen-year-old student from Mexico who asks why I’m here. I answer vaguely: for healing. What about him?
            “I’m hiking to honor the four pillars. Spirituality. Health. Social Justice. Community. But mostly, to open my heart. Whenever we walk through a big city, like Pamplona, I’ve noticed that pilgrims close up. They cross their arms, don’t look you in the eye. They become . . .”
            “Guarded?” I offer.
            “Yes! Guarded. I want to keep my openness.”
            Where has he acquired this wisdom? “Yeah,” I say. “Me too.” We trade stories as we pass arrows made of rocks. I wonder who arranged them here, under the glaring sun, knowing they’d eventually get swept away. I am grateful for their labor.
            Soon, we wish each other a Buen Camino and part ways. He walks ahead, sure-footed on the damp soil, at home here amongst other nomads. On this pilgrimage, as in life, you meet and connect with many beautiful souls, some of whom you’ll encounter again, others you won’t. But the Camino teaches you to embrace vulnerability, even in the face of uncertainty. Pilgrims have told me secrets they’d never before shared. Whether or not they’ve remained in my life, I hold them and their confidences sacred.
           It occurs to me, as this young pilgrim walks away, that home isn’t always a place but a way of being in the world. And as I walk alone, savoring the slight breeze, carrying all I need in my blue Osprey pack, I’m startled by the realization that I, too, am at home.

v

As a child, I felt a sense of home only during my family’s six-week-long vacations in Kolkata, India, my parents’ birthplace. We visited India three times before I turned six. At the airport, we were greeted by the warm embrace of my mother’s seven brothers and sisters. My relatives beamed at me, calling my birthmark a sign of enlightenment, like Buddha’s third eye. Every time we arrived, it felt like returning home.
            My mother’s childhood house was always packed with relatives, visitors, and dogs—my eldest aunt’s white Pomeranian, as regal as her sari-clad owner, and my cousins’ sleek German shepherd, who tolerated my sloppy embraces. She would sit with me and my cousin Munia, only eleven but infinitely older in my adoring eyes with her denim jean-skirts, tousled curls, and mischevious smile, on a sun-dappled veranda overlooking a street alive with rickshaws and children playing. When I told her in Bengali about getting mocked for my birthmark, she linked arms with me and told me that it was beautiful, magical. I beamed and rewarded her by singing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” on a loop, until she fled to the flat roof to smoke cigarettes with my older cousins and sister. With her mother—the aunt I called “New Mommy”—and my parents, I visited temples and regarded the Buddhas sharing my mark with newfound pride. When strangers stopped me on the street and admired my birthmark, I stood taller.
            Eventually, we stopped visiting India—in part because my mother, who earned her doctorate and became an award-winning professor in her forties, feared flying, and partly because assimilation became a matter of survival, and our family learned to excel at the task. In sixth grade, I had my birthmark removed after a dermatologist warned us that it could become melanoma. Part of me didn’t want my birthmark gone. What I wanted was to transport myself back to Kolkata and play cricket with my brother on the flat roof, where no one hurled epithets at us. Still, without my relatives’ reverence for my mark, I’d long fantasized about the surgery to remove it, imagining that afterwards I’d wake up inside a different, acceptable body: one that was white.
            In reality, my mom and dad kissed my birthmark before the procedure, which I was kept awake for, my forehead numbed. I felt the dermatologist scrape away the thick, hairy protrusion, then stitch my forehead closed, leaving a small, gauzy strip over the incision.
            “Why’d you get it removed?” a classmate with long blonde braids asked the next day in the bathroom. “We were finally getting used to it.” For years afterwards, I experienced phantom birthmark pain—a sense that something essential, like a limb, had been sliced off. My body no longer felt like my own.
            I comforted myself by writing stories based on fragmented memories from my precious childhood visits to Kolkata. Suspended between cultures, locked out of both, I found some approximation of home through storytelling. As Salman Rushdie writes in Imaginary Homelands: “And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”
            I never thought of writing as a career until, at the age of twenty, I spent my summer at my childhood home in debilitating pain and bedridden. Whenever I used the toilet, it filled with bright red blood. My colonoscopy was two months away, and as I researched my systems, I began to fear I had colon cancer and might be dying. I told no one, but as I faced the prospect of an abbreviated life, my priorities shifted.
            It was as if I’d been on a conveyor belt, moving inexorably in one direction until my illness toppled me off. My success in college competing on a nationally ranked mock trial team had earned me early acceptance to a top law school. I declined and wrote stories in bed, my laptop my faithful companion, until I was well enough, months later, to pursue advanced degrees in creative writing. Through the flares and remissions that followed, writing served as my lifeline.
            But sharing stories with that wise, young pilgrim reminded me that storytelling isn’t about typing in isolation. Rather, it is based in oral tradition and inherently communal, rooted in human connection. As psychologist Peter A. Levine says, “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
            As I walk, my poles clicking against the dirt, I reflect on our conversation out loud, speaking to the ether. It occurs to me, an hour later, to record my thoughts as voice memos on my phone. For hours, I walk and talk, lost in physical and creative flow. Ahead, raptors glide through an endless blue sky, and I marvel at all that can be contained in such an expanse, at how much can be shared.

vi

The experience of hiking the Camino is akin to running a marathon, then waking up, broken and exhausted, and doing it all over again, day after day. This aspect of long-distance hiking, the repetition and impossibility of physical recovery, demands extraordinary physical and emotional resilience and is like life—except on the Camino, your pain is on display, without walls or buffers to hide behind.
            The beauty of the Camino is that we commune with others in our struggle. We bond over blisters—how to prevent, pop, and disinfect them—and long-suppressed grief that surfaces during the endless slog, scraping us raw. Given the crowded trails and communal sleeping arrangements, suffering in silence isn’t much of an option.
            One hundred eighty miles into my pilgrimage, my feet become infected. The podiatrist at the clinic urges me to rest—advice I heed for only a few hours before trudging on, hobbling over steep inclines and rocky descents and cursing the swamps of horse dung. I cycle through the stages of grief. Denial: “Who shits this much?” Anger: “You couldn’t step off the trail to poop?” Bargaining: “Please go away. I’ll do anything.” Finally, despair—“Just . . . why?”
            I’m ready to jump ship, to leave this dung-riddled slog behind. Then I pass a rock with a message scrawled on it by a pilgrim named Elizabeth Bickley: “Don’t Abandon Yourself.”
            I sigh and keep going. An hour later, I drag myself into town only to get caught in a deluge of rain that sends me scurrying into a corner store. I buy a chocolate bar, bite into it, and realize I’ve bought inedible baking cacao. I stare at the label, forlorn.
            “I love your dress.” This whisper of a voice comes from an ethereal, lovely woman in her mid-thirties with long brown hair, perched on a stool, still wearing her backpack and ukulele. She’s munching on a granola bar, which I eye with envy. “You’re bold, wearing that while hiking.”
            I smile faintly. “It’s not about fashion,” I confide, dragging my pack to a nearby stool and hopping on it. “I pee outside—a lot. This dress gives me easy access.”
            “Me too! I love peeing outside too!” She beams, waves her pinkie towards me, and links it with mine. “Men treat nature like their private urinal, don’t they?”
            “Totally,” I say. “We have to legitimize female outdoor urination.”
            Her name is Juliette, and she is a special-education teacher from Virginia. As butterflies flutter ahead of us on the trail, we hike seventeen miles together, opening up about our grief—both of our recent broken engagements, her mother’s long battle with cancer and death, and my beautiful, older sister’s struggles: the cardiac arrest that left her on a ventilator for six weeks before she was placed on ECMO—dialysis of the lungs—and miraculously survived, only to be left blind in one eye and on oxygen 24-7.
            How liberating it is to connect over both joy and suffering. The Camino is a testament to how communal storytelling can heal us. We cry, as everyone does on the Camino, the tears omnipresent as we walk and talk through our psychic and physical injuries. Vulnerability connects us. More than that, it saves us. As O’Rourke writes in The Invisible Kingdom: “When we suffer, we want recognition. Where science is silent, narrative creeps in.” It is no wonder that every pilgrim I’ve met, including me, struggles most after leaving the Camino: a space that lends itself to openness.
            Here, you learn that once you share your grief and stop bearing its weight alone, it no longer consumes you. It gives way to the joy of communion.

vii

I see Juliette again 280 miles into my journey, between Astorga and Rabanal del Camino, at a cowboy bar in El Ganso—a remote village with stone houses and wildflowers—that my online guidebook, unimpressed by everything else about the Camino, insists I must see. Inside, I’m transported to Texas, where I lived for nearly thirty years. I’m surrounded by mounted animal heads, skulls-turned-décor, and cowboy memorabilia. Overwhelmed, I take my Spanish tortilla outside. My heart lifts at the sight of Juliette sitting at a picnic table and reading her Bible. She waves me over with a squeal. We embrace like long-lost friends.
            As I sit across from her, a ladybug lands on Juliette’s finger, struggling to find its bearing. With her lilting voice, she cajoles it into flying away. There is something relentless about her kindness.
            Juliette is Catholic and works for it, attending 5:00 AM masses before hikes, but she does allow herself wine. We drink glasses of Rioja, cheaper than water here, as she slaps sunscreen on her face, and I cauterize a needle, ease my foot out of a flip-flop, and pop a crater-like blister.
            “Have you seen The Greatest Showman?” Juliette asks. “I keep thinking ‘This Is Me’ is the Camino’s theme song.”
            I shake my head.
            “It’s beautiful,” she breathes. “Listen.”
            With a dollop of sunscreen on her nose, she closes her eyes and sings to me and twenty strangers about being brave, bruised, and glorious, her voice trembling with emotion. Weeks later, I will sing the same song during my university convocation speech and describe that transcendent moment: our battered bodies, shared suffering, and the conviction in Juliette’s voice that we are, all of us, glorious.

viii

The endpoint of the pilgrimage, the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, sneaks up on you before you’re ready for it. The arrival itself is sacred, but the moments of connection along the way are even more so. I felt most moved and transformed by the journey itself.
            I wish I could transport you to the rolling green hills of Triacastela—eighty-one miles from Santiago—where, after thirteen grueling miles of walking with Juliette and several episodes of diarrhea in the bushes as she stood guard, I throw down my pack and collapse onto the ground, sobbing. She sits beside me, reminding me of my strength, and then hops on a boulder to distract me with an introductory ballet sequence she learned back home. Minutes later, she is still dancing, lost in an exquisite flow.
            I wish I could take you to Villafranca del Bierzo, where I have breakfast with the owners of the albergue—a couple who lost their twenty-year-old daughter to brain cancer. To honor her, they opened their home to pilgrims. The husband, a former musician, rarely plays his guitar anymore because chemotherapy has left his fingers brittle. But he asks to play me a song and then begins strumming his guitar before I can protest. His wife wraps her arms around him, swaying to the beat of a song he first serenaded her with decades ago. The morning light sets his frame aglow—this artist, robbed of his child and health, who plays through pain to share his joy.
            When I leave, it’s past 10:00 AM, and I have a twenty-two-mile hike ahead in the mountains. Still, I marvel at everything, even the piles of horse feces that now seem to form arrows. I am filled with stories—not just mine but those of others who’ve endured unimaginable sorrow but move forward with open hearts, embracing the coexistence of suffering and joy.
            Yet our stories are not bookended by triumph. On the Camino, you learn to open yourself to others, sharing the journey for a brief time before letting go. But the true pilgrimage begins after you leave—when you return to a world that guards against such vulnerability.
            Without the community fostered by the Camino’s albergues, marked paths, endless slogs alongside others walking the same path, I will falter. Too often, I’ll hide out, too shell-shocked to seek out avenues to healing as I battle anaphylaxis from toxic mold exposures, countless miscarriages, and my sister’s heartbreaking stints in the ICU. Twice more, I’ll return to continue my pilgrimage, called back to recenter, heal, and find my way back. The Camino has made addicts of everyone I know.
            But I will never forget bounding along the last stretch of the Camino with strangers-turned-friends, all of us telling our stories. I am no longer the child hiding behind her bangs or the woman isolated by debilitating pain, though I give voice to those parts too. Here, healing is not a destination but a journey shared by all of us pilgrims. And the yellow arrows—ever present, always wise—point me in the right direction, assuring me that no matter where I am or how deep my struggle, I am always going the right way.