33. Peace found me in Paris, my most treasured souvenir.

What a week – what a month – this October. What a thing it is to let time wash over you, to feel how it carries you and drops you off, gently, on an unsuspecting evening where you realise just how much everything has changed.

I’ll never understate the relevance of growth which flows with time and its trickles. It’s like medicine, how it heals and how it puts things into perspective. The comfort of change met me on a Saturday morning, where I stayed a few more minutes longer in bed than everyone else; what had occurred before this Saturday was the daintiest string of events which left me with the most profound shift I’ve so needed.

Recently, I had the privilege of spending a few days away with friends, which proved such a necessary escape from the stresses of my real life. I thought I could leave a part of me back home, the part that worried, and I’d come collect it once I was back – hopefully with a clearer head. And, you know what? That did happen, but not without me finding that the part I left behind had actually followed me all the way to France.

I hadn’t noticed when it followed me out the front door, or when it sat in the row behind me on the plane. Then there it was, in all its glory, in an Urban Outfitters on Rue De Rivoli, Paris. It stared me down from across the shop, as if it struggled to decipher which between it and I was mirror and which was reflection.

It was a book. This self-help book was a reminder of something much bigger than the fact that I don’t read enough, but of all the work I have put into myself and my growth these last few years. Not only this, but it was a book my mum had raved about and recommended to me time and time again, and for some reason I had never made enough effort to understand why.

In this moment, I realised this was truly meant to be. All the parts of myself I thought I could leave behind while on this trip seemed to find me; the progression of who I have become, and the people who have tried to help me along the way all found me when I wasn’t even looking.

I think, the reason for this is because it’s hard to see what is right in front of you, let alone what is deep within you – as I looked over its green cover, I felt I was the past and the present Georgia, as I always have been. I was the whole of me, with no excess.

How silly it was to assume that I could walk forwards without all the lives I’ve lived in this same body. How silly it is to assume we don’t walk with the whole of ourselves.

I was taken aback by this understanding, so much so, that I lost myself in this book for at least an hour, right there in a corner by the top floor window of Urban.

I was so consumed with how this book had found me, in the most random of places, at the most random of times, as if to spur me on and remind me of everything I was trying to forget. I was so enamored with this reconnection that only by the time I turned the 38^th page I realised I had missed calls from my friends who thought I had disappeared. And now I think of it, maybe the version of myself I had brought to Paris had disappeared and I was given a completely new outlook; all of this from one book and everything that was tied to it. It was me.

So, the next day, that Saturday morning, we woke up with plans, but I felt absolutely no pull to fulfill them. Because I was already fulfilled enough. And that much I knew for sure; I had nothing more to prove than that. I spent the day by myself reading my book on the patio, sat in a pretty yellow chair, beside a makeshift ashtray.

I believe that with how much I felt during this time away, there was definitely some sort of transference of energy which seemed to rain on me in the most glorious form of a complete understanding of how much has changed and how far I’ve come in my 20 years in this world. I carried a lot with me on this trip, but the energy that I carried across borders dispersed once I was ready to acknowledge it – and then leave it there.

And sometimes that’s all it takes. Peace found me in Paris, and that’s something I’ll take home with me; I consider it my most treasured souvenir.

‘Then there it was, in all its glory, in an Urban Outfitters on Rue De Rivoli, Paris. It stared me down from across the shop, as if it struggled to decipher which between it and I was mirror and which was reflection.’