The camino starts after the camino

In Finisterre my physical camino ended. But people say: The real camino starts after the camino. I had no idea how true that was.

When I got home everything was so much brighter. I remember walking home from the train station in my home town and noticing all those little details I have never paid attention to. My senses were heightened. I was very sensitive to everything, yet very happy and grateful. I was buzzing and full of energy. That lasted about two months, then the real camino started.

Some people think that when you have walked the camino you are enlightened. You are all balanced, tolerant and non-judgemental. That’s complete bullshit. In my opinion enlightenment can only be experienced in little moments, like in meditation. You are still having a human experience and no matter how strong, balanced and happy you are, there will always be problems and challenges. Otherwise life would get boring. Otherwise we would stand still. Otherwise we wouldn’t develop. And how sad would that be?

So what happened? Well, first I didn’t get into university. I had given up my job as a self-employed English and guitar teacher to get a proper degree in education. I was very certain (and arrogant!) that I would get in (“who else, if not me?”), but I didn’t. Suddenly this big dark hole was in front of me. It was also the very first time I did not get what I wanted (except with boys – I never get the ones I want to have, haha!). I had never experienced failure and rejection (again: It’s a whole different story when it comes to love). I have always been the best student both in school and at university. The teachers had always loved me. I had been the geek. And now, a university rejected me. I felt like a complete failure.

On top of that, the same week I received the rejection letter, one of my best friends had a psychotic attack (yes, it is a mental illness) and stabbed his family and himself. Luckily all survived, though with my friend for days it really wasn’t sure if he would. My friend then tried to commit suicide twice more. It was the darkest week of my life and I nearly went mental myself.

The media went completely crazy about it and there were a lot of exaggerations and assumptions made nationwide that just weren’t true. Since then I had been a part-time journalist. But it was then that I decided to make a clean cut. I handed in my resignation at the newspaper that I had worked for for the past three years. I had dreamt of being a journalist since I was seven years old, but reality looked different than I had imagined back then. Saying goodbye completely to my dream from childhood wasn’t easy either.

But I had to be strong, at least for my friend. So I tried my best to support him and to get my job as a teacher back. And so I did. To drown all of it, I did 12-hour shifts, fives day a week. At the beginning of this year I experienced severe health problems and was later on diagnosed with a burn out.

A burn out? After doing the camino? How is that possible? Have I learnt nothing from all my experiences? I believe I have. I honestly believe that I was only dealing with all these challenges, because I was ready to handle them. Through the camino, I had become strong enough to get through them. I always like to compare life with school. It starts of very easy. You kind of start your learning process while playing around. But it gets tougher and tougher. But it has to, otherwise you won’t progress. If you are a real geek and your teacher’s favourite, (if it is a good teacher), you will get extra difficult tasks to do to challenge you even more. That’s what life is like for me too.

So, if you ever face challenges and you ask yourself: “Why me? Why is my life so damn difficult?” The answer is: Because you are strong enough to get through them.

As mentioned above, this past year I struggled. A lot. It was the toughest year of my life. There has been a lot of crying, there was a lot of anger, disappointment and self-pity. But in my darkest times, where I was literally giving up on life, I remembered my camino experience and that made all the difference. Suddenly I was full of energy again and could move on. The camino gave and will always give me the strength to keep going, no matter how hard it will get.

You make all these beautiful experiences in your life and you think they make you feel better forever. They won’t. Life is a roller-coaster. It will always go up and down. But do treasure your memories and these will always make you keep walking. Just keep on walking. Santiago might seem far away, but with every step you take you will come closer to it. Just keep on walking.

I am writing this with teary eyes now and I am well aware that I am giving myself some confidence with this. Today, Tuesday, July 22, 2014, is my last day here in Germany. If I glance into the corner to my right I can see my packed backpack, my hiking pole and my hiking boots that I will pick up tomorrow to do yet another camino. This time I will attempt to walk the Camino del Norte, which starts in Irun, on the French-Spanish border and leads to Santiago. It is a slightly longer walk, mostly along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Due to the ocean, the weather will be mild, but the path itself is supposed to be much harder than the other camino that I did last year. Someone on the internet called my last year’s camino “a walk in the park compared to the Camino del Norte.” I am actually scared! There will be less people around, which is good and bad at the same time. Good, because I might find that peace and quiet that I was missing so much on my camino last year, but it’s also bad, because there will be less people to help me when I am struggling. I know the mountains are my weakness, especially going down has often been painful and scary (me being very scared of heights and falling).

Last year I felt very weak. I often walked very slowly and seemed to struggle so much more than other people. Then my camino friend Mark (Marathon Man Mark) said to me: “Actually you are the strongest of all. Yes, you might be slower, yes, you might be more scared and yes, you might be struggling the most, but yet every day you arrive in the albergue like everyone else, despite your fears of falling, despite your pain and your emotions, and that makes you the strongest of us all.”

Not comparing myself to others was certainly one of the biggest lessons I learnt on the camino. But what else has taught me my last year’s camino? Of course I learnt to be patient, to be grateful and tolerant. I learnt never to give up. I learnt how to deal and overcome pain and through that my relationship to my own body completely changed. I started to see my body as my friend, as my team mate, rather than my enemy. I learnt to trust myself and I found out that I can do anything if I only believe in myself. And one of the biggest gifts of the camino are the people that I met. Not only can I now make free holidays pretty much everywhere in the world (haha!), but these people I met have given me so much support and inspiration. Maybe it might interest you what happened to all these people.

You might remember Dani, the Spanish man I met in Roncesvalles, very early on my camino. Though we had problems communicating with each other, he was always there to help me out, when I needed help. Sadly, I could not keep up with him and after about a week, I decided to take it slow, while he pushed forward. Well, coincidentally (or not), Dani lives in Irun, the starting point of my next camino. He will pick me up from the train station on Thursday and I will most probably spend two days visiting the city with him. On Saturday, July 26, I will start my camino and Dani wants to accompany me for the very first day, before he has to go back to work.

Of course I stayed in contact with my amazing walking buddy Jens, who I visited in Norway for a couple of days last year in August. I also met up with Philipp from Berlin. I have also very recently visited Julia in the Black Forest. On my camino I had to say goodbye to her in Leon. Thanks to modern technology it is so easy to stay in contact with people. I have an amazing network with my camino friends on Facebook and I am always overjoyed when I receive an email from my Marathon Man Mark, in which he tells me about his recent adventures. He has since travelled the world – America, Australia, Nepal, and by now I think he is back travelling Europe. Mark has also published a little book with poems about the camino. This book also contains drawings from his fellow pilgrims (me included), who he asked to be inspired by the camino and draw a picture for him. It really is an amazing poetry book and if you are interested, you can order a copy here:

Read Between The Arrows – Mark Larson: UK version please click here:

If you are from the US, please click here:

Last but not least, I want to mention that writing this blog has given me so much inspiration, energy and hope. Everytime I wrote about my camino experiences, I could let go off all my stress and challenges that I was facing throughout the year. When I was writing, I felt like I was right back on the road, writing about it was like doing the camino all over again.

A big thank you goes to all my readers, the comments, the interest, the love, and the appreciation, motivation and encouragement to keep on writing. My blog has nearly 3000 hits and people from over 30 countries have accessed it, which to me, is unbelievable and so amazing. Thank you all for your support and your interest.