A PERFECTLY IMPERFECT ESCAPE
When Jean Hannah Edelstein planned a trip to Mexico to get away from her troubles, she hadn’t expected stormy weather. But while it wasn’t the holiday she’d wanted, it turned out to be the one she needed
Jean Hannah Edelstein’s holiday from hell helped her face her problems
The sun shone as the van that I’d hired to transfer me to Tulum from Cancún airport drove down the beach highway that runs between the sparkling aqua sea and the lush jungle. The sun felt propitious. But by the end of the week, my recollection of the sunshine felt like it meant something else: a cruel tease.
It was the week of Thanksgiving, and I’d decided to spend it on a solo holiday rather than celebrate with my family. That autumn, I was having A Difficult Time. I was embroiled in a transatlantic romance that showed remarkable signs of doom, even by my own quite poor standards (he told me that he was a narcissist, which I learned too late is a key symptom of narcissism). And a year and a half after the death of my father, I was getting used to the idea that he was gone, but I was still grieving. The whole family was, and we’d yet to figure out how we fitted together without him. Thanksgiving is very family-centric, more so than Christmas in America, and that year I couldn’t face it.
At home in New York, I’d started seeing a therapist. Every week, I spoke to him about my hopeless feelings and reluctance to take antidepressants. Instead, I figured, what I needed was a week in Tulum. I’d had a holiday there the previous September and had fallen in love with the beach, the sparkling sea and the ice-cold Mexican beers. The sand is white and pristine and hot. The coastal road is studded with eco-hotels, restaurants with varying levels of hippieness, and yoga studios.
Tulum had been a dream that September, and since I knew it already, going there on my own seemed easy. I rented a room at a modest yoga hotel, where I could take daily classes on a big fan-cooled open-air porch. The room was a standalone hut, under a roof made of palm leaves. My plan was to take yoga every morning, eat some kind of aggressively healthy breakfast in the hotel restaurant (a smoothie with chia and aloe? Please, I’ll take two) and then spend the rest of the day lounging on the beach with a book, having a swim, maybe doing another yoga class in the afternoon. And I’d turn off my phone.
On that first afternoon, I unpacked my bag, and put on a bikini and a summer dress. Then I went to the beach, ate some fish tacos and drank a Corona in a hut on stilts and thought, ‘This is going to be okay. I’m going to be okay’.
‘I WAS GETTING IN MY OWN WAY, SHUTTING MY FEELINGS DOWN’
Yes, dear reader, then it started to rain. Do you check the weather trends before you book a holiday? I’m not that kind of person, and I’d like to say it’s because I’m fun and whimsical, but really it’s because I’m a bit lazy. Now, there’d been some rain on my previous trip to Tulum, maybe up to an hour-long downpour every day, but each time the rain stopped, brilliant sun came out and dried everything and it was as if it had never happened. Not so this week: late November, it turned out, is a common time for the Yucatán to be hit by severe tropical storms.
The rain started just as I finished my tacos and it did not stop for the rest of the week. No, I was not going to get a tan. No, I was not going to swim in the sea. Moreover, I was not ever going to be dry. The infrastructure in Tulum is by and large designed for people to always be outdoors. There aren’t a lot of solid ceilings, and where there are solid ceilings there are rarely solid walls.
What could I do? I took classes in the yoga porch where, if I set up my mat close to the centre, I was only lightly spritzed by water. Between classes I could lie on the bed in my hut and get rained on through the palm-leaf roof. I could eat food, but in order to access it, I needed to wade through a three-inch-deep puddle that had formed just beyond my hut. I went to have lunch in the fancier beachside hotel across the road. Rain dripped through the roof there, too. Without asking, a kind waiter brought me a towel to wear while I ate nachos.
I did not turn off my phone. I used it constantly, texting friends blow-by-blow accounts of my misery. ‘Go get a massage,’ one suggested, so I went to get a massage, provided by a kind woman in a hut where rainwater leaked through the roof and mixed with the massage oil. At night in the muggy heat, I listened to the clanking generator, raindrops splashed on my pillow and my brain whirred with self-loathing. I called the airline to see if I could get a flight home, but there were no flights available until the day before I was scheduled to depart, and at an extortionate price. I decided to endure the weather for the rest of the week.
So I returned to the yoga porch, rolled out a mat and bent myself into shapes, and I will concede that by the end of the week, I looked more toned and healthy than I had done when I arrived, albeit with a complexion that was still pale, with a touch of green. At the end of the final class, the teacher (slim, blonde, sunny demeanour) gave me a warm hug. She looked concerned: I must have looked sad. I’m not usually a hugger of strangers, but I leaned in.
By then I’d accepted that, if it hadn’t been a mistake exactly, the trip had achieved the opposite of what I’d intended when I’d bought my flights and reserved my hut. Rather than offer a brief respite from my troubles, it had pressed on them like a raw nerve. The truth is, I probably would have still felt pretty desperate if the trip had been sunnier: maybe a different kind of desperation, that I couldn’t even enjoy a nice holiday. Good weather wasn’t the only thing standing between myself and happiness. I was getting in my own way, trying to shut my sad feelings down instead of allowing myself to move through them. It’s not like I was able to solve my problems the moment I got home. But realising that they’d stalked me across North America meant that I was more prepared to co-exist with them than the day I’d boarded the plane, brimming with desperation to burn them off in the sun.
The next morning, the sun glittered in silver mosaic tiles as I sat at the bar and drank my final smoothie. I didn’t allow myself to feel sorry that I was leaving just as the storm had passed. I focused on knowing that soon, I would be free. At the next table, an American family – middle-aged parents, twentysomething children – were enjoying each other’s company and the opportunity to wear sunglasses. Tulum, it occurred to me, was a place where people came to celebrate Thanksgiving, not just to escape it.
The barman smiled at me. ‘You have brothers and sisters?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘one of each.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but you are the one who is alone.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘yes.’ I gave him a jaunty wave when the van finally arrived to collect me. What else could I do? I’d come to Tulum to escape my problems. I never imagined that I could feel so excited to fly home to them.