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August 2019 | REDONLINE.CO.UKT
he 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’.Edelstein:
‘I’d decided
to spend
Thanksgiving
on a solo
holiday’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 theholiday she’d wanted, it turned
out to be the one she needed