Bourdainism in Austin: The Land of Inhale

It has been a while since I let anyone this far in.

Transparently, the past few months asked me to practice something The Last Romantic isn’t known for: privacy. I was navigating changes that made discretion feel like the most responsible thing I had to offer, so I kept my routine and my circumstances close, the way you cup a match against wind.

But being The Last Romantic comes with a condition. My friend Michael has a phrase for it, and I’m stealing it here (Michael, I’m sorry if I’ve just blown your moniker and your cover): Forced to Observe.

It is a strange sentence to live inside. You don’t get to simply walk through a room. You watch yourself walk through it, and you watch everyone else, and you take notes for a reader you can’t see. And with the watching comes a weight I can only call self-imposed responsibility: to reach into other people’s hearts and crack a little light through them, however I can.

That responsibility is a double-edged sword. I’ve learned that many of us with cPTSD carry this overwhelming sense of justice, this outsized feeling of being accountable for how things turn out. I’ve decided to keep mine.

In my hardest years, accountability and agency were how I paved a road out, for myself and for a few people walking behind me. I am still learning where the balance sits. But I believe this trait is the fuel for my purpose, and I’m not willing to trade the fuel for a quieter engine.

Here is the other thing I understand now: the circumstances I’m navigating only hold power over me if I carry shame about who I was. I’ve looked. I’ve looked for seventeen months, with the lights on. I hold no regrets. About any of it.

That exhaustive excavation, trauma work that felt less like healing and more like archaeology, taught me something I had resisted for a long time: I was always exactly where I needed to be, using the tools I had in the box at the time. And when I wasn’t, I moved.

Nietzsche called that posture amor fati, the love of one’s fate, and I’ve never trusted a phrase that pretty. But at the very least, I’ve stopped arguing with the practice.

Which is why sitting still, in one place, for this long, has turned this into a Bourdainism piece on Austin. A Bourdainism, I realize, about not necessarily about going anywhere. I think most people assume wanderers like me travel because motion is how avoidance and escapism most often dress themselves. That’s partly true. I don’t think it’s the whole of it.

I started solo traveling a few years ago, in Peru, and learned quickly that there is no running from yourself. Distance is not a solvent. Holed up alone in a hotel room on psychedelics, I went down into the deepest layers of who I was and voice-noted what I found there: realizations I had neither the tools nor the capacity to integrate.

Those recordings are strange artifacts to me now, letters from a woman who knew things before she could hold them.

But it needed doing. Life becomes smaller when fear enters the room. And when the fear is of yourself, in any form, there is simply no room left to live in at all.

I used to think my defining trait was perseverance. It isn’t. Perseverance is what keeps you alive. Bravery is what lets you look. My most important trait, I’ve come to understand, is bravery.

Looking back, I can see what my subconscious was actually asking for the whole time I kept moving: community, and some sense of stability. Of course it took countries and countries to hear it. I too am human, and fallible, and built with the same needs as everyone else: connection, community, love.

The quality of our relationships reflects the quality of our lives.

For what is any moment, especially the beautiful, or the tender; the heartbreaking, if not witnessed and shared?

—An excerpt, from my journal.

I recently lived a few of those moments. The kind that blow the doors off the hinges of my soul, where a realization hits you hot and heavy, so devastatingly beautiful that you can’t look away and can’t quite look at it either. Moments of tenderness, of love, of vulnerability. Moments of being witnessed. I am keeping the details for now. But I want it on the record that they happened here, in the stillness, which is not where I expected to find them.

I titled this Bourdainism in Austin because I am not from here, and I write about this city the way Bourdain wrote about anywhere: as a guest who loved the house too much to lie about it. I don’t yet know where home is, or where it will land. What I know is that each day here feels like a clean Inhale.

On the East Coast there is no true Inhale. You exhale all of yourself, constantly, with no real pause, until you’re running on whatever air is left at the bottom of your lungs. I lived that way for years. I mistook it for being alive.

I’ve said before that I feel like a Ferrari trapped in the aisles of a supermarket. I meet a lot of people here in Austin who tell me they feel the same way.

They supposedly meant to leave. They supposedly meant to do something else.

But they got stuck in the Inhale. They got stuck in the ease of driving most of the day because it’s hot, and in having time for all the therapy and all the yoga and all the introspection and the workouts, and so they are perfectly-fine-here, thank-you-very-much. Sometimes they travel, and they bring back a piece of somewhere else to sell in a storefront. And they are Texan, so they like to be challenged, but not-too-much-because-we-all-have-guns.

Do you want to know what I think?

I think a lot of this place is complacency, and the best thing it has going for it is community. But that community can be a fleeting facade, and I have felt its insidious effects myself: people fluent in just enough therapy-speak to weaponize your feelings, and nowhere near enough to face themselves, daily, especially in the lonely hours when no one is watching.

As someone who exclusively does that, I have truthfully been feeling very alone here, surrounded by people.

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And here is the part I have to be honest about. I have been here long enough to have done the therapy and the yoga and the introspection. I have the time. It is hot. I could become one of them and never notice, because the Inhale feels like health, and for a while it is.

Breath is the oldest proof that life is about balance. You cannot inhale forever any more than you can exhale forever; hold either long enough and the body makes the decision for you. I left a place that was all exhale and found a place that is all inhale, and I am beginning to suspect they are the same trap with different weather.

So when do I exhale, exactly?

There is a new chapter of work starting, and I am hesitant to hyper-focus on it just yet. In almost three months of building my consulting business, there is a taste of freedom I fell in love with: choosing the room, the people in it, the hours.

But the pen, it was always about the pen.

I’ve been asking when I get to exhale as though it were a place, somewhere I could drive to once the heat breaks. Maybe it was never a place. Maybe it’s only this: a window open, and the page in front of me slowly filling with all the air I’ve been holding, one line at a time.