Thread by @TheBuddhaSmiled

Currently waiting for a train to take me away from a place I’ve waited 30 years of my life to visit, so indulge me in this thread.

Machu Picchu is the dream I have been meaning to visit ever since I first read about it as a wide eyed 7 year old. A bookish, nerdy, slightly “what will we do about Buddha because he’s just a bit girly” 7 year old.

Being the bookish, not very sporty kid of what can only be described as the Indian version of the high school quarterback and prom queen didn’t make for the easiest of childhoods.

“Why don’t you like team sports”, my dad, who played hockey at national level, would ask 14 yo me, when I’d express a preference for either spending time in a library, or, if I had to be outdoors, swimming.

How was I supposed to tell him that the other teenaged boys called me “faggot” and would often try to hit me during PE, with either their hands or whatever else was to hand?

So I retreated, further and further into libraries and books. Books that were the only escape from a schoolyard that made daytimes intolerable, and parents who just couldn’t understand why their intelligent son was as popular as they were.

And the one thing I told myself during that entire time was that some day I would be in control of my own destiny. I would make my own decisions, I would live my own life, and that life WOULD GET BETTER.

And Machu Picchu, without it realising it, became an icon of that better life: the place I would visit when I was an adult and do what I wanted to do in my life. It became my totem.

Oddly, like most totems, this one took a lot of waiting, and a failed attempt 8 years ago, over the past 30 years, before becoming achievable.

(8 years ago, when I quit my previous job in investment banking, I had planned to backpack through Latin America with my lawyer boyfriend. He dumped me before I bought my plane tickets)

So the totem became soiled - an icon of a broken heart along with a bullied teenager.

And it took me that much time - since he dumped me - to work up the appetite to finally make the pilgrimage here. 8 years, of the past 30 years of hope and wonder became layered with hurt.

For reasons I’m still figuring out, despite the emotional car crash that the last 18 months have been - or maybe because of it - this autumn, though, my heart told me that it was time.

So to Machu Picchu, I finally came. Deciding that either the demon would be slain, or I would.
And that is why, when I had my first glimpse of my totem city yesterday, I sat down.
And wept.

I will forever be grateful for the guide who made sure the rest of my group was occupied and left me alone. And who asked throughout our 4 hour hike after me.

As Blanche said in A Streetcar Named Desire, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

I went back up this morning, to see that totem city. Today, my heart did not spill over. Today, I did not weep. Today, I didn’t think about all the pain, and heartbreak, and frustration, and of feeling caged. Today, I thought of that wide eyed 7 year old.

Today, I stood looking out over a misty hidden city in the heart of the Peruvian Andes, and I thought of that bullied 14 year old, and I thought of the guy who ended up in a London hospital in 2014 after being called a Paki and being told to “speak English”.

I saw the clouds break over a pile of stones that have more meaning in my life than everyone reading this who was happy to turn around last year when charlatans were claiming my life was less valid than every small-town back row racist.

And I am proud of being able to tell myself, and all those other avatars of mine, that we made it here.

It got better.

Because I made sure it did.