Author’s Note: As you may have noticed, I’ve taken about nine months off from posting chapters of my memoir Anomaly that I started sharing in January of 2025. It is still a MASSIVE work in progress and nowhere near a stage where I should have anyone else read any of it. But it was cathartic for me to release it last year, so I am once again reworking it. As of right now, I’m calling these chapters “Part Two” because they are new, I’m not sure how it will all integrate yet, so stay tuned. I posting these chapters because it helps hold me accountable to keep writing. These are chapters I wrote on my solo trip in Europe in the fall of 2025. Enjoy.
Part Two | Chapter 23
(October 2025)
I am lying face down on a marble bench in the hammam room of my riad in Marrakesh, Morocco, completely naked. I am silently crying as the kind woman, who speaks little English, instructs me to roll over, face up, so she can scrub the front of my body the same way she just removed the first layer of skin off my backside. She is unbothered by my tears, which I cannot seem to control.
“It’s okay, lady,” she soothes. “You okay.” This is not a question; it is a reassurance. And it brings a new wave of unexpected emotion, grief, and healing as my body sheds its skin and releases all the loss, struggle, and heartbreak that has come before. “I’m sorry,” I say sheepishly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I mime the sign for crazy and point to my tears and myself, making an embarrassed grimace.
“It’s okay. Normal lady,” she smiles warmly, validating my emotional breakdown as she scrubs the insides of my Thys, then lifts my breasts one at a time to scrub under them, behind my ears, and under my arms.
“Look,” she says, her face lit with the excitement of someone who knows she’s great at her job. She’s pointing to my legs, which are covered in little black rolls of skin, some a half inch long—I am instinctively embarrassed. But she just smiles, in a way that tells me she’s not remotely disgusted. I take it to mean she understands my emotional reaction to this ritual. Because look at all the layers of skin my body is shedding—maybe an entire lifetime’s worth—so of course I’d feel its metaphoric shedding too. I can see that this makes her exceedingly proud of me, which feels like unearned grace.
Tears continue streaking my face with mascara lines as she ladles warm water over my body, rinsing away the layers she has just removed, then pouring the entire bucket over my head in a way that feels unbelievably cleansing. It’s as if my whole life is being scrubbed off my physical body so I can emotionally release the past and be reborn, clean and new. When she asks me to turn around so she can wash my hair, I am suddenly a vulnerable child being tenderly bathed by a mother who loves them. A lump swells in my throat at the unfamiliarity of the nurturing kindness of this gesture. This is not an experience I’ve ever had, and the core of my soul knows this and releases more of whatever I’ve been holding onto for a lifetime.
When she is finished, she has me stand and pours bucket after bucket of warm water over my head, rinsing my entire body in a way that feels so maternally comforting and purifying. The vulnerability of this experience is impossible to adequately put into words. Being physically naked in front of a total stranger who is caring for you in such a nurturing and non-sexual way requires instant unearned trust, and it is healing something deep inside my soul that is long overdue.
I am on a solo journey across Europe as a 50th birthday present to myself, one I’ve dreamed of taking since I was eighteen years old. I am here to push myself out of my comfort zone every day. To say yes to everything and to learn whatever lessons the Universe has in store for me. To let go, to grieve, and to be reborn—transformed into the next version of myself as I let go of the past and enter this new chapter of my life.
I included Morocco on this trip because it was one of my younger brother Mathew’s favorite stops on his cycling adventure across Europe after he graduated from high school. He came back with countless stories from his time here and a silk tablecloth for me. He shared how he’d been welcomed by the people and fallen in love with the culture, which sparked his lifelong passion for international travel and appreciation for different cultures and ways of life. He’d stopped in internet cafes and written long emails describing his adventures, all of which made me long to experience travel in a similar way. I could see how much it was maturing him into a wise and open-minded man, and it made me proud.
He’d been inspired to stop in Morocco by the stories dad told us of his adventures driving a VW bus across the country in 1974 with his best friend—how they’d paid a cop two dollars not to haul them off to jail for smoking pot, or how they’d dressed in local garb and eaten tagine and couscous with their fingers on the floor in Fez and Marrakech. So, I knew I had to include this little three-day detour in my own Alchemist journey to find my personal legend, my life’s meaning.
And as I expected it would, my time in Marrakech is cracking me open in a way I never could have anticipated. The people have welcomed me with open arms, made me laugh, and feel cared for in a way that seems foreign but wonderful all at once. I have come to discover what I’m made of, to release generational curses, to heal my broken heart, to learn to trust, to circumvent my fears, to be open and to push myself to be more.
Earlier in the day, before my transformative hammam bath, I’d had a lesson in listening to my intuition and learning how to blindly trust, something I’ve always struggled with. I’d booked a hot air balloon experience as a gift to myself, something that had been on my Futureboard (my version of a vision board) for years. I’d always imagined that I would manifest a love who would hold me protectively from behind as the balloon ascended. That maybe he’d have arranged the whole thing, with a bottle of champagne all romantic like, maybe even propose as we floated high above the world in each other’s arms, just like the movies.
And the thing is, I had. I’d written my perfect man into existence, and we’d spent a year and a half in a beautiful, committed, loving, healthy relationship. Until he’d blindsided me with a break-up just before my trip.
