The Trip I Can’t Remember
In blind and rushed pursuit of a life never meant for me, I lost touch with the one ally who could have led me home
In the twenty-three years I’ve been traveling internationally, Mallorca, Spain is the only place I’ve ever visited where recollection and reflection come up empty. I have nearly zero memory of what it was like to move, taste and simply be there. It would be one thing if this was a trip taken in my reckless, carefree youth, but it wasn’t. I was 44 years old. It was the summer of 2023.
This isn’t and won’t be an indictment on Mallorca. I have often wished in the years since leaving it behind, having only grazed the island’s surface, that I could return and redeem myself. Until then, Mallorca floats about unsettled and unresolved as a cautionary tale and a humbling and haunting reminder of how much it hurts to do the places we know we should love a great injustice.
I know the memories are hopelessly lost, as none of my typical digital recon has uncovered anything substantive. But I also know my time in Mallorca will come to reveal something that is as raw and unexpected as it is arresting and reassuring. I’m a bit anxious and giddy to see what writing head-on into this confrontation and dissection will bring.
My first instinct is to downplay the vast wasteland that has overrun my memory across these four days in July. But this is Tessera 60? Recall has never been a problem for me until this destination popped up on my content calendar.
I can remember every single pintxos I tried my first time through San Sebastián, Spain, in 2018. I can remember the taste of the steak tartare I ate on a rainy night at Naše Maso in Prague on my first solo, self-led trip in 2016. I can even remember the time I ridiculously anointed Peanut Butter & Co, a peanut butter sandwich shop in Greenwich Village, my first-ever meal in New York City back in 2003.
Imagine that. My first time in Manhattan and I chose to start with a peanut butter sandwich!
Taste has to get its legs somewhere, I suppose.
But when I do invite myself to remember, or try at least, I feel like my head is too heavy and held down to lift up and see anything. Something intangible is blocking me from catching a real glimpse at any part of the bigger picture or fuller memory.
These four days are a jumbled and distorted mess. Access to anything meaningful and delicious has long been written over and denied. Still I can’t help but recognize that the misshapen fragments I am able to recall are not unlike the perspective from which we see the world when our faces are held down. Held down and fixed in shameful concentration on the soul-sucking screens of our cell phones.
This season of my life was unlike any other. I was consumed by work. Proudly embracing if not celebrating a severely off-balance work-life balance. I wasn’t thinking about or even circling the perimeter of purpose and presence. And it showed in the choices I made, the mindset I clung to and the way I signed up to move about the world.
I was only a few battle-tested months into my new role as head of global brand. If I had been successful at anything to that point, it was convincing myself that every hard day was exhilarating, not exhausting. That what felt impossible was intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. That what felt like a compromise of my vision and talent was all part of the fee for getting a seat at the executive table.
I have no doubt I arrived in Mallorca believing I was in my dream job, building an unstoppable team and meaningfully disrupting the status quo at a big legacy brand. I was feeling so very accomplished and yet, if I had been brutally honest with myself, so very buried alive. Never stopping to second-guess why those two always seemed – at least on the path that I was on – to cling inseparably to one another.
What ultimately put this trip in perspective for me is I can’t remember a single thing I ate the entire time I was in Mallorca. Not one meal. Not one drink. Not one breakfast. Not one glass of wine, which I can only presume was taken in earnest reprieve from some lively and lovely sundrenched patio.
The entire endeavor of going back and trying to find anything meaningful has been frustrating but elucidating. It is as if my past self was sending out an SOS to my future self. When I discovered it this morning, its message was clear: Don’t ever let this happen to us again.
Perhaps even more illuminating is today’s discovery that the further I got away from my center and the more I resisted living up to my creative potential, the more invisible travel’s most potent force had become.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Taste is what was wiped clean from my memory. It is still mind-boggling to me. I can’t remember a single bite.
Not a single bite.
So where was it?
Where was Taste, my compass, when I was moving through Mallorca?
Shrinking in rebellion, fear or disgust?
Or was its absence evidence of something far more devastating?
Had Taste been disinvited, quieted by the one person it longed only to inspire and steer? I can’t just entertain the idea. I must accept it.
I couldn’t have felt abandoned by Taste because I had all but stopped appreciating and looking for it in 2023. When I pull back and look at the version of me that emerges post-promotion, when I am knighted with the title I had so longed to carry, I see something telling and incredible.
This wasn’t just a Mallorca problem. Mallorca was the crescendo. Or maybe it was rock bottom? Whichever perspective I take looking up at it or down on myself, Mallorca is a symbolic, pivotal trip. In a season defined by cranky, fitful travel, by gaps in memory, lapses in taste and hurried, indulgent make-good experiences, I used Taste like a mistress. I didn’t stop and appreciate it. I expected it. I paid for it. I consumed and forgot it. This happens throughout 2023, first in Colombia, then in London, then Mallorca, Bali and Mexico.
The more I chased misalignment of soul and purpose in blind pursuit of something never meant to be for me, the more I lost my way. Remarkably, but ever so spectacularly, I had distanced myself from the one ally who could have helped me get back on track.
Taste, my Compass.
When I focus once more on Mallorca, it’s hard to picture Taste waving and shouting at me over all those petty distractions I had turned to, to drown out the cognitive dissonance raging inside of me. It’s hard to imagine it judging or enabling the obscene handbag purchase I made at Louis Vuitton – that is most pathetically and abhorrently the only thing I can actually remember about Mallorca.
That damn beautiful pink bag. Proof of a trip I can’t remember and an artifact of a lifestyle I can no longer support or defend.
But given what I know today, it’s easy to conceive of Taste sitting with me at all those meals I can’t remember in Mallorca and beyond. Patiently, though not necessarily passively, waiting this phase of my life out with me. Instead of gnashing up against the condition of indifference I was traveling in, Taste left a breadcrumb to make its point when I’d be ready.
And I think Taste had a real point to make about it and about me in Mallorca. And I think it’s finally getting to make that point right now.
Taste is pleading with me to go back to the tables I forgot, the streets I can’t remember, the places I looked past and through. Hours ago, I would have said it was too decadent to pardon myself and grant a destination do-over. Now it seems like the only resolution to this reflection is return and reconciliation.
But not with Mallorca – with myself.
Have you ever come back from a trip and felt like moments didn’t stick or stay with you?
The Mosaic Index is a framework for recognizing the signals shaping how we travel and why certain places and moments stay with us.
If you’re curious what your pattern looks like and want to understand more about what moves you, start your Mosaic below.
