I'm Jen Klassen 

Part 3: Coming Home, Chapter 2: Learning To Stay

I arrived home after my Camino adventure feeling like a new person. I felt alive, vibrant, and loved—even loveable. A month later, I turned 50 which felt like a threshold moment as I was entered this new decade with a fresh way of relating to myself, and a quieter way of seeing the world. My hard edges were softening as a result. Defensiveness, cynicism, and rigidity were more masks that no longer served me in this new chapter as I entered what I called ‘my soft era’.

I’d had a chance encounter with an unlikely man on the Camino who told me exactly that. Him, not knowing a word of English and me, not able to speak a word of Spanish, we communicated through google translate (for the record, reader, this is not the story your mind may be jumping to — wrong genre).  He was a very spiritual man and told me on the first day we walked together that I was very beautiful but would be more beautiful still if I softened my edges by learning to love and forgive myself. I argued that I did love and forgive myself…who was he to talk to me like this when he didn’t even know me?

He was holding up a mirror and, quite honestly, I wanted to smash it.

It’s probably fortunate he couldn’t understand English, given the words that followed.

Every day on that trip and for weeks following, he would send messages reminding me of the importance of forgiveness and using other people as mirrors pointing me to myself instead of looking at others with judgement. He pointed out how tightly I held my expectations, how much I was still trying to manage life, and encouraged me to surrender to life as it unfolds. Every time I complained to him, he turned me towards the truth — that each present moment is perfect as it is because it is here to teach me; every experience here for my evolution. There was no trick in my book that could get this man to give me the validation I was looking for. Infuriating. Perhaps his boldness was made possible by the fact that he lived on another continent, as no friend in my immediate world had ever mustered the courage to call me out the way he could.

He remains a dear friend to this day and I will always be grateful for whatever fate placed us on the same bus to Sarria and later nudged him to tell me the truth no one before him had ever dared to name. Needless to say, and thanks to this chance encounter, the Camino was the beginning of a spiritual awakening. For me, the Camino path did not end in Santiago but was the beginning, rather, of a new journey of learning to forgive, let go, and surrender to the life in front of me instead of battling constant frustration and disappointment with people and experiences.

Over the course of my journey of coming home to myself, many people asked me —and still do— if I was dating. There were a few dates with a couple of great men that went nowhere and I am grateful for it.

Thankful for great dates going nowhere.

I wasn’t ready. I was still living old patterns of codependence that I wasn’t always aware of. Often, I believed I was further ahead on my healing journey than I actually I was. What I can see now, is how desperately I wanted still to be chosen and desired as a strategy for safety. That longing was a signal to me that I was still not able to fully love and choose myself.

I was still looking for worth and securing belonging by being needed—by saving, supporting, and organizing myself around another person.

Entering a relationship from that place could have only one possible outcome: the familiar revolving door of self abandonment in pursuit of love and belonging. Still hoping, if I’m honest, to be rescued by love from someone outside of myself.

Have I been lonely? Very rarely, but on occasion, yes. Typically, this occurs on Sunday afternoons…I have no idea what triggers melancholy on those days. Maybe it’s walking past couples strolling hand-in-hand at the beach, or clinking glasses in the late afternoon sun; maybe I just get bored and want company. But I remind myself in those moments that loneliness is just a feeling and it won’t last forever. And it never does. Everything passes.

The loneliness of being alone is nothing compared to the loneliness I felt in marriage.

No one’s fault, just the result of two people who hadn’t fit together for a very long time.

In that first year, I did something I had never done before. I stayed in one place and didn’t change anything. I stayed in the same home with the same people, with the same position at the same job, doing nothing but work and healing. No educational pursuits (okay that’s not totally true: I did get accepted into a Master’s Program then dropped out after my first class. I knew with absolute clarity that I was doing the thing I normally did when life felt unmanageable— avoid discomfort by reaching for the next achievement). I learned to stay in one place and lean into the places I would rather avoid.

I learned that feeling my feelings wouldn’t kill me after all. A shocking and inconvenient realization.

I learned many practical skills as well: like remembering to take out the trash every week, and handling car and home repairs. I learned to manage my own banking, pay my own bills, file taxes, and create a budget. I discovered I am good at managing my finances and don’t need as many new things and experiences as I’d once thought. Less new clothing, products, and Amazon packages arriving at my door. Less time spent out or ‘away’ and fewer drinks on dimly lit patios. Fewer drinks in general. Looking back on my life, I think all those things and experiences I thought I needed were just ways for me to avoid inner truths I was too afraid to acknowledge. Now that I my outside life was more aligned with my inner life, I had less to run from or toward; I wasn’t desperate to escape my life. The truer, more authentic me craved simplicity, stillness, and fewer demands.

I was creating the life I wanted aligned with who I was becoming; a life shaped by choice.

As the first year of my singleness came to a close, I believed I was nearing the end of my healing and that, surely, I would emerge with my new wings any day. But year two had other plans for me and I found myself thrust father into the dark than I knew I needed to go. Everything I thought I had stabilized with such intention and purpose began to shake as one crisis and reckoning followed another.

Coming home was not a linear process but instead a journey of spiralling deeper inward toward truth.