14/09/2025 - Addicted to newness.

I’m tired today, physically drained, and even as I write this, I’m yawning. It’s hard to keep motivation high, to keep doing the same things over and over. It’s my eighth day walking and already I’m asking how I’ll do this for thirty more days… But I will. I know I will. It’s not the effort; it’s the repetition. I’m facing my biggest addiction: newness and change.

The novelty of this experience has faded, and now I’m chasing the high. I’m getting bored, even though the landscapes shift and new people appear constantly. The pattern is the same, and now that I’ve experienced it, I want to hop to a new one: a new place, a new adventure. That’s how my brain is wired. Which is exactly why I came. As I said, I want to learn commitment, which is tested precisely when things get less novel and less exciting. How can I expect to commit to someone if I can’t commit for a month to a journey I chose for myself?

I know I’m carving new neural pathways just by sitting down to write again. Wake up, eat, walk, shower, do laundry, relax, write, work, write, eat, sleep. That’s been my week and will likely be my month ahead. I have to deal with it, regulate my emotions through the craving for novelty, even when I crave something different.

Even when the bland, neutral feeling hits again, which disarms me every time we meet. But as I learned in Amsterdam, neutrality isn’t scary; it’s the peaceful current of stability. It’s knowing I’m safe inside a routine I can inhabit. No extra logistics to plan, no constant adapting. I can just be, and do. That gives me space to think more deeply, to challenge myself by going inward. Isn’t that exactly what I came here for? Why am I annoyed when I find it?

Because, here’s exactly why. When I enter that state, nothing seems to matter. While walking today, I wondered about everything I want to develop: this book, the Camino personal documentary I’m filming, my blog, my contribution to my dad’s book, turning this experience into a guide I could sell, so many ideas. And yet none of it felt worth the time or effort. As if life were only meant to be breathed, moved through freely, danced with.

I know that isn’t true. Creation is the other pole that gives life meaning. But this is how my Pisces Moon responds to emotional monotony: I lose drive, focus, and passion; I only want to flow and let go. Melancholy, ecstasy, I want to be carried by them. I want to drift into something soft and stop deciding anything. Such a familiar feeling, though I haven’t met it in a long time. It’s strange to write about it again.

It’s a revisit, a last goodbye. I’ve changed over the years and found my way out, but of course it still exists within me. The difference is, I won’t use substances anymore, I won’t stay in bed scrolling for hours, and I won’t linger in those emotions. I wont dissociate this time. They gave me excuses to self-sabotage, to make life feel meaningless when I’d created so much joy, beauty, and purpose around me. I worked so hard to want to live, and I realize now, I succeeded.

Because, back then, feeling bad was better than feeling nothing.

I see it clearly now: a pattern that ran my life for years, one I finally made peace with. I dismantled its mechanisms one by one to regain the wheel. I faced truths when they were hard. I put myself in situations I knew would trigger me on purpose, and then withdrew. I wrote and wrote and wrote, even when I didn’t fully believe what I was writing, until each piece clicked into the puzzle and I saw how I masked my greatness, my hunger for life, my happiness under nonchalance.

All this to say: I see it now, and I’m proud. I’m doing the very thing that doesn’t let me slip back into that pattern. I’m willing to keep walking, keep moving forward, revisit my patterns along the way, face them one by one, and still wake up the next day choosing to leave them behind. Choosing to show up as who I know I am beneath them: a brilliant mind, an active body, a brave heart, and a fierce soul.

I decided to post my Camino journey on my blog starting now with a one-week delay between what I experience and what I publish. That buffer gives me peace; posting next-day would trigger me into inertia and make me quit. I know myself enough to not try it. I’m ready to show more of myself on the page, slowly. I’ve always known this book would be published in some form.

But between the idea and the act, there’s a world. Therefore, I choose rationality over emotionality for actions that serve evolution. To soften the shock of releasing the book in February, I’ll share this part on my blog as a sneak peek, a glimpse into my world, a sense of what the book is about. Even though I feel like I’ve lived a hundred lives since starting it back in Verbier, before the move, before Amsterdam, before Andalusia, before my grandmother’s death, and now. So many chapters of me spilled onto those pages. Some I don’t even want to reread yet, because of how uncomfortable that would feel.

I write because it’s my calling, because I crave it. Being read is equally appealing and frightening. I don’t write fantasy (I’ve tried). I write myself, unfiltered. I seek discomfort in my writing; I chase the thoughts that resist coming out, the ones soaked in guilt and shame, and I pour them anyway. I retell the most intimate parts of my days, the ones no one sees. And I’ll have to let many eyes peek past the gates of my intimacy that I’m choosing to open.

The heretics of yesterday are the visionaries of tomorrow, I know it. Maybe I’ll be misunderstood or criticized, but I can’t let narrow minds define my purpose. After all, if I only get this one life; it better be living it.

So today wasn’t just another day on the Camino. It was a deep one. I spent it thanking past versions of me for making hard choices when they had to, choices that brought me here, ready to embody the woman I’ve always dreamed of being. Free, naturally, without the shackles of other people’s perceptions.

I realize I was still clinging to beauty as a way to be accepted. When someone says something wild or strange, beauty softens the edges; we filter what jars us. It’s a privilege I’ve known, the kind of beauty that turns heads, attracts compliments, and opens doors. It made me reluctant to release it. But I know that to let another kind of beauty shine, from the heart, I have to surrender to my most natural self.

It’s hard not to straighten or curl my hair. Hard not to dab concealer on a pimple or two. Hard not to use style as a vehicle for my personality. Hard to post on Instagram in my most natural state. I feel like I’m disappointing people because they expect me to be beautiful, like I’m less than I could be. And in the social-media sense, maybe that’s true. But I chose to remove my breast implants; I chose to wear less makeup; I’m choosing to accept my wavy hair; I’m choosing not to take the pill to regulate hormones or erase pimples; I’m choosing not to medicalize what I can first meet from within.

I truly believe I’m becoming more beautiful by shedding rather than adding, by accepting, until I can love this new version. Today, I feel like I reached the core of it. I’m 100% natural, and I love what I see: the spark in my eyes, the way my lips twitch when I smile, my bright big teeth, my asymmetrical eyebrows, my strong shoulders, my perky nipples, my round hips, my muscled legs. All of it. It took me so long to find beauty in the reflection, to find beauty in imperfection. But by removing what I once layered on top, I revealed what was always there. My body has changed with it because I chose the power of loving myself.

I’ll keep showing up naturally, keep daring to be without artifacts. That doesn’t mean I’ll never straighten my hair or wear makeup again; it means when I do, it’s to enhance, like painting on a canvas I already love, not to hide something unlovable otherwise.

So many thoughts today, I could go on, but it’s plenty. Tomorrow I’m walking only 12 km to Navarrete, because the next stages are long. Now, I’ll take the time to work and write in my dad’s book, then gather my things and curl up in my little pod at the hostel, the one with the curtain that gives me a sliver of privacy, which feels like luxury now. I’m not even hungry tonight; I ate late: ragù raviolini and one of the best desserts of my life, una torta de queso, a Basque-style cheesecake from the region. Delicious!

With love, Loune.