Stop Being Mean to Yourself: A Story About Finding the True Meaning of Self-Love (8 page)

Back at the hotel, I looked at the bag of gifts lying on the floor next to the bed. The people of Algiers had opened their homes and their hearts to me. In this city where only a few days ago I thought I would be confined to my room, I had done and seen so much. This was to be my last evening here. I was scheduled to fly out in the morning—the only flight to Casablanca for several days. Now I wondered if I should cancel my flight, maybe leave later in the week.

I went into the bathroom and began to draw a bath. As

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I bent over the tub, adjusting the temperature of the hot water, the lights in the hotel room dimmed, flickered, then extinguished. I edged toward the door leading to the outside corridor, then opened it a crack. All the lights in the hotel were off.

It was a blackout.

A flickering of terror ran through my veins as Nazil's words flashed through my mind.
They know of things
.
They know who is coming and when they are leaving
.

If they do not already know you are here
,
they will soon learn
.

The darkened hallways outside my room were quiet, still. All I could hear was the sound of the water running into the tub, and the pounding of my heart. I closed the door, then leaned against it. Moments passed, slowly. The lights came back on. I finished drawing my bath, then packed my backpack. I
was
in the midst of a civil war. When Fateh had first knocked on my door, I had taken a deep breath and dived under the surface. Now I was running out of air.

It was time to go.

The next morning I slipped out of the city at dawn. As my plane took off, I stared out the window. I had never seen a country as beautiful as Algeria. Despite its beauty, the landscape emanated a haunting desolation. It was as if the earth itself—even the trees and foliage—had absorbed the pain and despondency of the people who inhabited it.

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I felt relieved when the plane landed in Casablanca. My time in Algeria had been enlightening but stressful. I was ready to get back to life, vitality, and freedom—

freedom especially from the imminent dangers of terrorism. I hailed a cab back to the hotel where I had stored my luggage.

"
Je returnez
!
Je returnez
"
I said to the desk clerk, a large frowning man wearing a caftan. He was yet another person who had scowled at the idea of my trip to Algeria. Now, he smiled slightly—at my safe return and, I guessed, at my illiterate use of the French language.

I checked into my room, feeling a strange mixture of emotions as I changed clothes and repacked my luggage. Algeria had tapped into some mysterious part of me.

My time there now felt surrealistic. I wasn't certain I had been there. Nor was I completely certain I had survived. My experience there had ruffled ever so slightly the edges of the boundaries that keep reality so firmly and neatly in place.

I also felt energized. At the beginning of this trip, I had spent the better part of my few days in Paris hiding out in my room feeling intimidated by the luxury, beauty, and tinge of elitism that surrounded me. When I had finally ventured out of my room into the lobby, I had sat precariously on the edge of a velvet highbacked chair. A security guard had approached me and asked if I belonged there. I showed him my room key and said, "Yes, I do." Then I had gone out and done a few things. Now, the repression and

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confinement ofAlgeria made me even more determined to see and do as much as I could on the rest of this trip. I felt a new surge of power, a new appreciation for freedom. I belonged here, too. And I was going to act like it.

I immediately began planning an afternoon outing to Rabat, Morocco's capital. On my way to the taxi stand, I went into the restaurant in the hotel lobby and ordered a café au lait.

The same man who had served me the last time again brought me a silver tray containing a demitasse of espresso and a small pitcher of warm milk. I eyed that pitcher suspiciously. As I poured that warm milk into my coffee, I knew I shouldn't.

Until now, I had been arduously monitoring everything I ate and drank on this trip to try to prevent myself from getting sick. Except for the Ramadan feast in Algiers, I had barely tasted any of the succulent food.

But it wasn't just over here that I had been monitoring my intake. For the past six years or more, most of the people I knew, including myself, had devoted themselves to eating healthy. It was part of a larger process that was taking place—a detoxification, a cleansing, a fasting of sorts—as people developed a higher consciousness about what they ate and absorbed into their bodies. I could barely remember the days when food was just food, and if it tasted good, I ate it. Now, the rule of thumb was what the dumpy doctor in a "Wizard

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of Id" cartoon had told his patient: if it tastes good, spit it out. There were so many rules to follow, including my own. There were so many prohibitions against so many things. Lately, especially, it seemed as if everything I wanted I couldn't have.

So I drank every last sip of the espresso and warm milk.

On the sixtymile drive to Rabat my stomach began to ache.

The taxi pulled into a lot outside a sprawling palace and courtyard. The driver then located a guide who offered to walk me through the typical tourist attractions. The guide was a stout old man with dark, sunwrinkled skin and a missing front tooth. He told me to call him Tommy, but I knew that wasn't his name. It was just an easy word for Americans to pronounce. He told me if I liked what he showed me, I could pay him what I thought the tour was worth at the end of it.

We walked around the king's palace and the building where the king's children were tutored. Then we visited a sacred tomb site. The tomb was a twostory building burnished in gold and guarded by the police. Inside the building, a wraparound balcony overlooked an ornate coffin. Standing there, I had the strangest feeling that I was brushing against an opening between this world and the afterlife.

We left the tomb and walked and walked. My stomach hurt more with each step. Finally, we entered a large, terraced garden area. I realized how much I had missed nature on this

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trip. Except for my stressful visit to the Algerian countryside, I had spent most of my time in hotel rooms, crowded cities, and airports.

Tommy pointed to a large bird nesting on top of one of the crumbling columns of rock. "Look! I think it's a stork."

We paused a moment to watch the bird.

By now, it was getting to be late afternoon. Tommy looked tired. I suspected he was hungry. Occasionally, I saw him sneaking peeks at his watch.

The dedication I had observed in the Muslims during my travels throughout the Arab world impressed me. The word "Islam," I would later learn, means "surrender or submission to the will of God." I was acutely aware of the heightened and accelerated spirituality in the air as the culture went deeper into the month of Ramadan. But I also sensed the strain of the fast wearing on the people as I observed them carrying on their daily work. Thirty days is a long time to abstain.

As I watched Tommy pant and puff, walking down the garden path, I could see the effects of the elongated fast wearing on him, too.

"Are you getting hungry?"

"Yes," he said.

"Going for a month without eating or drinking all day must get tough," I said.

He nodded. "But it's good for you," he said, grimacing.

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I agreed. "It's good for the body, good for the mind . . .

"And good for the spirit," he said, finishing my sentence.

I trudged behind Tommy across the wide main streets of Rabat into the entrance to the
Casbah des Oudaia
,
a seventeenthcentury fortress hidden within the city near the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. As we walked the narrow streets of the
casbah
,
I pointed to a small open market nestled between two houses. I couldn't stand the pain in my stomach any longer. I needed a large bottle of water.

We finished the tour. I thanked and paid Tommy, then made the drive back to Casablanca, holding my stomach all the way. By now, it felt as if I had swallowed a porcupine, quills and all.

Many substances, places, and people can be toxic to us. Even other people's selfhatred, their beliefs about themselves or us, can be poisonous. What's around us and what we absorb into our bodies affects us. If we insist on being around a toxic person or ingesting a substance that's toxic to us, we can develop an allergiclike reaction. Our bodies twist and contort, become out of alignment and balance. We can become confused, foggy, even sick. Our sense of power diminishes. Toxic substances, toxic people, and toxic beliefs can weaken people, just as the mythical kryptonite weakened Superman.

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Before I understood this, I had spent much of my life turning on myself instead of backing away from whatever was poisonous. If I just try harder, do better, be more, be different, I can handle this, I had thought. It had taken me a long time to learn that the lesson wasn't
handling
toxicity. It was learning to respect what was toxic to me.

There is a feeling that comes—a gentle hit of recognition—when something is right for us. Sometimes the response is almost electric. Other times it's more subtle. The body simply feels at peace. There is a different feeling that comes when something is wrong for us, when a person, place, thing, emotion, decision, or substance is toxic to us. That feeling can be either a strong negative reaction, a nagging sense that something is not quite right, or a blank response—we don't feel anything. It had taken me years to learn to detect my intuitive, bodily responses. Sometimes I still denied and ignored them, thinking I could just plow through on willpower, desire, and mental fortitude. And I still had my blind spots—those places in me that drove me straight to what I
knew
I was allergic to.

I had survived the terrorists in Algeria. But I did myself in when I ignored my instincts in Casablanca. I had broken my own rule: "Don't drink the milk."

When I returned to my room at the hotel in Casablanca, I dug through my suitcases and found some herbs for my stomach that I had brought for an emergency such as this.

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I downed a handful, then walked to the window and opened the curtains. I saw all the same sights I had seen before, the first time I was here. Veiled women and darkeyed men crowded the city streets. The noise from radios, cars, and ship horns blared up through the window. Soot covered all the buildings—the modern highrises and the old Arabian shops. Maurice, my friend from America, had been right. Casablanca was indeed a dirty seaport city. But it had become more than that.

Now, it had become a safe harbor and a home.

My time here was ending. Soon I would be leaving for Cairo, Egypt. The energy of this trip was about to shift again. I had no idea what was coming, no inkling of what was in store. For just a moment, clutching my stomach, I wondered if I should cancel my plans and return to America. That thought passed quickly. I was in way too deep. There was no turning back.

I had survived my initiation in the vortex of terrorism in Algeria. I had made my peace with Morocco. Now I was about to move into my indoctrination into the ancient Egyptian mystery school.

''I still do not understand why you would spend so much time in the countries you did and then suddenly decide not to fly to Greece for the luxury part of your vacation,'' my interrogator in Cairo said.

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"It was probably a combination of my allergy to dairy products and the difference in the way milk is treated here," I said. "But I got sick from drinking the milk."

I hated myself for what happened next. I started to cry. "I haven't done anything wrong," I said. "I'm tired. I'm sick. And I just want to go home."

The woman looked at me. She began talking to the man standing next to her, again in a language I couldn't understand. Then she turned to me. "I'm sorry this had to take so long," she said. "You can go now."

As suddenly as this interrogation began, it ended. I didn't understand what had just happened, but it was over. The flight to Tel Aviv had been delayed for several hours. The interrogation had lasted most of that time. I sat in the gate area waiting for the boarding call and wondered if I was being watched or observed.

I relaxed when I reached the Tel Aviv airport. It felt airy, much lighter than the airports of North Africa, more like being inside a Lutheran church than a terminal.

Because I was changing airlines here, I had to claim my luggage, pass through customs, and recheck my luggage on the flight to America. Even with the delay in Cairo, I still had over four hours before my plane departed. I gathered my suitcases, found a cart, and began pushing my way through the sprawling airport. When I passed the all night restaurant, I decided to stop for a bagel.

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I looked around, noticing the enchanting demeanor and rituals of the people around me. I wished I had scheduled some time here on my trip. Even from this limited exposure to Israel—sitting in the airport restaurant in the middle of the night—I found the culture enticing.

This was the land where the Christ lived, walked, and did His work.

I remembered a conversation with Nichole shortly before I left on this trip
.
It happened one day when I asked her to look up a particular Bible verse for me
.

She copied the verse onto a piece of paper
,
brought it to me
,
and began reading aloud
.

"
Matthew 22
:
35
,"
she said
.
"
Then one of them
,
which was a lawyer
,
asked him a question
,
tempting him
,
and saying
,
'
Master
,
which is the great
commandment in the law
?'
Jesus said unto him
,
'
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart
,
and with all thy soul and with all thy mind
.
This is the
first and great commandment
.
And the second is like
.
.
.
unto
.
.
.
it
.'
"