A Part of Me I Hadn’t Met Yet…

Reading The Paris Novel, I didn’t just follow Stella St. Vincent’s journey; I saw my own. Her quiet loneliness, emotional distance from her mother, and her tendency to perform roles instead of being herself… all of it felt disturbingly familiar. It was as if Ruth Reichl had tapped into the hidden parts of my own story and given shape to feelings I hadn’t yet understood.

Stella goes to Paris because, after her mother’s death, her mother sends her there… years too late and without explanation. I went to Paris for reasons that seemed practical or intentional on the surface, but now I understand I went because something in me needed to be finished or perhaps finally begun. For both of us, Paris became the place where the self we had abandoned learned how to find air again.

Throughout my life, I have played many roles: mother, wife, daughter, caretaker, the responsible one, the one who keeps going even when everything in her yearns to stop. At some point, I lost touch with my own core. My mother and I shared a quietness that grew into distance, then into ache. The relationships in my life mirrored that same gap; closeness without genuine connection, presence without emotional safety. Like Stella, I learned to survive by shrinking the parts of myself that longed for tenderness, joy, agency, and delight.

Then, Paris arrived.

Not the postcard Paris, but the Paris that stirs something deep inside you. The Paris that awakens your senses: the warm scent of a croissant in a lively café, the shock of oysters on ice, or a silky soufflé followed by a sip of bubbling champagne, the quiet of a museum where a single brushstroke or sculpture feels like a heartbeat. At the La Galerie Dior, I marveled at how Dior fabric drapes across a body as if reminding you that beauty isn’t just something to admire, it’s something you’re meant to live in. The romantic buildings, bakeries, patisseries, and lamp-lit streets challenged me to imagine a life not centered on responsibility but on desire, wonder, as if I was writing an enchanting love letter to myself.

In Paris, I experienced a version of myself I hadn’t seen in decades, maybe ever. There was a rebirth in simply walking, tasting, and seeing differently. A sensory awakening that loosened the hold of old stories: the inherited silence between mothers and daughters, the emotional debris of relationships that asked me to be small, the unresolved pain I carried like a second spine.

Paris didn’t heal me, but it unlocked me, and sometimes unlocking is the start of healing.

I began to realize that rediscovery isn’t flashy. It’s subtle. It occurs one moment at a time: a café table where you sit alone without feeling lonely, a chiffon dress that reminds you your body belongs to you, a work of Rodin’s art that reflects something tender inside you, a bookstore where you find yourself lingering as if waiting for your life to catch up.

Stella and I both realized that completing oneself isn’t about achieving perfection; it’s about reclaiming the pieces that were never truly lost, only hidden. It’s about seeing the world through a lens that is finally your own—not borrowed, not inherited, and not shaped to meet others’ expectations. Paris was my catalyst. The place where beauty, pleasure, art, food, and culture worked together like quiet architects of my rebirth. A place where identity felt fluid again, where self-worth stopped being negotiated, and where reinvention didn’t feel like a betrayal of my past but an invitation to my future.

In the end, I didn’t go to Paris to escape my life. I went to remember it. And in remembering it, I remembered myself. Thank you, Ruth and Stella, for revealing the reason above.