The Photo That Changed Me: getting back to myself in the silence of the Camino de Santiago

Laurence Millar is a travel writer with a special interest in small islands and big walks. A firm believer in the power of travel, books and putting one foot in front of the other, she embarked on a journey along the Camino trail that changed her approach to life.

They say that walking the Camino de Santiago does not change you, it reveals you. I didn’t really understand what that meant until I reached a lonely spot on the pilgrim’s path, somewhere between the towns of Logroño and Nájera. It was here that it dawned on me that even after walking alone for days with no background noise or conversation, my anxiety had not caught up with me.

It felt like a filter had been lifted, allowing me to reconnect with a more light-hearted, more confident version of myself that until that moment I thought had been relegated to photographs of my younger self.

As someone who has battled anxiety for years, the idea of spending any time alone with my thoughts was, until that moment, quite literally my worst nightmare. Left unchecked, they had the power to drag me down any number of terrifying rabbit holes, which could then take me days or even weeks to claw myself out of.

So the fact that I had walked alone for days and actually enjoyed it, did feel like a revelation. A small miracle, in fact. And as I was not at all sure that this feeling would last, I took a photograph to mark the moment.

The road that got me to that photograph was a long and winding one. It had started eight years before when I walked the first three sections of the Camino with my husband, my father and his wife. We set off from St Jean Pied de Port in France, crossing the Pyrenees into Spain and arriving in Pamplona to celebrate her 70th birthday. I vowed on the plane home that I would come back and complete the Camino someday.

Fast forward a few years and with my youngest child leaving for university and the dreaded empty nest quickly becoming a reality, the promise came back to me. She would set off on her adventure, and I would set off on mine. However, in the two years that followed that decision, my stepmother died of pancreatic cancer, my father had surgery for lung cancer and my husband was successfully treated for prostate cancer.

Suddenly, walking just for my benefit didn’t feel enough, and I set up a JustGiving page to raise money for cancer research. Everything was going well until, on the morning of my first 30km walk, my husband had to leave to deal with a work crisis, and I found myself facing one of the longest stretches of the Camino alone.

This had never been the plan and I was terrified. I was a 54-year-old woman with dodgy ankles and very average fitness levels, who was not good on her own. What did I think I was doing? I was about to order a taxi to the nearest train station when the chatter of the other pilgrims quietly enjoying their pre-dawn breakfast made me stop. Maybe it was FOMO; maybe it was the thought of my sponsors; maybe it was the reassuring belief that I could give up at the end of the day. But somehow, I found myself stepping onto the path.

A pilgrim saying (there are many) states that the Camino gives you what you need, not what you want. And it turns out I just needed to put one foot in front of the other. The Camino looked after the rest.

Instead of offering my mind a golden opportunity to focus on itself and flood me with nightmare scenarios, the Camino forced me to look outwards. At first it was the basics: finding the star markers that confirmed I was on the right path; making sure I had enough water, somewhere to sleep and enough Compeed to cover the alarming number of blisters that were appearing on the soles of my feet. Then there was the physicality of tackling the climbs, descents and, perhaps most challenging of all, the endless, unchanging monotony of the Meseta.

There were days when I would walk through stunning olive groves and beautiful sandstone villages, and others when I would have to slog through ugly urban sprawls or along depressing motorways. Walking 8–12 hours a day, every day, meant that by the time I had dragged myself to my room, I could barely muster the energy to grab a shower and join the others for a communal dinner before collapsing. There was simply no space for worry.

With the pilgrim’s scallop shell tied to my pack, I got caught in the current of the wake-walk-rest-repeat routine that simply carried me along, until I reached that moment, halfway between Logroño and Nájera, and took this photograph. It is certainly not the most inspiring of landscapes. But it is here, on this dusty non-descript patch of the Camino, that I remembered the “me” before I was floored by anxiety.

That version of myself had travelled for months in Southeast Asia and South America – stopping only long enough to save the money I needed to fund more travel. That “me” had gone on a tiger safari in India and scuba dived with reef sharks. It was the “me” before I became paralysed with the fear of making the wrong decision.

Maybe that is part of the Camino’s quiet power. Apart from the big choice – to walk or not to walk – there are very few decisions to make. The result is that there is a lot of time and space to think. I always thought that I would use that space to make some big decisions. But looking back, it is the small things I remember.

The intoxicating first sips of strong coffee after a hard morning’s walk; looking down at the Camino winding its way through a patchwork of fields after a tough climb; watching the sunshine stream through the empty panes of the high stone arches in the ruins of a Gothic cathedral.

When I got home, people asked me if the Camino had changed me. I don’t think it did, but it changed the way I do things. These days, not having company does not stop me. Whether it is a trip to a different country or a trip to the cinema, I am happy to go alone. And I’m not scared of staying still with my thoughts anymore either.

It feels a little like tempting fate to be writing that, as who knows when anxiety will show up again – but at least now I have this photograph to remind me that it doesn’t have to stay.