My Italian Honeymoon

All for me.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.

In-flight Diet Coke and Biscoff—the only time I indulge in either. Honestly, give this pairing a Michelin star. Please note the ziplock full of Clorox wipes I used to sanitize my travel space.

You have to identify the difference between giving up, and giving the finger. Booking a solo trip to Italy, when you’re a person who’s dreamt of an Italian honeymoon for 24 years, could be considered giving up on one’s dream, if left to sit in its bathwater too long. Instead, I choose to look at my life, my age, my worthiness, the lovability of me, and flash the middle finger on my left hand in the general direction of societal shame and confining notions of failure. It has a bigger impact when you do it from the window of a plane.

This situation is not, in any way, ideal. I am honest and unafraid enough to admit that to the internet. There’s no world in which I wanted to be single and never married at 41-years-old without an Italian passport stamp. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. So I didn’t go. I waited, I went to Paris instead, and I held out hope that Italy was one solo trip I’d never see, because I’d never have to. Hope stays home a lot. Shani goes to Italy.