When I booked a solo hiking trip in the Canary Islands, I expected breathtaking scenery – not a terrifying panic attack
After watching Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, which draws heavily on the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, I was determined to visit. A Google image search of the island made my head fizz: black sand beaches, alien-green ponds, mountains, great pyramids of ochre dirt and dead lava. In the summer of 2016, I finally booked a solo hiking trip there to mark the completion of my first book, Anxiety for Beginners. It was breathtaking, in all kinds of ways.
In the excitement of having written a book, the difficult experiences I had reflected upon in my childhood and teen years (a near-fatal illness and quite a difficult home life) had begun to feel a little academic – I wasn’t connecting to the person I had talked about on the page. I realised it wasn’t just the content of the book I had needed to process, but where I was in my life.
