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This is part of Traveling in Our Bodies, a four-part series that reflects on how women's bodies influence their movement through the world.
I was walking along a rocky beach in Northern Norway when I suddenly fell. The summer was unseasonably warm—a distinct lack of snow and ice on the looming glacier before me—and, overheating, I was wrestling to take my sweater off when a stack of unsteady stones gave way beneath me. I hit the ground, laughed, and only spent a moment taking in the short-lived pain in my right hip. Then a deeper realization hit: This was the first time I had felt inhibited by my own body in days. That's because, the month prior, I spent an entire night sweating and twitching in pain on the floor of a bathroom in Beacon, New York.
My partner and I were spending a weekend away from our home in Brooklyn to antique, have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants (Quinn’s, don’t miss it), and enjoy more than a couple of hours playing the Jurassic Park game at the Happy Valley barcade. After nodding off for 30 minutes on our second night, I shot up in bed; the culmination of 20 years of intense pain searing through me. Waves of contractions, only minutes apart, rolled over my entire body. A nasty little symptom casually known as “lightning crotch” made it impossible to walk. I crawled to the bathroom. After years of this spontaneous pain with no clear diagnosis, the only thing to do when it happens is to cocoon into myself, count my breaths for hours, and dig my nails into my palms. But that night marked the first time I openly wondered if some unnamed thing inside of my body was going to kill me.
And then, the thought I feel privileged to admit came next: “How am I supposed to spend a week on a remote island in Northern Norway?”
According to the World Health Oganization, roughly 10 percent of those with female reproductive organs experience endometriosis worldwide. It's not uncommon for people to live undiagnosed, never having a name for these symptoms. The condition means that your uterine cells grow outside of the uterus causing tissue build-up and scarring—and a lot of pain—and there is no cure. After that flare up, I finally found a doctor who agreed with me that my symptoms weren’t “just gas” as many other physicians had suggested, and I didn’t need to lose any weight (by far the most common prescription I've received), diagnosing me based on what I was feeling and my family history. It’s worth noting that this chronic condition is never fully confirmed until a person has undergone exploratory surgery—a procedure that insurance companies don’t often cover, leaving lots of room for major issues to slip by unseen.
Hearing a professional assure me that I wasn’t imagining the extent of my pain felt like a dam busting open. I sobbed, both in relief and for the future pain I would likely have to learn to manage. I was told that if this diagnosis was correct, it could be incredibly hard to have children. Being pregnant was never seriously on my mind, but the feeling of having that snatched away from me tore something up in my heart that I didn’t know existed. In the more immediate sense, though, it had me worried about my impending trip. After months of planning, I was set to travel more than 3,700 miles away to attend a week-long writing residency in Arnøya, Norway—a tiny, isolated island above the Arctic Circle that’s home to Singla, a communal creative space overlooking the North Sea.
Taking this trip was important to me. Being far from my own daily life living on a busy street in Brooklyn is core to not only my creative process as a writer, but my overall mental health. I’m a Midwestern girl at heart; I need the space for quiet, I need fresh air, and I need the physical disconnect from my professional life. Arnøya offered this and more: sea swims to make up for the house’s lack of a shower, daily hikes around the island, and family-style dinners each night. Now, though, my eyes continued to gravitate to one line: “The island does not have a medical facility, and any serious emergencies require helicopter or boat/ambulance assistance.” More often than not lately, I had been tempted to hightail it to an emergency room during a flare-up. I felt a deep sense of doubt.
For immediate treatment, my doctor suggested having my hormonal IUD swapped as I was coming up on year seven of its suggested eight-year lifespan, and can be effective in easing endometriosis symptoms. But complications can arise from that procedure and it’s also incredibly painful. So I decided to have faith in my own coping mechanisms and make an appointment for a removal and reinsertion for when I returned. A few weeks later, I set off for Norway.
The first leg of my journey was an overnight flight to Paris—smack-dab in the middle of the Olympic Games—followed by an early-morning route to Tromsø, where I spent an evening before hopping on a ferry north. The morning boat ride that followed was a dream, cutting through channels buttressed by fjords, whales occasionally emerging from the deep. It was there that I encountered some of my fellow travelers also on their way to the retreat. As we asked each other getting-to-know-you questions, the wind on the outdoor top deck threw our hair into sinewy halos. I tried to find ways to mention my endometriosis, as a way to somehow prepare them for my pain and shield myself from future social discomfort, but it didn’t feel right.
Our home for the week was a collection of weather-aged buildings—the main house, a boathouse with a mural of colorful shapes facing the road, a petite sauna that long ago served as dynamite storage, a lighthouse and an accompanying maintenance shed, and a light-filled blue barn. The latter was where we opened each day with a creative prompt. We were encouraged to simply play—with found materials and ink, paint, pencils, cyanotype photography, and writing. I conjured up short story ideas and fell in love with painting watercolor volcanoes. Something about the uncertain flow of rocks and magma gave me permission to let go; I forgot about perfection and revisited a geological wonder I had obsessed over as a kid.
When we weren’t in the barn we were in nature, hiking in t-shirts and stripping down to our swimsuits for dips in freshwater lakes. We rode bikes, which had been stored in the basement of the barn, to swimming holes. This was summer in Northern Norway, and we fell into its rhythm. My roommate for the week, a beam of sunshine and a talented artist from the Netherlands, made me laugh before we even left the room every morning. I shared a heart-to-heart on a hike with another attendee who was battling some of the same career questions I had once struggled with. I still light up every time I see a message from her, checking in on a creative project or sharing updates on the home studio she’s creating. And I felt inspired by an artist named Maria, who blew my mind with her watercolors and calligraphy, and her plans to visit every single national park in the United States. When it came to my own story, well, before long most of the group knew about my endometriosis—a fact that some of my closest friends back home still weren’t aware of.
The familiar cramps came knocking on the last night—and that’s when the dots connected. For six days, I hadn’t checked my email, spoken to anyone from home aside from my partner, or spent any significant time planted in front of a screen. It was the first time in my adulthood that I shifted my responsibility from working for others to doing whatever I wanted. I was, in other words, entirely in the present—and my body seemed to feel that sense of release. Once the stressors of life back home crept in, so did the pain, like a bully knocking over my block castle as I started to plan my re-entry into daily life. Even as I stood beneath the property’s red lighthouse or woke from a nap as the ferries passed by, I knew I was starting to lose the feeling of being in this magical place, where we made art in our light-filled barn.
There are some trips where you can't help but count down the days to coming home, either in anticipation of sleeping in your own bed or grieving the impending end of a great trip. I had felt neither of these pulls—I was living in many moments, strung together like the birch-bark necklace I made to wear during our last dinner (the result of a prompt to “wear something you made from found items”).
Taking myself far away from the crush of everyday life allowed me to see how much stress was attacking me physically. For five consecutive days each morning, I stood up and stretched my body next to my twin-sized bed without worrying about triggering cramps. I lost track of time writing in a custom journal (made by a friend, and stamped with “Erika Is Not Available” on the spine) and painting for hours. I allowed someone else to keep the schedule, which flowed gently with breaks for fika and dinner. I hiked at the front of the pack without worrying that I couldn’t make it to our destination. I laid in the grass at some point every afternoon, feeling the breeze passing over me—something I haven’t experienced since I was a kid—without anticipating the next wave of discomfort. I felt whole and connected, far away from the fear that had almost prevented me from traveling to Norway in the first place.
While I haven’t had a repeat of my night in Beacon, I know what my body is capable of—and I still feel some form of discomfort every day. When I start to feel the warning aches coming on, I think of the crystal-clear glacial lake we walked to on the second day of our stay. Reindeer darted across the mountain valley, berries dotted the trail, and our voices echoed as we huffed toward the body of water, anchored by a small island in the center. We swam, and Anna, an artist and one of the facilitators, tempted us back on land with homemade cardamom buns. We ate sitting on tufts of wiry grass that left etchings on the uncovered parts of our butts and legs. Some of us talked with each other, a few people sketched, but I just listened. A steady breeze, the ice-cold water hitting the rocky shore, and the voices of new friends really far from home. This is medicine for me.
