96. It doesn’t matter how it starts, it’s how it ends.
About ROSALÍA + Rauw, me bathing in essential oils, snowboarding and vintage shopping in France.
We’ve been living in France for two months now and our favourite Saturday activity is going to brocantes and vide-greniers which are second-hand markets and car boot sales. C. has a passion for looking through other people’s stuff (junk) and I have a passion for seeing him happy and enjoying things, so it’s an activity we both get joy out of.
Last week we were late arriving at a brocante (my fault, I didn’t want to leave the house by 9 a.m. to go to a second-hand market) and when we got there it was pouring rain (French summer), so we ended up coming across (thank God) a very small two story barn that had been reconverted into a charity shop. Outside there were a few boxes of random kitchen utensils and some old clothes (the grandma-looking type, not cool vintage ones) so we didn’t expect much before entering. The result was like stepping into heaven.
There were things stacked from the floor up to the ceiling and every single centimetre had been utilised and filled with objects. There must have been hundreds of plates, around thirty butter dishes, hundreds of knives and forks, hundreds of cups and mugs… Absolutely anything you could think of was placed in this shop. Now, this was already C’s heaven (I very much enjoyed this shop too, I must admit) but things got even better when the shop assistant told us that each plate we’d chosen to buy cost twenty cents. Yes, you read that correctly, twenty cents. This is when we realised that whatever we saw and liked, we either bought now or forgot about forever.
The result was us spending 12 euros and buying: a pc monitor for my broken Mac, a white crewneck hoodie with a French hotel’s logo on the front, of course, a butter dish and many plates, some fabric to up-cycle a cabinet, a metal shelf, and a magazine rack. We will be going back again.
That evening, C. made dinner and used two of our new plates. We both said how they reminded us of hotel plates because of the colours and pattern. Later, we both realised that they were very similar to the plates we’d been given at the hotel we stayed at in Candanchú (The Pyrenees, Spain) on our last snowboarding trip.
I want to tell you a story about what happened in Candanchú last winter.
C. took me skiing for the first time in 2017 and it was the best day of my life until I dislocated my knee on a slope. Since then, I’ve been very anxious and scared of skiing. Every time I tried it and “gave it another chance” my anxiety took over and I hated it. Seeing as we were living in the north of Spain last winter and had ski slopes close by, we decided to go snowboarding every Wednesday—it was the cheapest day and it wasn’t the same as skiing so I thought I’d be able to handle it better. It went OK, as expected, sometimes even better than expected, but we had very little snow throughout winter. We decided to say goodbye to the season by going to a much bigger ski resort. This is why we went to Candanchú.
I was the one that suggested going and who actively convinced C. that it would be a great experience, our first time in a resort, we’d get to stay in a lovely hotel, blah blah blah.
Neither of us could sleep that night at the hotel because the beds were rock-hard. I'd taken melatonin and magnesium to help me sleep and to hopefully put my anxiety to rest but that didn’t happen, of course. We both woke up at six thirty a.m. and by seven o’clock I was sitting in the bathtub, bathing in essential oils and reading a book trying to calm my nerves before going to the hotel buffet for breakfast.
By nine thirty a.m., we were dressed and fully loaded heading to the ski lift. C. had a paper map in his pocket and took it out on the ski lift to show me where we were going. I bet you can’t guess… We were going to a blue slope at the very top of the mountain. Yep. To the top. I forced a smile as I began to cry on the inside while sat on the ten-minute ski lift to the main part of the mountain, where we’d have to get another very small and very fast ski lift to the top of the mountain where we were going to spend the day.
Around me, I saw the biggest mountains I’d ever seen in my life. In my anxious mind, I was heading to the top of Kilimanjaro to die in an avalanche and never be found. As I got off the chair lift, the man operating it wasn’t happy with me because I couldn’t get off properly and yeah, nobody wants to be that person at a ski resort.
Once we reached the top of the slope, looking at the huge mountains, I felt surrounded by beauty and took a while to realise how magnificent nature is. C. brought me out of that trance by saying that it was time to snowboard into our doom. It was a sunny day and the snow had a thin layer of ice, which was perfect for my first run down, and C. had also made sure to tell me “for my safety” that there was a flat part that I had to approach with speed or else I’d be stuck there and have to walk—exactly what I needed to think about.
Anyway, I survived the run and the flat part by singing to myself and pretending that I was cool and put together. We did this exact run around six times before C. asked me if I wanted to move on to a different slope—I didn’t, no more adventures thank you. I sat in the sun eating a fruit bar while he headed to the black slope called “Quebrantahuesos”, which means “bone crusher”. How fun. He survived with all of his bones intact and I enjoyed sunbathing in the sun. It was a win-win.
My experience at Candanchú was very different from C’s who loved it. I was content, smiling while bricking it 90% of the time and overridden by anxiety, but hey, I did it. I boarded down the blue slopes and I got on the big scary chair lifts (multiple times). Everything was going well, it was flowing, it was an A-OK day until it was time to go home. Was there a chair lift to take me down to the mountain gracefully while taking in the scenery? Of course there wasn’t, that would be too easy. You have to ski or board down and pass through red slopes (red ones are usually steeper and narrower than blues) so you can imagine what was going through my mind. I wanted to jetpack home and forget all about snowboarding until I stopped said to myself “This is the last run, you’re going home, just go crazy.”
I said to C. “Let's play a game: you follow my tracks and do everything I do, if you don’t you lose” and so that’s what we did, taking it in turns. I paved a path of nice big open turns as he challenged me to make sharp turns and go up and down ramps doing little jumps. We had the best time ever and before we knew it, we were at the bottom of the slope with massive smiles on our faces. We had such fun that we did the red run again two more times playing this same game, and every time we think of Candanchú, we think of those last red runs.
The moral of this story is inspired by a sentence in ROSALÍA and Rauw Alejandro’s song called “Promesa”, it says “Da igual cómo empiece, es cómo termina” which translates to “It doesn’t matter how it starts, it’s how it ends” and Candanchú is the perfect representation of that. I started the day off rigid, tense, full of fear, battling with anxiety, trying to control the situation, and having a pretty average level of fun. But that doesn’t matter because the way it ended was amazing and those last three runs were more fun than all of the others combined.
Sometimes we obsess over the idea that it has to be fun and fantastic from the minute we start and in reality, it doesn’t. Just because you start your day off on the wrong foot doesn’t mean that it will end that way too. We can move in and out of fun, boring, relaxed, tense, comfortable or scary situations… and not get stuck in one. It’s healthy to be able to navigate all situations and allow new ones to come when it’s time.
Whenever you’re having a bad day and you get toothpaste on your shirt or you open the fridge and there’s no milk for your coffee, think of my Candanchú story and remember that the next thing that happens might be magical.
