We Finished It
Part four of a four part series.
There is a moment I want to tell you about.
After days of steep climbs and rain and mud and shared rooms and sore everything, after the anxiety of returning to a trail that had taken something from me, after walking past the spot where I fell and feeling something shift loose inside me, we finished the route.
We walked the last mile of the section of the Camino Primitivo we had missed two years earlier. We reached the end of it.
And I stood there, and I felt something I want to try to describe accurately, because I think what it actually felt like is more useful than the version that sounds better.
What Completion Actually Felt Like
I had imagined, in the abstract way we sometimes do, that finishing would feel triumphant. A movie moment. Big emotion, clear catharsis, a tidy bow.
It was quieter than that.
What I actually felt was settled. Like something that had been slightly out of alignment for two years had quietly clicked back into place. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just right.
And underneath the settledness was something else: genuine pride. Not the performed kind. The quiet kind that doesn't need an audience. The kind that comes from knowing what it cost you to get somewhere and knowing that you got there anyway.
I am so proud of us. I want to say that simply, without hedging it or contextualizing it away. We went back, and we finished what we started, and I am proud.
Completion doesn't erase the hard parts of a journey. It doesn't undo the loss or the difficulty or the moments when you weren't sure you'd make it. It just adds something new to the story. A different ending than the one that was written for you.
What Two Tries and Two Years Taught Me
I have been a speaker and coach long enough to know that the lessons we teach are often the lessons we most need to learn ourselves. And the Camino. both trips, handed me a living experience of things I say on stage all the time.
That resilience is not about bouncing back. It is about moving forward, into something different, carrying what happened with you but not being stopped by it.
That finishing is not always linear. Sometimes it takes two attempts. Sometimes it takes two years. Sometimes the version that actually gets finished looks different from the version you originally planned. That doesn't make it less real or less yours.
That fear is information, not instruction. I was nervous to go back. My body remembered the trail in ways my mind had processed and moved beyond. And I went anyway, because I had decided that what was on the other side of the fear was more important than the comfort of avoiding it.
That you cannot skip the hard parts. The rain and the sore legs and the sleepless nights in crowded albergues were not obstacles to the experience. They were the experience. And tending to yourself through hard things, resting when you need to, asking for help, not pretending you're fine when you're not, is not weakness. It is what gets you to the end.
For Anyone With Something Unfinished
I want to close this series by speaking directly to anyone reading this who has something unfinished sitting in the back of their mind.
Something you started and had to stop before you were ready. Something that circumstances interrupted. Something you walked away from and haven't been able to walk back to yet, whether because of fear or timing or not knowing if it still matters.
I want you to know that unfinished things do not have an expiration date.
You can go back. Two years later, ten years later. When you have more life lived and more understanding of what you were carrying and more clarity about why it matters. You can go back with a different body, a different season, a different plan.
Finishing does not require it to be easy. It does not require it to be clean or dramatic or triumphant. It just requires that you decide it isn't over yet.
The Camino has a phrase: Buen Camino. Good journey. Not easy. Not fast. Not perfect. Good.
I hope whatever trail you are on, it is a good one.
And if you have a section you haven't finished yet, I hope you find your way back to it.
If this series resonated with you, I'd love to hear what it brought up. You can reach me at melissa@melissapickle.com, or find me on LinkedIn and Facebook. And if you know someone who is navigating their own hard trail right now, feel free to share.