Paula Brukmüller - Flowers from Greece - The Autobiography of the Journalist Who Turned a Personal Tragedy into an Inspiring World Tour

I thank myself. Thank you for not giving up, thank you for being strong and fighting so hard for your own happiness. Thank you for allowing yourself to live all these experiences and for having the courage to tell them in a book.

I thank my mother Eleni and my brothers Edilson and Tatiane, who hugged me when it all fell apart and supported me in the insane decision to go on a world tour alone. For cheering for me and loving me unconditionally always, despite the distance.

I thank my father Sergio for accompanying me in spirit.

Michelle, my best friend, who dried my tears and set me in motion.

To Simone, my online coach, for believing in me and for being always ready to put me in the present and help me achieve awareness.

To each person who gave me a roof, a plate of food or a hug during this journey. After going through 24 countries, it is difficult to put all names in a few lines. But I carry each one of you inside the heart.

To my Instagram followers for encouraging my writing and asking me daily for a book of my experiences. Your energy was fundamental.

To my partner Alexandra Vidal and Livr(a) Publisher for helping me make this book real.

Finally, thanks to the man who has been with me for almost 15 years. For the lessons learned, the shared happiness and the courage to let go of my hand and set me free to live it all.

“Flowers from Greece” requires a warning preface: humor will not be used as camouflage in any line of this book. Not a word. Instead of the masterful device invented by Jane Austen and used wisely by women in autobiographies and fictions that hit the “bestseller” lists, Paula Brukmüller takes a deep breath (if by the sea, even better) and strips down, completely and entirely, right in front of the reader.

Paula uses her personal tragedy of successive miscarriages, attempts to get pregnant, and the breakup of a marriage, moving to a city in which she was not born in, as a backhoe excavator. While completing a world tour, alone and with a backpack on her back, she seeks out who she wants to be, but mostly pulls from herself lost pleasures of her own femininity, and turns out to be hedonistic, devout, sensual, suppressed, selfish, friend.

The beginning of this journey is really “a miracle of the unconscious.” Her conversation with her father in Cappadocia is a tenderness. Her stalker in Greece is unbearable. Her 10 years younger lover is a delight. Her drunkenness with two friends in Thailand is wild.

In this nearly 400-day journey through dozens of countries, she doesn’t use filters. Her brave leap of a cliff that defies the blue of the Mediterranean Sea and leaves her with a red butt and a lot of shame. Nude bathing in a secret waterfall in the Chilean desert is liberating, but she also experiences the arid path there.

They are side by side: the filthy red ceramic floor, the cold in Russia, rats, hunger, extravagance, lack of money, visas denied in Oceania, tears, orgasms, insecurities, topless, extortion in Thailand, drunkenness, hangovers, forgotten names in Atacama, breathtaking landscapes.

By facing her vulnerability so organically, Paula risks being admired, hated, and, in a time of judgment as liquid as relationships, condemned. But the decision to expose the journey itself is not a literary resource. It is an atonement, cycle closure, a healing process.

A path that ends up challenging, beyond conventions, the comfort of the reader. Because, as warned earlier, the sense of relief brought by comedy, as Elizabeth Gilbert did, for example, is replaced by pressure. Paula clashes, but only on herself, and turns the reader into a voyeur of the entire process. This is not a sad book, and this “hero’s journey” may even help the reader, but this is not a self-help book either. “Flowers from Greece” may fit better among travel titles. After all, what is proposed here is really a journey (and with tips on how to go around the world with little money but a lot of emotion). I, who had the honor of meeting her in one of the parts of this trip and embarked with her when reviewing this book, I have only to thank for the discomfort, the tears, the joy: here are some “Flowers from Lisbon, Paula!”

The smell of coffee coming from the kitchen brought a message of love and care. It was only 6am and my mom would have left my breakfast ready in the previous night, if my trip had been in different conditions.

I put my most comfortable jeans on and I decided to go makeup free. Before closing my suitcase, I looked at the plastic bag with my wrapped costume on the corner of my bedroom for the last time, together with the other cardboard boxes filled with books, DVDs, photographs and files. Different from what happened every year, I didn’t feel like dressing up for Carnival.

The last place I wanted to be in that holiday was Rio de Janeiro. What I really wanted was a dark bedroom and a sedative strong enough to make me sleep for a whole year. I could even imagine myself waking up after several months and seeing all my problems solved. Someone would be holding my hand smiling and saying “Come this way. Your new life is ready.”

Since there is no magic formula to come back when you’re down in the dumps, I decided to do something different from binging on a TV show and eating tons of calories. By the way, I was incapable of doing even that. I could spend countless days with nothing in my stomach and I would still not feel hungry.

It has been less than a month since I came back to my mother’s house. I could still feel the effects of the emotional tsunami that swept away everything in my life. However, despite the unbearable pain, a stubborn optimism insisted on telling me that everything was happening for a good reason. It was a weak voice that, amid a paralysing fear, I could barely hear. But it was a constant voice: “Hold on, it shall pass. Nothing lasts.”

I returned to the Wonderful City with a funeral face. The boiling sun and a temperature around 40°C was an invitation to the carnival revelers to quench their thirst with warm beer cans mixed with cheap cachaça. [1] Cachaça is the brazilian most famous rum. The spirit is a sort of liquor distilled from fermented sugarcane juice and it’s the strongest alcoholic drink in Brazil. It contains between 38 to 54 percent alcohol by volume.

The costumes were more creative than ever, with humorous political appeals and clever insights of commercial products, but I didn’t see much color at the party. Even so, I enjoyed Carnival with friends, making a supernatural effort to smile.

On the outside, I was rock hard. “It’s life,” I would say to anyone who asked how I was doing. “Every cloud has a silver lining” and even a “thank God” I let go out of my mouth. Inside, however, I shouted the opposite. And when you mix beer with rejection, the result is always bizarre. I swear I didn’t recognize myself.

Hiding behind my sunglasses, I often cried in the middle of the revelry and texted horrible messages on my cell phone. I’m not ashamed neither I regret anything. It was important to exhaust the pain. It is also part of the process.

After the Momo’s [2] Momo also known as Rei Momo (King Momo) is a symbol of the Brazilian Carnival. It’s inspired by a Greek Mythological character that personifies irony. However, in Brazil, the character is adapted to the Carnival festivities as someone who likes Carnival and is preferable overweight. He should be nice, playful, and good-humored. party, I hid myself at a friends’ house in Recreio dos Bandeirantes, [3] Recreio dos Bandeirantes is a noble neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. and then I realized that I was the only person who could help myself.