Last Monday, I had just returned from a week in Mumbai where, against all odds, I had managed to relax. My cortisol and shoulders were down and I  wasn’t sleeping like a mangled starfish. 

I was waking up relaxed and had begun entertaining the dangerous possibility that I had finally become one of those calm women with emotionally regulated nervous systems.

Life obviously found this hilarious and within 24 hours of my arrival home, I handed my passport to a courier. Why you ask? Because I had planned a year end fancy vacation yet again and my travel agent told me to do it as he did it all the time and I had nothing to worry. So against all my internal alarms and warnings, I handed my 3 passport booklets and all my financial information to a porter!

He disappeared. Not “delivery delayed.” Disappeared. Phone switched off. Communication stopped. Man gone. Passports gone and with it, my entire identity was in the hands of someone who face I barely noticed when I was handing him my entire existence. 

Suddenly my nervous system whispered, “Welcome home.” And I saw chaos enter my mind and my body like I hadn’t in a while. It felt like I  was being pushed off a 100 floor building every time I closed my eyes and I felt like a 1000 ton weight was put on my head!

What followed were two days that felt less like real life and more like a badly written thriller.

There were clues. Someone had spoken to someone who might know where he was. His company was trying to find him. There would be an update soon. His phone had possibly been switched on.

Every few hours, I  found a little hope. Then nothing.

I became the distraught parent in a kidnapping movie, except instead of my child, the missing family member was 3 small blue booklets and a paper stack containing every important detail about me. I  had a small crew of hardworking friends and family who decided to play detectives and called his number ever few seconds just to make sure we could find a clue.

My imagination moved seamlessly every few hours to “maybe he has had an emergency” to “someone is currently crossing an international border as Neha Thapar.”

My recently lowered cortisol packed its bags and left and every time I got up, I felt like someone had tied me into knots.

Then, two days later on a Wednesday morning just as randomly as he had disappeared, the courier resurfaced and handed my passport back to my travel agent.

That was it. No explanation remotely proportionate to the preceding 48 hours.

Passport returned. Thriller cancelled.

This weekend felt unreal. The crisis is over, but I cant shake the feeling it has left behind.

Somewhere between imagining identity theft and wondering how quickly I could get an emergency passport, I realised something. I love my passport far more than any normal person should love a government document because it isn’t really a document to me, its a  possibility.

It is my ability to throw things into a bag and go, to change countries, scenery, weather, perspective and my reality as I please. It is my freedom to occasionally escape the emotional washing machine in which I seem to spend most of my adult life.

Travel has always done that for me. It interrupts my life just long enough for me to see it differently and perhaps that is why losing my passport frightened me more than I expected.

For 48 hours, it felt like someone hadn’t just taken my identity. They had taken my exit door, my freedom and everything I had built over the last 22 years.

I have it back now, it’s safely tucked away, my cortisol is filing for workers compensation, and life has returned to normal. 

But I’m looking at that little blue booklet differently. Very differently now than ever before.

Apparently freedom and independence can be 30 pages long!

Till later!