Georgia on my mind – a story of travel, Tbilisi and my life-changing migraine
Georgia saved me, although it would be some time before I realised what that meant.
flew to Tbilisi in the late summer of 2019, and spent the first month living in a 12-bed dormitory in a hostel that no longer exists near Freedom Square. The heat was glorious and oppressive. I had no plans, except to continue writing a book that I hoped might make sense of a period in my life that had caused abject pain.
Mostly, I spent time at wine bars Gvino Underground or Dadi, writing or trying to write before returning, defeated, to my dorm. At a certain point, I fell in love with an Estonian girl from the hostel who told me about the Lenin statue that had been toppled in 1991 following Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union. Sometimes, we went dancing at Drama Bar or Bassiani. Other times, during those early mornings, we would sit beneath those spectacular, cracking, 19th-century buildings in Sololaki petting street dogs, occasionally watching them chase cars, while we spoke about our lives.
After the relationship (although I am not sure you could call it that) ended, I spent a lot of time walking through the city’s Botanical Gardens and along the ridge toward Mount Mtatsminda. “Tbilisi in dying light is like a fairy tale,” someone said one evening from the lookout, as twilight faded over the Mtkvari river.
I forced a smile, because it was true.
That night, I told myself I was done being heartbroken, and I was done with all the smoking and drinking and partying. Not long after, I rented an exorbitantly priced apartment in the heart of the Old Town and developed something of a routine. Each morning, I ran through the Jewish Quarter up to the fourth-century fortress before passing beneath Mother Georgia and looping back home.
Then I showered, always cold.
I wrote in the afternoons, and later at night. Sometimes, I went to Bathhouse No 5. “You know what your problem is?” a Georgian man told me while lying fully reclined on the sauna floor. “You think too much.”
April 2015: Sydney
Perhaps he was right.
After the publication of my first book, Lion Attack!, I suffered a 10-month migraine that left me unable to read or write or look at anything with a screen.
I suppose the pain had something to do with stress, although, at the time, no doctors could help me, and one afternoon I nearly threw myself in front of a train. It wasn’t that I wanted to die, I just needed the pain to end.
A short time later, I saw someone who manipulated the muscles and nerves in my neck, and while the migraine temporarily retreated, the pain spread to my neck and back, while occasionally — relentlessly — returning to my head. But I needed a job. So, one afternoon, I took two painkillers and googled: ‘No experience. Full-time. Sydney.’
There was a job on the railway as a train guard. I speed-typed an application and sent it in. Miraculously, after five rounds of interviews, I was accepted, and I spent two years travelling in circles around the Sydney rail network, opening and closing doors, making announcements, watching the lives of others while trying to understand my own.
One evening, I ran into the Irish writer John Connell outside a chicken shop in Western Sydney. He was in Australia to promote his memoir, The Cow Book. I congratulated him on its success, and told him I was looking forward to reading it when I could (at that stage, I was still learning how to trust my body again).
He asked if I was working on anything. I pushed forward several paragraphs I’d written between stations on the backs of train diagrams — certain sketches or memories that I suppose were attempting to make sense of that time, but also the funny or interesting or horrific things I had witnessed while working on the train. Like the one about the driver who sometimes pretended he was blind while changing train ends. Or the suicide I witnessed on my first shift.
I told John that I didn’t know whether it would turn into anything, but the important thing was that I was trying. John advised me to send him the manuscript when it was done.
May 2019: Spain
My health was slowly improving. After discovering the work of Dr John Sarno and Dr Howard Schubiner (pioneers in chronic pain and neural pathway medicine), after visits to a psychotherapist and months of journalling and learning how to rewire the neural pathways in my brain, I was healing (or hoping I had healed) from migraines and chronic pain. I quit my job as a train guard and booked a one-way flight to Barcelona, where I planned to start writing what I called then My Migraine Book.
I spent three months in Spain, living in a small room with a balcony and a desk on Carrer Del Carme.
Each morning, I ran to the beach and did push-ups and pull-ups while chatting, occasionally, to the people still awake from the night before. Then I would go to a cafe and write or try to write — but those experiences still seemed, despite my best efforts, untranslatable.
Once or twice, I called my father and completely broke down. I told him there was every chance my life would become a catastrophic failure once more. But my father, my beautiful father, told me we were going to name my doubts Frederic and that we were going to lock Frederic in an invisible room. “F**k Frederic,” he said with such defiant sincerity that I can still hear him now.
A week before I left, I finished the first chapter.
August 2019: Albania
The writing was slow, but at least I could write, and with my time running out in Spain, I booked a cheap flight to Albania. There, I drank with an Australian at a campground bar one evening and we discussed the merits of asking for help. It was an improbable conversation, partly because, as he termed it, we were two boys on the piss, but also because, as he lit a cigarette and exhaled while pointing to himself in the chest, he was an ex-professional rugby player who, until now, had not had to ask for anything.
But, that night, he told me about his injury and how he was seeing a psychologist because his life was in shambles and he had no idea what to do.
To my surprise, I found myself opening up too — talking about the migraine, sure, but also about vulnerability and connection and the uncertainty of literature, about what I was doing with my life, and my sudden and obvious desire to find what you might call a home.
As we said goodnight, Eva Cassidy’s Tall Trees of Georgia began playing over the speaker, and we hugged and told the other that everything would be okay.
“Life is a very bad novelist,” the late Javier Marías writes. “It is chaotic and ludicrous.” That night, in my tent, I listened to that song over and over. I knew Cassidy was singing about Georgia, USA, but it was Georgia, formerly of the Soviet Republic, that kept coming to mind.
Years before, an ex-girlfriend had spoken of the hiking and skiing in the Caucasus Mountains, those unbelievable peaks that run through the heart of the country, and just several days earlier, two backpackers had told me about the techno clubs built into bridge pylons and located beneath sports stadiums in abandoned pools.
A quick Google search revealed that I could travel and work in Georgia for up to one year. Several days later, I flew to Tbilisi to spend the rest of my savings.
October 2019: Tbilisi
Tbilisi was changing, growing colder, and for several months, I tried not to see anyone, preferring instead to write, although one evening I realised I had written myself into a hole.
A few days later, a friend arrived. He suggested I put the book down and join him for a week-long bicycle tour around Georgia. And while it would be easy to talk now about the canyons and rivers and monasteries and mountains, about the nuns who gifted us cheesecake and the 50-strong party who invited us to their family supra while they toasted and celebrated their long-dead father in a remote hall on the Javakheti Plateau; while it is tempting to talk about Georgian beauty and hospitality and kindness, famous throughout the world and all completely true, I think, instead, I will end this piece a different way.
What I hope for in my writing now is what I found on my bike cycling through Georgia on that trip — to stop thinking; let go of outcome and give into process; to focus on pedalling and words while ignoring the steepness of a mountain or the seeming impossibility of a book.
That’s what I mean when I say Georgia saved me.
Standing next to the river beneath Vardzia, that ancient cave monastery, I remembered what it was to feel inconsequential, and the world felt new.
Oliver Mol is the author of ‘Train Lord’ (Penguin Michael Joseph, 2022). He lives in Tbilisi, Georgia, and is the recipient of a Marten Bequest Scholarship for Prose through the Australian Council for the Arts
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