A Decade of Travel and “Failure”
It has taken me 10 years to find my way into and around the world of travel writing, and when I say “find my way…” I mean, find my voice. More than that, to trust it.
It has taken me a decade because I tried to complicate things. I tried to fit into a mold. I also allowed doubt and fear, and insecurity to creep in. I didn’t stop, though. Despite the setbacks, I never let it go - I couldn’t.
10 years ago, I wrote my first blog entry about travel. I published it on an earlier platform, with a different (but also similar) name than Wander to Breathe. Five days later, I wrote and published a second blog post. Then, I stopped.
While I didn’t stop writing completely, I did stop sharing. I returned to keeping my words tucked safely away on an emotionless white screen or furiously scribbled on the pages of my journal, sometimes almost illegible depending on the feelings that poured out. I didn’t share what I wrote, though. I didn’t publish it on the blog I had been so excited about launching when I set out on my trip to Thailand, because twenty days after I posted that second entry I was on a flight back across the world - with only one of the two suitcases I had originally left with and feelings of failure to carry me home.
While my family and friends happily welcomed me home when I returned a month early, it was difficult for me to navigate my feelings about leaving my trip early. Even though I was happy to be out of Thailand - when I had set out on that adventure, I thought that if anything changed with my travel plans, it would be me staying longer and maybe wouldn’t even return for school that fall.
, rest of summer during that second month where I was supposed to still be in Thailand, I typed away at the Starbucks down the street from my mom’s — wondering if I was really a wanderer.
The rest of that summer was filled with moments of doubt about who I was and who I wanted to be. The more I wondered, the more I questioned, and eventually, the more I realized that travel isn’t always about the beautiful destinations or the possibility of adventures. These are the things that get you on the plane or in the car, but they aren’t what make you a wanderer.
The wandering comes during the moments in between the joy, the laughter, and the sunsets. It comes in the moments of your doubts, your tears, and your “failures.”
So, while #mythaisummer didn’t immediately lead me out of my classroom in Utah and into a dreamy world of travel and writing, it did lead me in the direction I needed to go, albeit slowly and (if I’m being completely honest), a bit inconsistently.
May 31, 2015
Last night on my flight, the girl next to me said to her friend, “I would Love to be a high school English Teacher!” Just like that, complete exclamation mark and emphasis on LOVE! I didn’t want to creep too much, so I didn’t lean over and say “are you sure?” but I did have a small chuckle with myself because I never really think of anyone saying they would LOVE to have my job. Let’s be honest — there are times I don’t love my job — and quite a few times I wonder “how did I get here?”
My career in education was never a journey I intended, however, I do believe my time in education was intended for me. If you asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I “grew-up” I never would have been that girl saying she would “love to be an English teacher,” but as my mom says, “never say never”. As a kid, my ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up were usually formed around whatever ’80s movie or ’90s TV show I had come across at the time: including pilot and bartender at one point thanks to Tom Cruise classics, as well as a short lived idea of doctor thanks to “ER” (looking back, I think all my choices were attached more to the possibility of attractive men in the profession rather than any real interest in planes & medicine).
When I got to college though I knew one thing — I wanted to travel. I always had a desire to travel, and at 18, it seemed about the best idea possible of something to form a career around, so I declared my major Hospitality & Tourism management. Well, little did I know that Hospitality & Tourism Management deals a lot more with the management aspect
(like accounting and economics) and much less with the tourism part. Not to say I didn’t try to make it more of what I wanted — I planned some very detailed month long trips across Europe during accounting & econ lectures (note to professors: don’t have boring classes in a computer lab). Well, I lasted an entire year before deciding that if I had any hope of graduating with something higher than a 2.0 GPA, I needed to dump my major. So I switched to English Literature because, next to traveling, stories, life lessons, and the joy of getting lost in a book made sense to me.
It has been almost 15 years since I made that switch to English, and it has led me to great places. Since that time I have been back to graduate school twice, taught in 3 very different and unique schools, and laughed & cried in equal parts about these experiences. In this moment though — as I am literally flying over the top of the world — all the pieces of what I “know” about who I am and what I want are coming together. Travel, literature & writing — and now teaching — have somehow all found a way to fit together in my life.
There is no plan of how I got here — how everything is finally fitting together — because if you had asked me to give you a plan, it would never have looked like this. I wasn’t the girl sitting next to me last night who would “Love to be an English teacher!” I was a girl at 18 years old who knew she was a wanderer. A girl at 19 who remembered she loved being a reader & a writer. The girl who, somewhere between 25 and 30, realized she was an educator (and would eventually need to find a secret profitable career to fund her addiction to also being a student for life). There wasn’t a plan — there were ideas. Ideas that I just kept believing in — even when they didn’t make sense.
The pieces of a journey don’t always have to make sense in the moment, because sometimes they are still waiting on another piece.
At 32, I’m the girl who gets to put the nonsense pieces of her journey together. I get to wander, read, write, teach, learn. It’s the end of many individual journeys and the beginning of one new one.
So, as you wonder about where your journey may be going — just keep moving towards the ideas that you believe in. Keep working on the things that make sense in your soul, knowing that while the pieces may seem like a bunch of nonsense right now, in time they may make complete sense.