Between January 2014 and July 2015 I saved up to travel the world. After 18 months, I’d accrued $10,000. Then in August 2015, I sank every last dollar into a condo in Minneapolis.
In reality, I bought that condo so that I can travel the world.
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Three months before 9/11, I left Minneapolis to attend West Point and, later, join the military. For the next nine years I bounced around — living in Afghanistan and in five American cities. When I left the Army in 2010, I was so used to life on the road that I couldn’t contemplate a return to Minneapolis. So I continued bouncing around for three more years, traveling to 19 countries in 2011 and then completing an MFA in Creative Writing in Roanoke, Virginia.
While in Roanoke, I wrote a few dozen essays. It was therapy, the best therapy I could have asked for. It helped me process my turbulent 20s and heal from my Army PTSD. While writing, I recognized that all of my essays dealt with travel in some way, shape, or form — and that some of my impetus for this travel was “escapism,” a desire to run away from my mother’s severe and persistent mental illness which had reared its head when I was in high school.
Despite these elements of “escapism” in my travel, I’d legitimately learned to love it along the way, and I believe the experiences it gave me – hitching a ride on a motorcycle to a palace in Udaipur, witnessing extreme poverty on the way to a palm reading in Varanasi, trekking through a cemetery of Bosnian War victims in Sarajevo, getting food poisoning in Marrakech — made me a better person.
After Roanoke, I knew I wanted to travel again, but I believed that if I could first move back to Minneapolis and learn to love it as an adult then at least when I left again I could say that my reasons for travel were “legitimate” (i.e., I was curious about people and places versus succumbing to “escapism”).
Moving back to Minneapolis was brutal. My first winter, I contracted bronchitis and was bedridden for days. Afterward, even though most of my immediate and extended family live here — and even though I fell in love with new places and people here — I could barely bring myself to call Minneapolis “home” for two years, to hang pictures on my apartment walls.
The rest of the world was beckoning, and I fantasized daily about when I’d have enough money to hit the road again.
But while I saved up (a process that was sometimes so slow as to feel torturous), I realized that I could travel without leaving my hometown, that we all can. I met people in Minneapolis who were experiencing mental illness, chemical dependency, and homelessness. I met immigrants and people doing humbling humanitarian work.
The lives of the people I met were often so different from my own as to feel fascinating, foreign; during and after I wrote about them, I felt as though I’d travelled thousands of miles. And that’s when I understood that travel isn’t so much a matter of traversing miles as it is mindset, a willingness to be curious, to get outside your comfort zone.
While traveling in 2011, I’d learned one of my biggest life lessons: that there are no rules to the game of life. That lesson came from meeting a multitude of unconventional people — unmarried people, child-free people, people who’d quit their jobs and sold their possessions, people who were carrying every possession they owned on their back.
You don’t have to get married, I learned, or have children, or buy a home, or become a doctor, lawyer, or investment banker. It sounds so simple, but it was groundbreaking to me — a woman who’d all her life been told (by parents, lovers, relatives, friends, the media) that you had to do A, B, C, D, and E (and in that particular sequence) in order to be happy. I can’t imagine how even more groundbreaking this idea would have been to me had it been 1911 or 1961. I’m privileged to live in an era, in a country, where, as a woman, I can experience so many kinds of existences.
In 2015, in Minneapolis, I discovered a second layer to the “there are no rules to the game of life” lesson. I’ll call it the “just because you do this doesn’t mean you have to do this the conventional way” layer. I realized that not only can you choose not to do A, B, C, D, and E, you can also choose to do A, B, C, D, and E, and to do them differently than most everyone else.
For instance, while I’ve established that I may like to get married one day, I now realize that the conventional model of marriage (living in the same house, remaining in the same city, having children) is probably not amenable to me. I’m an incredibly independent, rather introverted artist, and I need hours alone to write and read and ponder. Perhaps I’ll find a man who’s OK with that — with living in a different home than me, or in another half of a duplex, or in a home with two wings. And perhaps that man will also be accepting of my realization that, even though children are adorable (and I think I will make an amazing aunt), that I believe that having my own children would probably take away from my writing and reading and pondering too much — so much that I would no longer be my best, most authentic self. Some people might call that “selfish.” I think it’s just “self-aware.”
There’s a third layer on top of the “just because you do this doesn’t mean you have to do this the conventional way” layer. The third layer is this: “if you do this you can also do that … and if you do that you can also do this.”
For instance, I’d believed that if you owned a home, then you couldn’t be a die-hard traveler. And, alternatively, I’d believed that if you were a die-hard traveler, then you couldn’t own a home. Again, it may be easy to see, with time and age and confidence, that this is a misguided belief but, again, I’d been fed this message so many times by parents, lovers, relatives, friends, and the media that it was practically engrained in my psyche. But this summer, I decided I wanted to be a die-hard traveler with a home … or a homeowner who is also a die-hard traveler; I wanted to prove to myself that these paradoxes are both possible.
So I now embark on my next adventure: to be anchored to a place by a home — even while I discover “home” all over the world.