June 16, 2019: I was folded up in an economy airline seat, contorting myself into various unladylike shapes when I resorted to scribbling my thoughts in a notebook, which is how most of my long, rambling blog posts begin.
I’d already partaken in my air travel ritual of an antihistamine with a glass of wine, but this time, it wasn’t doing much to quiet my mind, which was paralyzed in that purgatory between sleep and consciousness. Probably because this wasn’t just another business trip. I had just metaphorically blown up my life and was embarking on the first leg of a journey that I’d haphazardly strung together within the last month.
The plan was: fly to India to stay two weeks with a farming family I’d met on the internet, then, head to Europe and improvise a backpacking trip (and the rest of my life) from there.
Over a few frenzied weeks, I made arrangements. I quit my job. I told my friends and family. I went to the pharmacy and got pumped full of a slew of shots for yellow fever and cholera and hepatitis. I boxed up my apartment and smeared its walls with putty, handed my keys to my landlord, said a sloppy and tearful goodbye to my dear friends in Seattle, and then I got on a plane.
And finally, in that cramped airline seat, hurtling toward an uncertain fate in India, the dust was finally settling. The life I had meticulously curated over the last few years was reduced to a few boxes now sitting at my parents’ house in Portland. And I had no plan of when I’d be back to open them again.
To explain how I got here, I need to go back about a year.
When opportunity knocks
It was January 2018 that I had just moved to Seattle and started a new job writing for a magazine. For as far back as I can remember, this was my dream job. I loved everything about magazines: the aesthetically soothing graphic design, the colorful photos of beautiful people, the feeling of turning a page of that glossy paper as you let one of the short-but-sweet storylines temporarily engross you. I would mouth the names of the faceless writers, whose bylines appeared so importantly under those inky sans-serif headlines, trying to imagine the caliber of person whose words graced the pages of these glossy archives. They were heroes. And I wanted to be one.
But it was a dream so lofty I had dismissed it as impossible years ago. I had a few main reasons.
A. Do they even make magazines anymore?
B. I did not study journalism, communications or literature or anything creative. I studied… business.
C. Also, why should someone like me ever get paid to write above all the other actual, real-deal journalists that are losing their jobs as the era of print disappears before our very eyes?
Suffice it to say, my confidence was a notch or two below Beyonce-level.
So, when I got the call that I got the job, I was literally jumping up and down and screaming like a kid in a YouTube video that has just been told they’re going to Disney Land. I would have hastily accepted a job writing photo captions for children’s outerwear in a Fred Meyer’s catalog, but for whatever reason, this publication gave me a chance, when so many other employers would have slammed the door in my face.
One of my first articles published in the magazine.
That year, I got to experience the fruition of my dreams. I was getting bylines in print. I was being flown out to cover conferences around the world. My colleagues, who were sophisticated, educated fountains of journalistic wisdom, were teaching me how to turn my spasmodic, sophomoric writing into an actual craft. Sure, the subject matter wasn’t the most glamorous – air cargo – but I was just in awe that I was writing for a serious publication with integrity and industry clout.
During that year, I assembled the pieces of a life I thought would make me happy. It was my chance to become the 25-year-old, city slicking, savvy Cosmogirl of lore. I was able to afford living in an apartment with a bedroom (read: not a studio) just a few minutes from downtown. I could get happy hour with friends on weeknights, fill my fridge with organic food and snag an occasional frivolous tube of fancy lipstick if I wanted to without breaking the bank. And the best part was, I was getting paid to write.
So, the couple of friends I told about my abrupt decision to quit my job one random day last March were concerned that I was suffering some kind of mental break. And rightfully so. Why would you throw away such a charmed life? To do what? My reasoning sounded like that of a 16-year-old runaway. I didn’t know what I was going to do, I just knew I didn’t want it to be “this.”
The plight of the millennial
I think a problem starts for many of us in high school or college, when we begin to abandon all the hobbies that don’t serve any career-forwarding purpose. For me, it was YouTube, graphic design, reading sociological analysis lit (i.e. gossip rags) and writing short stories. These interests fell to the wayside in favor of smarter goals, like volunteering for a thing called the Project Management Institute (I have since blocked out this chapter of my life) and collecting certifications in Microsoft Excel. Spoiler alert: this may be a good route to “success,” whatever that word means to you, but it turns out this is not the way to achieve happiness.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying it’s good to throw all responsibility to the wind to become an electively homeless street anarchist (a real classification of human beings in Portland, OR). But there has to be some sort of balance.
Boarding a flight on one of my business trips while I was working for the magazine. Also, a great hair day.
This is the fundamental challenge of being young: striking the balance between making the most of our precious, fleeting youthful years by exploring our passions and interests, while rigidly sticking to our arbitrarily chosen college majors, which we chose we were were 18. This is a task just as ridiculous as it sounds.
For four years of college (five for me, always the runt) – filled with lectures, exams, public speaking, intermittent binge drinking and earnest prayers for a swift death – we soothe ourselves with the concept that there is an endpoint: that someday we’ll be glad we exercised a sense of discipline during our most venturesome years – that all of it’s going to be worth it someday. That you’ll get a job that you like, that you’re good at. And when you finish that job at the end of the day, you’ll tip your hat as you walk out the door and won’t think about work again until morning.
You promise yourself that after graduation, if you ever find a job, you’ll cherish it with every fiber of your being and count your lucky stars every night that you made it through the seemingly endless march of educational milestones to the “finish line.” But it’s kind of a gamble, when you think about it.
What if you do actually reach your goals… but you decide they’re not right for you?
I had become so accustomed to living accomplishment to accomplishment that I’d forgotten to ask myself if the fruit of my efforts were making me happy. When this finally dawned on me, it was like unveiling a bed sore that had been festering, dormant in my subconscious. The truth was, I didn’t like my life. Plain and simple. And I hadn’t for a very long time. I was as passionate about my job as much as I was passionate about my college major. Unfortunately, this did not appear to be the kind of problem that can be remedied with a green smoothie routine.
Sometimes things don’t just fall into place like you think they will, and recognizing that truth and changing your reality doesn’t make you unappreciative. It’s answering a call to action.
Flying the coop
I was suddenly possessed with this strange sense of conviction – a feeling that was so rare to me that I knew I had to listen to it. It told me to cut the cord.
I didn’t want to spend the next few weeks talking myself out of it. I didn’t want to get bogged down by the fear that I may very likely never be able to get a job like this again, or that a future employer might have questions about my short time at a magazine and why I quit with no plan.
I’d always had this fantasy in the back of my mind of traveling the world and freelance writing, but I had only ever dreamed of going for it. I didn’t see myself as brave or capable enough. Maybe now was the time to try.
So, within the same week of my genius epiphany (I am unhappy!), I was sitting at a table in the conference room with my Editor, who listened sympathetically as I told him about my general confusion and my desire to travel that eventually concluded in me giving him my notice.
After I told my coworkers, I felt that dopamine rush of relief and short-lived sense of liberty, but then, the adrenaline set in. This was real. I really had to go through with this now. What the fuck had I done?
I would have to move out of my apartment that I’d just signed a one-year lease on three months prior. I had to tell my parents. I had to say goodbye to my friends. I had to find some freelance gigs to finance this thing. And I had to actually make a plan for the next chapter of my life to follow. My head was spinning.
But with the encouragement of one of my coworkers that I had a special kinship with, I went through the motions. During my last month at the magazine, she gushed about exotic places she had been and would like to go and filled me with encouragement and inspiration. I rode on her energy as I pieced together a haphazard plan of summer travel that started in Southeast Asia ended somewhere in Europe, after which, my life was open ended.
It felt a little bit late do this at 25, which may sound young in the grand scheme of things, but most of my friends had already gotten that reckless travel bug out of their systems before it mattered – you know, before they were already a few years into launching their careers. Before they were thinking about contributing to their 401ks and saving up for down-payments on their starter condos.
It wasn’t really that I was possessed by some sort of wanderlust. I was never that zealous, insatiable traveler you think of that throws caution to the wind in the name of exploration. I just needed a reset, a kick in the ass. A big one. So I started by doing the thing I said I would never do: going to India.
I’m going to give you the TLDR version of this trip because I’ve rambled on long enough, and truthfully, the specific events are really beside the point. But I’ll give some highlights for good measure.
During my two weeks in rural India, I stayed with some generous farmers, drank chai with their neighbors on their kitchen floor and was invited to a be in a wedding, where I was embraced like family. I rode on the back of a moped of a very kind stranger through the streets of Pune in a monsoon. I woke up at dawn in a hotel inside of a cave to watch the hot air balloons in Cappadocia with my friend Sha, which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I worked for a deserted hotel in a remote Greek town, and ditched that scene with a wild ass Irish girl – she knows who she is – to jump on a ferry to a nearby island where we sunbathed for a few days. I drank spritz with a charming fellow in Naples, and then spent a week with him in Berlin. (And actually, he’s sitting next to me right now, five months later.) I stayed alone in a yurt in middle-of-nowhere Switzerland and spent two days wandering around its virginal green hills. And so much else in between.
But most of the two months were spent doing much less interesting things. There was more than one moment spent holding back tears while pathetically listening to true crime podcasts (my comfort genre) on my headphones under a blanket. There were plenty of days where I didn’t want to talk to anyone or be brave and face another crazy day. My introverted self was wildly uncomfortable and daunted. Honestly, through most of the time, I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right, or what this experience was doing for me at all.
It wasn’t until I was walking alone down by the river on quiet August day in Zurich that something clicked. Throughout all of these experiences, I’d still felt somewhat confused — confused about what I was doing and where I was going and what life had in store for me. But at that moment, it was like a fire reigniting inside of my chest – one that I had forgotten I was capable of feeling, that I thought was something I was only able to feel as a child. It was a kind of hope, a warmth, a lightness.
And I started laughing. Laughing, as I strode alone down this fairytale cobblestone path. Crying with laughter. If you’d witnessed this moment, you would have thought I was a homeless girl that had eaten a few too many psychedelic mushrooms – unshowered in the same clothes I’d been wearing for two months, my bare, blemished face on display in the daylight, tears of relief rolling down my cheeks: tears for the precious, simple joy to be going nowhere in particular on a beautiful sunny day.
In college they teach you to be prepared to answer the question “where do you see yourself in five years? In 10?” in a job interview. If you asked me that when I was 15 or 20 years old, I would have a solid answer. Today, I really couldn’t really tell you. I have goals, of course, but for the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan or a “finish line” that I’m working toward. Last year or five years ago, I would be horrified at that answer. But for now, I am no longer waiting for anything. I have been freelance writing since I quit my job, living in a different apartment every few months. I have a lovely new partner and we’re just enjoying being together.
For the first time in my entire life, I don’t know who or where I will be next year or in five years. No clue. I have no fantasy that is always just on the other side of the horizon that I’m squinting at longingly. I am just reveling in the simple pleasure of not knowing, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.