Travel

Sometimes, when I’m in a public bathroom, I like to pretend that it’s a public bathroom – in an airport. It’s not that I love airport bathrooms, but rather that I love airports* for the association they have with being on the brink of something new. They’re a place between realities. The possibility of being in a totally different life-changing situation within a few hours in exchange for a few dollars has a special kind of magical power over me.

I think I inherited my adventurous, nomadic tendencies from my dad, who always prided himself on living simply, making it easy to stay mobile. He had me manoeuvring busy airports before I could read, venturing into the woods on all sorts of camping trips and on a particularly epic road trip all around the western half of the United States. He taught me how to be a confident and adventurous traveller from a young age.

*To be clear, I obviously don’t love all airports, I’m not insane. LAX is probably one of the worst places on earth. 

The public school system did a number on my self-esteem. I never measured up according to their standardized standards, so my confidence in my ability to be successful academically and professionally was extremely low coming out of high school. So the fact that I got into a university and was actually about to graduate felt totally surreal. To end my final year with a bang, I planned to go to Italy on a study abroad program. It would be my first trip overseas, which had always felt like an unattainable dream. So at the beginning of that year my spirits were high, and the future was starting to look bright.

About two months into the first term, in late October, on an ordinary day, my phone rang as I was on my way out the door to apply for a part-time job at a coffee shop. It was a police officer calling to inform me that my father had been found dead in his apartment. He was a healthy guy in his 50s, and he died suddenly in his sleep from a heart attack.

The rest of that year was a blur, and although I did somehow manage to finish school, I definitely didn’t learn anything, other than how to pass a class without retaining any information. Graduating from university should have been the exciting start to a new chapter, but for me, it just felt like an ending. Not only had I lost my father, but then my boyfriend of six years broke my heart and with the end of having school to keep me busy, I felt I no longer had a purpose. Not to mention that graduating with a degree in art didn’t exactly fill me with confidence for a career – confidence having always been in short supply for me to begin with.

But I still had that trip to Italy…

Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t cancel. I was in a very dark place and the thought of venturing off to a foreign country all by myself felt overwhelming to say the least. Coming from a family of modest means, at the time, it seemed like a chance to do something like this might never come around again. So I stuck to the plan, and thanks mostly to the incredible strength, love and sacrifice of my mother, one day I miraculously found myself hauling my suitcase over the ancient cobblestone streets of a little town in Northern Italy. It had all seemed like a wild fantasy, and that a person like me would never be able to travel to places like this, but somehow… there I was.

That trip gave me a new lease on life, as did a big move a few years later, and then another one a few years after that. The feeling of freedom and openness to possibility that comes with hitting the road is intoxicating. Now that I’ve done a bit of travelling and lived in a few different countries, I find that it’s really not that I love to travel to new places, it’s that I love to live in new places. Being a tourist makes me feel like an invasive but essential parasite. But spending time living within a new culture allows me to better see the world through new eyes. Experiencing that every perspective is limited by a unique set of circumstances is an incredible gift. As a result, any snap judgments I might be tempted to make about a person or place are far less likely to stick.