Travel as Transition

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

The big changes in my life have always begun with travel. Before my parents divorced when I was eight, we went to England for the first time and my love affair with the country began in earnest. Although, the reason we went to England and not someplace else was because I had already fallen for it – you tell a seven year old that there is a country that still has princes, princesses and castles, and instant infatuation will follow. That infatuation, whether or not due to the early influences of Disney, has stayed with me.

Which is why, before starting college at UCLA, I returned by myself for a two week tour of England and Scotland with around twenty other twenty-somethings. That would be Big Life Change number two, if you’re counting. Before I graduated UCLA, I returned to London to study Blake for a month. And after I graduated, I headed to Tokyo to visit two of my old college roommates. Those two trips were the harbingers of Big Change Number Three – graduating college and finding myself completely out of ideas for what I wanted to do with my life.

After nearly a year of constant nightmares, constant fighting with my boyfriend, constant self-doubt, constant job-searching and cover letter writing, a 3-month teaching job and a 3 month temp job--I landed an internship with Peter Greenberg’s production company. He is NBC’s Travel Editor, and something of a big cheese in the world of travel journalism. 

Long story short, I loved writing. About travel, about food, about people – all writing comes down to people really, otherwise all you have is a menu or brochure. Then I was offered a fat paycheck working for the City and spent the following two years trying to comfort myself with shopping sprees at Banana Republic. According to my horoscope for 2010, that was predestined:

Year 2010 Overview

Whew! Feel that enormous burden sliding off of your shoulders, like you've been carrying around an overstuffed backpack for the last couple of years? That would be Saturn, planet of structures and limitation, moving out of your sign. Congratulations, first of all, on having simply made it through more or less in one piece. You passed through the fire and made it out the other side.

And then – a month after quitting my day job – I traveled all the way around the world, from California to Oxford, to India, to Japan, and back to California. The full loop. Which is why I haven’t posted anything on this blog in a while. I’ve been in the process of figuring out what this trip has meant for me, because traveling around the world impacts more than just one’s sleep cycle. Part of that processing is transcribing my travel journal on my other blog: AnglophileinLA.

What I think it comes down to is this: I don’t feel lost anymore. I am happier with myself and my life than I have ever been – and most of that confidence was gained in India. I don’t want to write it all down now, because that’s what my other blog is for, but obviously there will be crossover. There I want to record what happened; here I want to record what I gained from it. I want to try and articulate the little changes I’ve seen in myself.

For now though, I have a lot of writing work to do. Writing for a living is finally starting to pay for itself now that the Christmas expenses are out of the way. But it keeps me busy and personal blogs get bumped down the To Do List.