Posts Tagged ‘life’

In the past twelve hours, I’ve booked two flight itin­er­aries for six dif­ferent flights to be taken in the next three weeks. In December and January, I’ll have vis­ited around eleven dif­ferent cities (pos­sibly more), in five dif­ferent coun­tries, on two dif­ferent con­tin­ents. In Feb­ruary, I’ll be adding even more coun­tries and cities to my list. By the time I return to Canada in the summer, I’ll have lived in seven dif­ferent coun­tries in four continents.

I am, without ques­tion, a vagabond.

Booking a flight can make my heart race. The feeling of landing in a strange city, lost and con­fused, gives me great pleasure. I actu­ally get a huge rush of endorphins, like a high, at the exact moment that I feel an air­plane leave the ground. I am hap­piest, and most sure of myself, walking through a for­eign place and watching everything around me. If I stay in one place for longer than a few weeks, I begin to get intense wanderlust.

It struck me the other day that what I’m doing is not exactly normal. Most people don’t take off from their homes for long stretches of time, and those who do most often travel in a way that’s markedly dif­ferent from mine. When I meet new people, I often get thrown by their ques­tions: yes, I’m trav­el­ling, sort of. But I’m still working. And I live in the coun­tries I travel to. No, I prob­ably haven’t seen that famous monu­ment, and I quite likely don’t care much to, either.

This is actu­ally the only pho­to­graph I have taken in San Fran­cisco, and it’s tech­nic­ally in Moun­tain View. Still, I find it more inter­esting than a snap­shot of a monu­ment that’s already been pho­to­graphed a mil­lion times over, by people expo­nen­tially more skilled than I (and likely wielding better cam­eras than the one in their phone).

I went to San Fran­cisco last week, but I didn’t see Alc­a­traz or the Golden Gate Bridge. I went to México City prior to that, but didn’t bother with the pyr­amids. While I recog­nize that some things are tourist traps with good reason, the more I travel, the less interest I have in these things. Part of this is because they’re often crawling with tour­ists, espe­cially in Europe, but another part of it is that vis­iting often feels empty. Sure, they’re beau­tiful or breath­taking or inter­esting, but I’ve invari­ably seen them already in movies and pho­to­graphs. The crowd of tour­ists mind­lessly snap­ping pho­to­graphs of these much-photographed monu­ments, as though checking off items from a scav­enger hunt, only exacer­bates this emptiness.

I don’t want to see the world through a lens. I want to taste, smell, and feel it as well. That’s why I’m trav­el­ling instead of watching a doc­u­mentary or zooming through Google Street View. I want to exper­i­ence and interact with the world around me.

The true journey, as the inter­jec­tion of an “out­side” dif­ferent from our normal one, implies a com­plete change of nutri­tion, a digesting of the vis­ited country– its fauna and flora and its cul­ture (not only the dif­ferent culinary prac­tices and con­di­ments but the dif­ferent imple­ments used to grind the flour or stir the pot) — making it pass between the lips and down the eso­phagus. This is the only kind of travel that has a meaning nowadays, when everything vis­ible you can see on tele­vi­sion without rising from your easy chair.

The incom­par­able Italo Calvino, “Under the Jaguar Sun”
(About travels in Mexico! Must find prior to leaving.)

I’ve always been prone to making up my own rules. While I tech­nic­ally wrote some­thing of a busi­ness plan (in about two hours, at four in the morning, off the top of my head), I didn’t do most of the things you’re sup­posed to do when run­ning a busi­ness. Hon­estly, some­times I wonder how I ever made it work, and how it con­tinues to work for me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t really do much of any­thing in the tra­di­tional way—my work, my edu­ca­tion, my rela­tion­ships, my pas­times, and my travels are all plotted out according to a set of rules that exists solely in my own head.

Ser­i­ously, I live here. This is not always what comes to mind when people think “Mexico”. I like it for its dirty parts as much as for its pretty parts.

Somehow, though, it all works. I become more and more delighted with my life as I veer fur­ther and fur­ther from the orthodox.

I’ve noticed that some­times people don’t under­stand this. I received a birthday card one year that said “Don’t worry, you’ll find your place and settle down even­tu­ally,” and it took me a while to stop being offended by the implic­a­tion that I’m unhappy because I haven’t roped down a man, staked out my plot in the woods, and started pro­du­cing chil­dren yet. While I know that many people are happy with this sort of pre­scribed life, I know I’m not one of them (or at least, I’m not yet, but I sin­cerely doubt I’ll ever be). It frus­trates me that some­times that means people will see me as a failure, because I’m choosing to do things in such an unusual manner. I abso­lutely love my life, and not everyone who “has it all” would say that. Some of the coolest, best-adjusted people I know are weirdos like me.

So buck with tra­di­tion. Drop out of school, live out of your car, take six dif­ferent wives. Don’t break the rules solely for the sake of breaking them, but don’t allow them to fence you into a life you didn’t choose. The world is full of people who are stuck by cir­cum­stance, but as a cit­izen of an affluent country, you have such a myriad of options open to you. Don’t follow the status quo just because it’s what we’re trained to do.

I want a world full of free-spirits and vagabonds.

From a dentist’s window in Ensenada. I’m not sure if this is con­sidered an unorthodox mar­keting tactic in Mexico or not, but for the pur­poses of this post, I’ll choose to believe that it is.

A little more than a month into my Grand World Tour, and I’m still utterly thrilled by it. My sense of time is all skewed—it feels as though I’ve been away from my “home” and the people I love so much longer, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve been living in México for a month. I’ve been absorbing, learning, and chan­ging so much, and I don’t think I have, for even a single moment, yet regretted my decision to under­take this grand venture.

It’s pretty intense what I’m doing, and I often find myself overly emotional—not in a neg­ative or pos­itive way really, but I think it’s my way of pro­cessing the gen­eral instability of this way of life. Everything around me is either con­stantly in flux or con­stantly unfa­miliar, and it would be easy to become unbal­anced by it.

One month in, here are my tricks for staying sane. Nine months (and two or three more con­tin­ents) in, I’m checking back with this, to see how much of it stays the same.

1. Realize that some­times a day will be a wash.

Some days, you’ll be sick. Some days, you’ll be tired and jet­lagged. Some days, you’ll be mel­an­choly and home­sick. I struggled with this with my recent trip to México City—I was only there for eight days, and I wanted to absorb as much of the city as I pos­sibly could. It’s fas­cin­ating, chaotic, and a chal­lenge to com­pre­hend, and I cas­tig­ated myself for being asleep or working at ten am. I should have been out exploring! Then I real­ized that run­ning myself down just doesn’t work long-term. I’m not on hol­iday for a week, I’m living my life in a for­eign place. Not every day will be pro­ductive work-wise, and not every day will be rev­el­atory travel-wise. Some days will be neither. That’s okay.

Some days, you get totally lost for hours, because all the streets in Mexico City go in circles and have six dif­ferent names. But then you acci­dent­ally bump into beau­tiful old build­ings covered in graf­fiti, and everything works out.

2. Stay in touch.

My biggest fear is loneli­ness. This is my first time trav­el­ling for more than five weeks by myself, and I know that I’ll miss the social struc­tures, and the people I care about, more than any­thing. Luckily, the internet is a magical thing, and it affords me roughly a thou­sand dif­ferent ways to keep in con­tact with people. So I use Face­book and Twitter more than I would nor­mally. I send texts to my litttle sister via What­sApp. I send emails and make phone calls. I had a Skype date with my room­mate, in which we both drank wine, talked, and made faces at one another for two hours. I send stories written on the back of post­cards. Keeping in touch with the people who made my “stable” life so rewarding (and in fact were pretty much the reason I stayed in Hal­ifax as long as I did between trips) goes a long way to keeping me sane and bridging the old life with the new. When everything around you changes, you change immeas­ur­ably too. Keeping grips on your alternate self helps you realize the things that remain con­stant and true throughout, and help you to be more assured of who you are, even when some­times it feels as though everything’s been torn out from under you.

3. Make new friends.

While it’s important to stay in touch, if I didn’t make new friends, I’d be hor­rific­ally lonely and home­sick. This was the biggest mis­take I made in Argen­tina, when I wasn’t trav­el­ling alone, and it con­trib­uted greatly to the deteri­or­a­tion of my rela­tion­ship with my travel com­panion, as well as my own sense of self.

I didn’t make friends with a baby jaguar, but I really wish I had.

I tend towards being a hermit. I’m a bit of a mis­an­thrope to begin with, and I work by myself all day, so it’s easy to spend a day in which I don’t talk to anyone. So I’ve act­ively been working against that, knowing that while yes, some­times I just need time and space away from humans, but more often it’s healthy for me to meet new people and make new con­nec­tions. I live with a room­mate, I couch­surf a lot again, and I make it a rule to gen­er­ally say “yes” when someone asks if I want to go out. As a result, I’ve met a ton of awe­some, intel­li­gent, varied people, and I’ve learned more about the cul­ture and hidden under­cur­rents of this country than I ever would have if I’d isol­ated myself. Sure, some­times I end up stuck at a party where everyone’s speaking Spanish and I feel lost and uncom­fort­able, but most of the time I find myself having a great time, making new friends, and learning new things. As far as I’m con­cerned, that’s a more valu­able part of travel than seeing pyramids.

4. Focus on the little things.

I find, the more I travel, the less I care for typ­ical touristy things. Sure, lots of these things are famous attrac­tions for a reason, but I no longer beat myself up if I miss one or two (or six­teen, depending on the place). Usu­ally, the guide­book attrac­tions are swarming with people (this becomes espe­cially true in Europe), and, while impressive, can feel like a one-hit-wonder. It’s nice to see, but then it’s over. I’ve seen so many tour­ists storm through an attrac­tion, taking photos every two seconds, not stop­ping to con­sider any­thing or even look at the thing they’re pho­to­graphing so enthu­si­ast­ic­ally. (Watch people in the Vat­ican if you don’t believe me.) It feels empty.

Really gor­geous graf­fiti in Colonia Roma. As much as I like museums and such, I think out­door art install­a­tions (whether “legal” or not) are far more inter­esting. Art should be con­tex­tual and integ­rated into daily life. México City is full of great museums, but I liked the series of coffee cups installed out­side the museum better.

I’m finding more value in taking a six-hour walk through a city, get­ting lost and finding inter­esting signs, build­ings, or things hap­pening. I’ve dis­covered that I love urban parks of all shapes and sizes and beau­tiful, multi-level book­stores (I’ve been to #4 and #6!). I really enjoy finding a per­fect little café to work away my day in. Long-term travel isn’t so much about the awe-inspiring or the impressive as it is about the everyday.

5. Remain flexible.

This is, above all, my most important rule when trav­el­ling, living, or nav­ig­ating rela­tion­ships. Things will always fail in unex­pected ways, espe­cially when you’re in con­stant motion. You need to be super-flexible in order to make it work. Every time I embark on another long strange trip, I change the rules up, adjusting the for­mula until I hit on some­thing that works.

If you want sta­bility, stay home. If you want adven­ture, learn to adapt.

This doesn’t prop­erly cap­ture the chaos of Mexico City, but ima­gine that there are a few mil­lion people jammed into tiny streets over­flowing with street vendors and old build­ings. I’ve left the orderly world I lived in behind; there’s no room for rigidity here!

All the way to Mexico, that’s all people asked me. The US cus­toms officer, before I’d even left Hal­ifax, looked at me like I was insane when I said I wasn’t staying in San Diego, but was just plan­ning to meander across the border. (Tech­nic­ally a lie, as I stayed in San Diego the first night, but I have such rotten luck with cus­toms officers that I find it’s best to give them the simplest answer pos­sible, and they’re often con­fused enough by my vag­a­bond ways.) “You’re going to Mexico?” he asked. “Near the border? By your­self? Don’t you know how dan­gerous it is down there?”

San Diego, from my hostel bed­room window in Gaslamp. If you’re looking for a nice place to stay with sur­pris­ingly shoddy internet, the rooms at the HI hostel were actu­ally rather lovely. I miss that bed.

I’ll admit I expected it from xeno­phobic Amer­icans. (Sorry, America! You’re great! Travel more, okay?) What sur­prised me was that, as I got closer to the border and found myself the only white girl on a trolley crammed with Mex­icans heading home, even they started asking me if I was in my right mind. I’ll point out here that they were busy being super friendly and helpful, helping me manœuvre my six­teen tonnes of lug­gage around. But for whatever reason, everyone seems sur­prised at my decision to live 100km from the notorious border for two months.

It sunk in. I tried as much as pos­sible to remind myself that a lot of travel alerts are xeno­phobic hooey, and that mil­lions of people live out their lives in northern Baja with no troubles what­so­ever. I’ve done a lot of trav­el­ling, some of it to places many would con­sider “dan­gerous”, and often these places were my favour­ites. (Sara­jevo, with its two mil­lion exploded land­mines and its gor­geous wounded beauty, is a not­able example.) In all my travels, I’ve only twice had any­thing really bad or dan­gerous happen to me, one of which was a mere pick-pocketing that lost me an iPhone. Ulti­mately, far more hor­rible things have happened to me in the city I call home than have in for­eign countries.

Sixty miles south, Ensenada looks like a dif­ferent world. Ser­i­ously, I can’t wear heels unless I’ve got a ride. (I just wear my “prac­tical” walking shoes, which are wedges.) What is becoming of me? Also, I like to pre­tend this taco stand is called “Sarah” even though it isn’t quite. It’s one of my land­marks so I know what street is mine, since it’s not sign­posted at this intersection.

I’ve always believed it’s a matter of aware­ness, and that’s some­thing I try to cul­tivate as I explore new places. Ideally, a for­eign envir­on­ment forces you into a state of heightened aware­ness. I pay more atten­tion to what’s hap­pening around me when I’m trav­el­ling, often because I’m usu­ally a vis­ible minority. There aren’t a whole lot of extremely white red­heads in little dresses in Mexico, and I stand out. I’m also gen­er­ally car­rying about $2300 worth of elec­tronics on me at any given time, and I’m aware that the com­bin­a­tion makes me an easy target.

There was this day last week when I was walking along the side­walk, and ahead of me were a group of men cas­u­ally swinging base­ball bats. Logic­ally, I knew they were prob­ably just waiting to go play base­ball, but my brain wired itself up into para­noia mode. I sup­pose the “safe” thing to do would have been to cross to the other side of the street, but I don’t believe in giving in to fear when it’s irra­tional. Instead, I gritted my teeth, turned off my music, and walked through them, all with stomach-turning vis­ions of a bat cracking into my skull dan­cing through my head.

This little girl is the most dan­gerous person I’ve come across so far in Mexico. I’m not quite sure why she’s so pleased with her knife, or why the but­ter­flies aren’t run­ning away from her manic bellbottom-wearing weapon-yielding ways, or why the hell she’s on the side of this building, but I really like her. The type is pretty great, too.

Of course, nothing came of it, and as I’ve accli­mat­ized to Ensenada, I’ve become less para­noid, without losing a sense of vigil­ance. I’ve also come to realize that—much as I’d expected—the reports of these parts of Mexico being so dan­gerous are largely unfounded. Sure, it’s dif­ferent. There’s a mil­itary man standing out­side the gov­ern­ment building, right next to the hos­pital, with an AK-47. I saw a truck pulled over on the highway, its entire front assembly lifted up to look for drugs hidden within the engine block—apparently they’ve cracked down on drug barons in Tijuana, so many of them have begun to migrate south. And much of the city looks dan­gerous when you’re used to the ster­ility of Canada or the States—the side­walks are broken and haphazard, houses are unkempt, and things are gen­er­ally in a lesser state of repair. Most houses are gated-in, and many have bars across their first-floor win­dows. The bath­room of a café I fre­quent looks a little like a gulag, espe­cially at night when the light is so dim I can’t see myself in the mirror. At first glance, it’s easy to mis­take a lower standard of living for danger, but that cor­rel­a­tion isn’t in all cases true.

Ulti­mately, part of what I like about Mexico is its rough-around-the-edges quality. I love that it isn’t per­fect. I love that you can see where its weathered, and that things are a little bit more chaotic and haphazard than I’m used to. And in spite of wan­dering around late at night down empty streets, in spite of get­ting drunker than I ought on too many tequila shots, in spite of being such a blaz­ingly obvious gringa, I haven’t had any prob­lems what­so­ever. In fact, people here have been excep­tion­ally nice to me—much nicer than they were in the air­port in Chicago or the pub in San Diego.

While Ensenada isn’t as pic­tur­esque as other (gen­er­ally more Spanish-colonial) cities in Latin America, it has its charms amid the dust and rubble.

I’d hate to think that I miss out on learning new things due to unfounded fears, and I’m glad that I didn’t listen to everyone who basic­ally told me going to Mexico was a death sen­tence. I’ve yet to be kid­napped by roving gang—instead spend my days eating deli­cious food, basking in actual sun­shine, and dis­cov­ering new things! In a new place, even the tiniest everyday acts are adven­tures. I’m here to explore.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Some­times, I get ter­ri­fied. Tomorrow morning, I hop on a plane bound for San Diego. From there, I’ll walk across the border and take a bus from Tijuana to Ensenada, where I’ll be living for the next couple of months (assuming I find some­where to live). After that, I’ll head up to LA, and fly over to Hong Kong for New Years’. I’ll spend a few months flit­ting around South­east Asia, living mostly in Thai­land and Vietnam, depending on how the visas all play out. Come spring, I’ll hop over to Spain, and finally get to tour around—ideally vis­iting Morocco, Por­tugal, and France while I’m there. By September, I’ll be heading back home, with a brief stop­over in Ice­land to hang out in the lagoon.

I’m really, really, really excited—but I’m also utterly terrified.

Appar­ently Google Maps can’t cal­cu­late the dir­ec­tions between Hal­ifax, NS and Hal­ifax NS if you take the insane route.

I’ve been plan­ning this for a while, but of course I’m nowhere near to ready. I haven’t even so much as looked at my suit­case yet, in spite of best inten­tions, and I leave in around four­teen hours. I have a couple of leads on apart­ments in Ensenada, but nothing con­crete. Everyone and their dog wants to see me or send me emails, so I’m run­ning about like a head­less chicken and pri­or­it­izing based on fleeting feel­ings. I prob­ably won’t sleep at all tonight, and I’m guessing I’ll be hung over on my plane.

And of course my brain is just going crazy. What if it doesn’t work? What if I’m miser­able? What if my phone is stolen and I spill scotch on my com­puter again? What if I can’t find any­where to live? What if I get sick? What if all my cli­ents abandon me for being a wild vag­a­bond? It’s hard to turn off the para­noid ques­tions once they get started, and some­times the uncer­tainty of it all is enough to drive me batty.

And of course I just real­ized that in all the excite­ment of learning more language-bits and plot­ting out maps, I’ve for­gotten to tell most everyone I’m going across the world for nine or so months. Whoops! My five-month tour of South America last year went by so smoothly (well, mostly) that it doesn’t seem all that important anymore—my cli­ents know now, that even if I’m in a dif­ferent con­tinent I’m avail­able and working. Most of them only com­mu­nicate with me via email anyway. I did just get an email from a client asking me if I could meet up on Thursday, which obvi­ously won’t be hap­pening unless they meant “in Mexico”, but I’m hoping that everyone real­izes I’m just as reli­able, if not more so, when I’m working from a café in Croatia than I am when working from my couch in Canada.

What I’m most scared of is not having a busi­ness any­more when I finally get back.

But ulti­mately, I think if I’m not scared, I’m doing some­thing wrong. I’ve always made it a rule to do all the things that scare me—sometimes because they scare me—and as a result I get to be stronger and have a life that’s full of crazy adven­tures. I make my own rules and determine how I want to exper­i­ence the world, rather than fol­lowing a pre­or­dained set of steps. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to travel the world, and I’ve been testing the waters with trips that get pro­gress­ively longer and more involved.

And now, I will lit­er­ally be going across the world. Some­times I forget how wildly lucky I am, but today, on the cusp of a new adven­ture, abso­lutely pet­ri­fied, I remember.

Last weekend was my birthday. (I won’t tell you how old I turned, but I am now offi­cially starting to feel old. If you’re really inter­ested, I’m sure a quick Google search will turn up some­thing that’s not yet a lie.) As a present, a friend took me on what can best be described as a “whirl­wind trip”: we rode his motor­cycle 3000 kilo­meters to New York City, and back, in four days.

It wasn’t until we’d hit Bangor, Maine on the second day that I real­ized just how insane of an idea that was.

For starters, when I say “motor­cycle”, I don’t mean a cushy touring bike with back­rests, stereo speakers, massive wind­shields, lug­gage racks, and padded seats. This was a beast of a super­bike, with a tiny little tri­an­gular seat on the back that looks like a mini­ature rocket. I jammed all of our vital belongings–two com­puters, sev­eral pairs of shoes (Excessive maybe, but it can’t come as a sur­prise), my flat-iron, three books, clothing–into my giant orange back­pack and strapped it to my back. The effect was as though I’d gained a 30lb hunch­back, and my bal­ance was thrown so out of whack that climbing up on the bike was roughly akin to mounting a nine-foot tall horse with a broken leg. After an hour, my ass ached like I’d never felt before, and my feet would keep going numb. By the end of the trip, I had fric­tion burns on my thighs and back pain that lasted for days, along with a giant smile on my face.

It was most assuredly one of the most insane, intense, incred­ible things I’d ever done.

Yep. This thing. I may as well have ridden a rock­et­ship. It was also hot as hell, so every time we stopped I’d strip off the moment I clambered down and fling my things all over the place, as evid­enced here.

Things I think I can’t do

When the con­stant pain wasn’t dis­tracting me, I was busy being ter­ri­fied. Three deer standing at the edge of the road waiting to jump out and kill me. Taking turns at 100 and leaning 45 degrees with the bike. Flying into my driver during an emer­gency stop coming into the city. Foggy night riding while a thun­der­storm lit up the sky around us. Lane-splitting between trucks. Con­struc­tion coming out of nowhere. Other cars cut­ting and swerving in. I’m a nervous passenger. There were so many times when all I wanted to do was say, “Listen. I cannot do this any­more. Drop me off at the nearest exit, and I will hitch­hike my way home. Thanks for the ride!” By day four, when we needed to make good time, and the riding was get­ting intense, and the wind blast was so crazy I was con­vinced I was going to be pushed off that tiny little seat, I was ver­ging on down­right miser­able. The only thing that got me through was sheer determination.

That determination—less char­it­able people would call it “bull-headedness”—has gotten me through so much. Earlier this summer, I went to Cape Breton with a friend. We found this charming place where you walk through the woods, clamber down a cliff using a system of ropes, cross through a rumbly river, and swim in ice-cold salt­water through a cavern until you reach this lagoon amid the rocks. Above it, there’s a cave in the side of the cliff, and more ropes. The boys who had gone the day prior told us we’d need lots of upper-body strength to pull ourselves up. One of them had even needed to be pushed up.

Of course, I figured I wouldn’t be able to make it. Pos­sessing an extra x chro­mo­some already pre­dis­poses me to be rather lacking in the upper-body depart­ment, and my twice-broken wrists of last year put me at some­thing of a dis­ad­vantage. I remember perching atop one of the rocks, about to jump into the icy lagoon, looking up at the cave in the cliff and being con­vinced I’d never make it.

Then I gritted my teeth, pulled everything in my body together, and I made it! I’m cer­tain it was that stub­born­ness, not any hidden reserves of strength, that fuelled my suc­cess. I’m also pretty sure that’s how I’ve struc­tured the entirety of my life.

Things that scare me

Breaking both my wrists last year made me pretty skit­tish about my vul­ner­ab­ility. Being in a couple of car crashes in quick suc­ces­sion when I was eighteen made me an extremely nervous pas­senger. As a gen­eral rule, I very much dis­like things that are beyond my control.

Obvi­ously, riding pil­lion on a motor­cycle is sort of a double-whammy for me. But I’m quite cer­tain that for­cing your­self to face things you fear makes you a stronger person. As a result, any­time I think “Oh, gra­cious. That sounds scary.” or “That sounds hard. I wonder if I’m cap­able of doing it?”, I take it as a sign that I must do it. Learning to ride a motor­cycle (I have a license now!)? Moving to South America for five months? Going zip­lining? Life mod­el­ling? Bring it on.

And of course, run­ning a busi­ness is one of these things. I’m amazed that I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m still ter­ri­fied of it and con­vinced I can’t do it at all. What if I mess things up and ruin my repu­ta­tion? What if I get jerked around and can’t pay my bills any­more? What if the stress drives me totally insane and I end up wan­dering about aim­lessly, mut­tering about em-heights and kerning?

Run­ning a busi­ness is one of the scar­iest things I’ve ever done, and it never stops being terrifying.

Being a brave little toaster

Facing fears in other areas of your life forces you to become stronger and more self-assured. That sense of determination—the “I don’t know if I can do this, but I’m damn well going to try as hard as I pos­sibly can”—is enough to push you to do everything you can in order to make it happen. I think, ulti­mately, I would have killed my busi­ness had I not started pushing myself to con­front fears in other aspects of my life.

I’m a big fan, how­ever, of pushing bound­aries incre­ment­ally. If you sud­denly dive into some­thing ter­ri­fying, it’s easy to become para­lyzed by fear, and no longer retain the ability to respond in an agile way when things change, as they invari­ably do. It’s important to push through things you’re afraid of, and things you don’t believe you’re cap­able of doing, but you can’t allow your­self to become locked up by them if you take on too much at once. It’s a fine balance.

It’s for this reason that I keep ramping up my adven­tures. I’m deep in plan­ning mode (by which I mean “vaguely thinking about from time to time”) for my next crazy adven­ture, which is shaping up to involve a few dif­ferent con­tin­ents. By pushing things a little fur­ther every time I do them, my brain starts learning that it can handle whatever chal­lenges I can throw at it. I stop being appre­hensive when some­thing crops up and I think I can’t manage it, because con­sistent exper­i­ence tells me that I can.

This is the classy way to relax. (Don’t worry, I’m in Con­necticut. The gas sta­tions are spot­less.) I was per­forming some variant of this sprawl, often with the back­pack still strapped on, at every gas sta­tion down the eastern sea­board (when I wasn’t busy doing cartwheels to stretch out.) Coin­cid­ent­ally, this is also how I look when I’ve had the week from hell and have been working non­stop put­ting out fires, scram­bling to get things done, and gen­er­ally going crazy. Like this one! Good times.

And hey, if I hadn’t pushed myself to make it through this trip, I may not have learned how to smoke a cigar­ette while riding a motor­cycle in New York City. You’re wel­come, lovely cli­ents. I do crazy things to make you happy.

Three months in South America turned into five months, and I was still sad when it came time to come home. Some­where in the JFK air­port, exhausted from my eleven-hour flight and an hour and a half of standing in line, waiting for US cus­toms to harass me for flying through a country I had no time to step out­side in, I started to get hor­ribly depressed. It was cold and grey. Everyone around me was speaking Eng­lish again. Everything looked so familiar, too per­fect and sterile.

Luckily, by the time I got to Hal­ifax (and another long wait at cus­toms while they inspected every single item in my giant suit­cases), I returned to the most enthu­si­astic home­coming, oth­er­wise I might well have turned around and gone back home.

When both the des­tin­a­tion and the origin are “home”

The concept of home has always been strange for me. When I moved to Canada as a little kid, I felt always felt weird singing the national anthem, which my teachers insisted I do loudly and proudly. This cold for­eign country wasn’t my “home and native land”, it was just the place I happened to be at the time. Years later, I do con­sider parts of Canada home, but it still feels like an adopted home—somewhere I’ve spent most of my life, but I never entirely feel like I fit. For this reason, I think, it’s easy for me to adopt new places that feel like home. After the time I spent there, Buenos Aires also feels like home.

Photos like this make me homesick.

Trav­eling long-term is so dif­ferent from trav­eling short-term. When I spent five weeks circ­ling through central Europe, I changed and grew so quickly, but no place ever felt like home, as I was con­stantly in transit. In Argen­tina, where I even­tu­ally settled into some­thing resem­bling a routine, change was so subtle that I’ve only now started to notice it.

Be stronger. Less scared.

Given how much of last year I spent hanging out in the hos­pital with broken wrists, it’s not sur­prising that I ended up a little on the para­noid side. I felt weak and break­able. When I first got to Argen­tina, I’d been out of my second cast for nine days. I couldn’t do a single pushup or open a bottle of wine. Worse still, I was so aware of my own vin­cib­ility that cer­tain things scared me that never used to—riding down­hill on a bicycle, slip­ping down a stair.

I picked up an exer­cise habit in Argen­tina (prob­ably the first time I’ve picked up a good habit!) and it changed me so fun­da­ment­ally that I’m insistent on car­rying the change over. Yoga, espe­cially, turned out to be pretty mira­cu­lous for my poor wrists. I’m slowly get­ting stronger, and I can do all sorts of things I couldn’t before—pushups, yes, but I can also bal­ance on my hands for short periods of time, hold myself up in a bridge, and open a bottle of wine with nothing but the most prim­itive of corkscrews.

I had a few moments in South America that utterly ter­ri­fied me. There was that incident in the Amazon rain­forest where I cut off my fin­gertip with a machete. Driving in cabs, and often­times just crossing the streets in Buenos Aires, where the bus drivers stop for nothing, held some sur­pris­ingly frightful moments. I drove around some pretty insane roads winding around the cliffs of Chile’s coast, in some cases nearly run­ning into other vehicles when there was only room for one. The final, and most innoc­uous moment was the smallest—running down the stairs in my building, my foot slipped. I caught myself, but for a brief moment, my mind was para­lyzed with fear (the second time I broke my wrist was due to a slip on a single stair). I just kept thinking how much people would laugh if I came home in yet another cast.

But I sur­vived everything. When a friend took me out for a scooter ride upon my return, I real­ized something—I wasn’t scared any­more. We’d gone for a ride the night before I left as well, and I remember closing my eyes on some of the turns, holding on for dear life, my logical brain cer­tain I’d be fine, but my heart still in my mouth. After five months of trav­eling through South America, I’m finally feeling stronger.

Work less. Worry less.

North Amer­icans are work­aholics. We have less hol­iday time than pretty much everyone else on the planet. Often­times, being a work­aholic is con­sidered a badge of honour. Small busi­ness people, espe­cially, are prone to a form of boasting/complaining about working six­teen hour days as though it’s proof of their forti­tude and commitment.

I used to be one of these people, but I’ve been slowly coming out of it. It’s sur­prising how much of life you can miss out on when all you do is work, and how easily you get burned out. I’m not entirely sure how I man­aged the first few years of my business.

The nice thing about trav­eling is that I simply couldn’t allow myself to be that much of a crazy work­aholic, or I’d never have an oppor­tunity to see any­thing at all. (Admit­tedly, I did spend way too much time working in Chile, but that was mostly because I was on a roll with a pro­ject.) I actu­ally took days off. Some days I wouldn’t work a full eight hours.

Argen­tina was a great influ­ence in this respect, because… well, I’m not sure how to put it del­ic­ately. They aren’t work­aholics, let’s say. There were public hol­i­days every other day, and some days when it wasn’t a hol­iday, everyone would just take to the streets for a good polit­ical protest. I got the impres­sion that while a great many of the par­ti­cipants were truly involved in the affair—lighting off gun­powder and cheering and such—a large per­centage would be hanging about, lazily chat­ting with one another. This atti­tude per­vades throughout much of the city—service in bars and res­taur­ants tends to be notori­ously slow, and there’s a gen­eral sort of unhur­ried pace. This gets infuri­ating when you’re waiting in line for hours, but it did help me learn a bit of patience.

Me, leaning out over one of the bal­conies in my apart­ment in Buenos Aires. I spent a lot of time in this spot, watching the street below.

…what next?

This whole slow-traveling of the world thing is some­thing I’ve wanted to do for at least a couple of years now, and my time in Argen­tina was a litmus test. It didn’t turn out perfectly—I didn’t travel nearly as much as I’d wanted to, and I ran into all kinds of electronics-related issues that made things quite dif­fi­cult. But I had such an amazing time there. I camped on the beach by the cliffs along Chile’s northern coast. I drove all the way around the coast of Uruguay and nearly ran over an arma­dillo. I crossed the Andes in a giant double-decker bus. I kayaked for three hours through the rivers of a sprawling delta. I learned how to set up a min­im­al­istic camp in the middle of the Amazon jungle. I learned how to make jokes in Spanish that people would laugh at. I wandered through beau­tiful cities old and new, I explored, and I saw so many things I thought my head might explode. I fell in love with a chaotic city that I hated at first, and I even made new friends. At times, it was frus­trating, infuri­ating, and I just wanted to go home. But I wouldn’t have traded the exper­i­ence for anything.

I’m already plot­ting my next adventure.

I was sup­posed to be home by now. Instead, I changed my ticket and delayed my return home by two months. Even then, five months just isn’t enough time. It’s sur­prising how much I haven’t got around to doing. Last week, we finally went to Chile—that trip was sup­posed to happen in December, when we first got here! I’d like to make it down (fur­ther) south to explore Patagonia a little; I’m dying to visit Bolivia’s salt flats and Peru’s high-altitude Incan cities; and I still haven’t made it to Rio, although I think I’m glad I skipped Carnaval. I haven’t taken a tango lesson yet, and while I feel like my Spanish has improved a great deal, that’s sort of like saying my suntan has developed—that is, I’m now “slightly ecru-ish” instead of “ghostly white”.

But, to be quite blithe: whatever. I’ve felt this way my whole life—like I’m not achieving enough—and I’ll prob­ably forever feel like this. No matter what I manage to achieve, I will always feel that I’m failing on some other front. As long as I can remember, I’ve always felt over­whelmed, and I’ve always been spurred by a fear of Failure. In the past, what this has meant is that I work like a demon at some­thing, let­ting other things slide, until the whole thing mani­fests itself into a giant mental break­down, and I dis­ap­pear for two days until I recover from it all.

I’ve finally changed this beha­viour. Instead of focusing on my fail­ures, I’m trying to turn that energy into pos­itive dir­ec­tion. In theory, if I focus my ener­gies instead on a pos­itive dir­ec­tion, at least I’m making efforts against the almighty Failure, no?

More on Feel­ings of Failure and a rant about body image in Argentina

It’s offi­cial: in a little under a month, I’ll have my things all packed away in storage, and I’ll be on my way to gor­geous Buenos Aires, nearly 9000 km from home, and quite lit­er­ally the other side of the world. I’ll be staying for three months, which offi­cially makes it my longest trip ever.

I’ve had my tickets booked for some time, which is about as close as I come to long-term com­mit­ments these days, and I’ve been slowly pre­paring for the trip—by which I basic­ally mean “talking along to my Spanish tapes as I walk down the street” (no, that crazy girl isn’t talking to her­self!) and “con­tem­plating how many shoes I can fit into a jumbo-size suit­case” (the answer, by the by, is “nowhere nearly enough”).

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Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steam­ship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ricane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­at­ively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­urdays off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glistened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally figured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in work­aholi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
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I get asked ques­tions about my tat­toos a lot. It some­times strikes me as strange—I have seven of them, which I sup­pose is quite a few, but they’re all really tiny black symbols—so it’s hardly as though they’re at all surprising.

A few years ago, before I quit my job to launch a busi­ness, I had my logo tat­tooed to my shoulder blade. (And actu­ally, I haven’t been tat­tooed since—I’ve run out of stra­tegic body space!) People thought I was insane. “What hap­pens if your busi­ness tanks?” was the pop­ular question.

Of all the tat­toos I’ve had done, I’m fur­thest from regret­ting this one. Admit­tedly, my busi­ness didn’t tank, but I don’t think it would have made much dif­fer­ence if it had. It’s impossible to start a busi­ness without having it become a major event in your life—to me, tat­tooing my logo to my shoulder was no cra­zier than the people who tattoo their kids’ names to them­selves. (And it’s cer­tainly less crazy than those who tattoo their lovers’ names on them­selves. As far as I can tell, my busi­ness will never leave me for a younger woman or run away with all my money. I hope.)

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It’s super-important.

Ser­i­ously, though, I’ve spent the last five weeks with my dom­inant arm in a giant cast. (Although after week two, I regained the use of my elbow and some fin­gers and by week three was able to use an extra couple of fin­gers on my right hand while typing, which has helped. My draw­ings, how­ever, still look like they were done by a five-year-old, and I sign credit card receipts with a squiggle and/or lip­stick kisses.) Mean­while, the work has by no means slowed down, even though my working speed has, and it’s still chal­len­ging to do simple things like make a sand­wich for lunch or empty the garbage.

Accord­ingly, I’ve been working rather long hours and have been becoming intensely stressed out. (Throw in the fact that I’ve quit smoking in sup­port of Bone Healing Power and the fact that I’m some­times still in a good deal of pain–breaking your bones stinks!) Luckily, I have the greatest cli­ents and friends in the world who help me out and under­stand when things take a little longer than they ought, or I’d have gone entirely insane by now.

I am not going here, although I rather wish I were. It’s basic­ally my stress-free island para­dise. Unfor­tu­nately, Croatia is a long drive from here.

So, in the interests of pre­serving that afore­men­tioned sanity, I’m run­ning away to a secret undis­closed island loc­a­tion this weekend, where I’m hoping I won’t be able to get cell-phone ser­vice, and I won’t have any way of leaving until a nice fish­erman comes to get me. My laptop, shock­ingly enough, is staying home (it’s very rarely far from me) and I’m excited by the pro­spect of no elec­tri­city, no emails, and no pos­sible way for me to try to get any work done. I’ve noticed that as I get busier, it’s harder for me to actu­ally take a full day off, in spite of how important it is for my mental well-being.

If you border on the edge of work­aholi­cism, I recom­mend get­ting tough with your­self and for­cing your­self into isol­a­tion. So long as you can return refreshed, and not dreading a massive pile of new emails, it’ll make you so much more pro­ductive in the long run. And so on that note: ciao, amigos!

Thanks mostly to a potent mix of stu­pidity, tequila, and my own inter­min­able love of over-enthusiastic wrest­ling matches, I’ve man­aged to break a bone. (I did tempt fate that night by saying I’d never broken one before, so I sup­pose I shouldn’t have been sur­prised by the out­come, really.)

Not being one to ever do any­thing the half-assed way, I of course man­aged a really nasty, painful break in my right wrist. After seven hours in the ER, three dif­ferent sets of x-rays, and numerous doc­tors drop­ping by to poke me about, stick needles in me, and ask me quite ser­i­ously if I’d been assaulted, they sent me home in a cast that runs from my fin­ger­tips to my bicep, with a handful of paink­illers and no assur­ances that I wouldn’t need to be back for sur­gery in a week.

The ensuing week has been a bit of a mess, but it’s taught me all sorts of valu­able les­sons already.

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