“Welcome Home”

I think I’ve been lost for most of my life. I’ve been searching and it feels like I’ve tried just about everything I possibly can to “find” myself.

So many times in my life people have told me what an “incredible”, “amazing” and/or “impressive” young lady (woman) I am and how much “potential” I have. It’s always exasperated me trying to figure out what the hell they were talking about. In what area of my life am I supposed to apply all of this untapped potential? And where is it all hiding?

According to the benchmarks of success in Western society, I haven’t accomplished much of anything. I don’t own a house, I sold my car less than a year after I bought it because it required me to more or less stay in one smallish part of the world (I didn’t like that). I don’t have (or want) a corporate career and I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid one (including walking away from several potentially lucrative job offers, thankyouverymuch). I’m not married, I definitely don’t have any kids, and I live about as far away from my immediate family as is physically possible. I don’t have any pets, I haven’t won any awards since I was in university and I was awarded a scholarship for having good grades, and I don’t believe I have any outstanding or overwhelming talents that are deserving of recognition.

I guess I’ve never really stopped to look at what I have accomplished…which, apparently, is a significant amount compared to a lot of people.

I suppose I should start on a positive note and pat myself on the back for what I have accomplished. I hold a degree from a top tier world-class university. If being restless and having an acute travel bug is impressive, then I am very successful in that regard. I have successfully lived in 6 countries now. And all because I wanted to. Travelling is my “thing” and I’m good at it. I can say hello in more languages than I have fingers. You could drop me in pretty much any city in the world and I could figure my shit out. The world does not scare me. On the contrary, the world excites me. Seeing as much as I possibly can is what I was designed for. I feel more comfortable in airports than I care to admit. I’ve worked in about 5 different industries across 4 different continents and I’ve been reasonably good at all of the jobs I’ve done and well-liked by my employers and fellow employees.

On the negative flip side though; in my opinion, I’ve done little or nothing with my degree. I merely buckled down and got that degree to prove to my peers, parents and myself that I actually could do it if I applied myself. I’ve since worked in education, hospitality, retail, child care, marketing and the travel industry, and yet, I can’t see myself remaining in any of those careers for the rest of my life.

I know I can do whatever I put my mind to – I just have no idea what it is that I’m supposed to do. I’ve spent countless hours seeking out my hidden glory. I know it’s not hiding in a cubicle somewhere. It’s also apparently not hiding in London, Uganda, Mexico, Los Angeles, Melbourne, or Sydney. If it is, I haven’t stumbled upon it yet. At least, I don’t think I have.

Picking a place and a career that locks me down absolutely scares the shit out of me. I’ve tried on countless occasions to do it, and failed. By failed I don’t mean I actually failed. I’ve actually been pretty good at just about every career I’ve taken a stab at. The failure part is more to do with my level of enthusiasm for whatever I’m attempting and also my attention span for whatever the vocation may be. Put me in one place and give me a routine for more than a few months and something inside of me starts to go crazy. I was not designed for that kind of a life.

A few months of the same routine leads me down an inevitable path of restlessness and misery, and now I’m cursed. I’ve proven to myself that I don’t actually have to stick to one location to survive. In fact, I thrive on change and on changing my location constantly. Which has been mostly fine for me up until the past few months…

In the past few months, I have finally started to yearn for a “home”. This tipping point finally hit me as I was saying goodbye to everyone I met at Burning Man this year (which will have to be an entirely different post or posts). One of the big things at Burning Man though was that throughout the week, everyone you meet there says, “Welcome home” to you when they meet you. At first, this seemed stupid and superficial to me, but by the end of the week, I realised I felt more at home at Burning Man (a city that only exists in the middle of the desert in Northern Nevada for one week each year) than I felt anywhere else in the world. It left me with a sense of longing for that feeling all year long, and it reinforced to me the complete absence of any sense of a “home” in my current life.

As I said goodbye to all of my friends, old and new, on the last day of Burning Man, my sense of sadness was compounded by the fact that I had no home to go to afterwards like the rest of my friends did. Everyone was saying how we should all visit each other during the year and I felt a deep pang of loneliness, and a little bit of shame and embarrassment, when I realised that I had no place to invite my friends to come and visit me in. And when I say “no place”, I don’t mean that I don’t have an apartment or guestroom for them to stay in, I mean that I didn’t even know what country or even continent to invite my friends to visit me in! As a 31-year old, I realised for the first time in my life that I was no longer okay with this scenario. I have too many people around the world I want to visit me and they need a damn guest room to sleep in when they visit! And I need my own damn room as well.

I want my own place. I want a permanent mailing address that is my own, not my parents house. I want a really nice home of my own, with all my stuff in it. A place where all my pictures of the world and all of my awesome friends are framed and hanging all over the walls. A place with a big balcony or terrace with beautiful plants and an awesome indoor/outdoor kitchen. I want a juice maker, a place where I can leave my stuff for more than a month at a time, a big bed of my own with an amazing (and preferably tempurpedic) mattress, a massive wine rack with dozens of bottles of red wine, a barbeque, and a guest room. A place where my friends can come and visit me. I’m ready. Finally.

This of course takes me back to my original problem: I need to pick a location and stay put. Since I graduated from high school at 17 I’ve more or less always had a bag packed near me so I’m ready to go somewhere, anywhere, at a moment’s notice. Even in high school, my senior year I bounced between friend’s houses, boarding at school and my parent’s house regularly. How do I teach myself how to stay put when I never have? And what the hell does “home” even mean? If there’s one thing time and all my travels have taught me, it’s that you can run as far as you want, but you can’t run from yourself. You can roam the world looking for answers and looking for that certain something (or someone) that will complete you, but the only place to really find any answers, is within yourself. It’s ironic to me that after all of my wanderings, and all of the places I’ve been to and lived in, that instead of finding myself, I now almost feel more lost than I did to begin with.

My new journey, and my new mantra, is no longer going to be looking for answers and my calling from travelling all over the world – I will be looking for my home and my calling from within myself. I have no doubt that my travels will continue until the day I die – I am a traveller at heart and always will be. But I will pick a location (soon) that I intend to create some sort of a home for myself in – a place for me to reside in between my travels. My journey seeking the answer to whatever it is I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life is going to be a journey within myself, rather than an endless journey around this planet. I will surely continue travelling, but not in search of answers. I realise now that I’ve been looking in the wrong places…“You do not need to seek freedom in a different land, for it exists with your own body, heart, mind, and soul.” (― B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life)