Help! I'm Not Having a Profound Experience!
I've done a lot of selfish things in my life but moving to the other side of the world to ‘find myself’ is probably the most selfish of all.
It started off as a fantasy I had growing up. I always envisioned myself as this well-travelled, cultured and articulate person of whom all my family and friends could be envious of. I imagined the conversations of aunts and uncles, saying, ‘Oh, have you heard about Sarah? She’s just moved to Berlin!’ or ‘She won’t be at Christmas this year, she’s somewhere in Finland’. My friends would all be so amazed to see me in person because I had just come back from somewhere where I was doing something special and artistic.
Among the western upper middle class, it is culturally acceptable to take a year off from life’s responsibilities just to travel. It is called Gap Year. It is also culturally acceptable to claim that this travel was a ‘profound experience’ and that it changed you as a person. Overseas travel makes you more. More intelligent, more sophisticated, more cultured and therefore your voice is more important. However, just because you travel in the name of ‘finding yourself’ does not mean you will be radically different once you return. Yes, you will be older. Yes, you will have visited other cities and landscapes. But do you change every time you visit a different suburb in your own city? Is travelling overseas honestly life changing enough to make you a different person?
The only novel I have encountered that examines the ‘gap year culture’ and mystical personal transformations that come with it, is Ben Lerner’s Leaving The Atocha Station. It is the only piece of writing I have found that is pretentious enough to offer the insight I needed. The novel follows Adam Gordon, an American Fulbright Scholar on a fellowship in Madrid. It is the story of his poetry, his not so charming personality, his relationships, and includes a lot of questions about the meaning of art.
For all of Adam’s flaws and disagreeable personality traits, I found myself relating to him. That immediately set off red flags in my mind. What do you mean you relate a sociopathic arrogant wannabe poet? Should you see a therapist? Should you even mention this to anyone?
These panic induced moments forced me to think long and hard about how I related to this character. The only thing that kept coming back was travel. Like Adam, I am a young aspiring academic who travelled in the name of experience.
I was eighteen when this all happened. I was from a small country town where every day I was reminded that nobody left this place. I still remember the night when the opportunity of travel presented itself at my feet. It was golden, wrapped up with a bow on top. How lucky could I be to have the profound experience of travel handed to me on a silver platter?
It came about through my mother’s ex-work colleague, whose daughter was working in London for a family friend (everyone knows someone in a country town). She was leaving in September, and they needed a replacement. At this stage I didn't care what the job was, I just wanted out. And really, that was all it took. Fast forward a few Skype calls later, the agonising visa process and I had a job! On the other side of the world! Working for a woman I had never met before! As a nanny!
Now, I know you’re still wondering. How does any of this relate to Adam Gordon? It’s because I believed, at the time, in the profound experience of travel. Adam constantly theorises through the novel about profound experiences of art and questions its existence. He says he is ‘intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their lives”, especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change’ (8). This idea relates directly to the profound experience of travel. Everyone believes it exists. Explaining my plans to family and friends indicated to me that they too were all stuck on the idea.
I told my best friend in the cinema, the lights still on, we were waiting for the movie to start. ‘What?’ she said confused, ‘I didn't know you were serious. Are you actually moving to the UK?’ I replied a simple yes. It created tension between a few friends and I. There was jealousy. They knew that everyone who travelled had a profound experience, and they wanted it to be them. There were also people who had already travelled, talking it up to extreme levels. They talked about how it had changed their life, which was funny because I didn't see any difference. And that’s exactly what Adam is saying.
There are different levels of this prophesied experience. One passage of the novel talks about Adam’s friend and his girlfriend who are travelling through Mexico, ‘I was vaguely jealous of them; [they had]… no real plan in order to acquire experience, not just the experience of my experience sponsored by my fellowship’ (68). This is something I often thought about as well. I was working in London; my accommodation was paid for. Was I really experiencing this the right way? Could I be doing more to intensify my experience? What was the difference between a simple tourist and myself? Adam has these questions too. His response to this is to try live in this idea of profound experience for as long as possible. And that is what I did too.
The parallels between us are getting even more concerning, I know.
Adam first claimed he had no internet connection in his apartment, which he did have, to make his long periods between replying to emails seem more important. He wanted his friends to think he was ‘busy accumulating experience’ (19) when in reality he sat browsing the internet daily. This intense form of ostentatiousness does reflect the ideas surrounding the ‘gap year culture’. If you are pretending you are off being more important, who is to know you are actually sitting in your underwear drinking coffee day after day. The fabricated idea of ‘experience’ is contributing to the stereotype. I often spent my weekends in bed, ordering in copious amounts of take-out and then watching BBC miniseries all night. I never mentioned this to anyone because it would confuse them. Why would you do that when you could be wandering the back streets of London and experience the aesthetics of the city.
I did try to seek this life, so you will have to give me some credit. I adopted an RP (Received Pronunciation) accent, which I had learnt from the children I was looking after. I was very proud of this accent and spent a lot of time practising it. I went on a Contiki tour to Europe over Christmas and was mercilessly made fun of by the other Australians. They didn't believe I was Australian because of my accent. And I was so happy.
I had euphoric moments like when two tourists approached me in Trafalgar Square and asked for directions. I had people ask me what school I went to. I had in some ways assimilated. It wasn't until I had to use my Australian passport as ID that the façade was shattered.
I related this period of my life directly to the passage where Adam condemns the American tourists in Spain. He says, ‘You could identify young Americans whose lives were structured by attempting to appear otherwise, probably living on savings or giving English lessons to rich kids,’ and congratulates himself on ‘making contact with authentic Spain’ (48), as if one coffee shop in Spain is more Spanish than the next. Why do we both care so much about becoming authentically foreign?
Are we ashamed of where we have come from?
Adam’s thought reflects on himself, as truly he knows he is not a Spaniard. But why does he try so hard? I did it too. A contrasting passage happens after the Madrid train bombings that Adam experiences, where he goes to an American news sites to read about what was happening. There is a disconnect there, as internally Adam is still American, reacting in an American way. It is the same in the following protests; he does not join in the chanting. He is mutually trying to be a Spaniard, while holding onto his Americanness. I was both pretending to be British, while knowing the entire time I was a fraud.
Questioning who I was and what I was trying to accomplish made me quite existential. I had my fair share of lying face down in the middle of my living room, existential dread paralysing me. There was anxiety too. I had my first string of anxiety attacks while in London, the most memorable one happening in an airport bathroom. I had flown back to Australia for two weeks over Easter, and then upon arriving back in the UK, anxiety crippled me. I locked myself in the bathrooms just before customs and had a full-blown meltdown. It was very dramatic.
What was I doing here? What was I trying to accomplish? Would any of this mean anything once I returned to Australia for good? Would I ever return to Australia for good? Nothing seemed real.
London was a fantasy world for me where I could do anything or be anyone. Sure, I didn't have a lot of money, and my visa would expire in another twelve months, but it was so full of potential. And I was terrified I was wasting my opportunity to have that profound experience everyone was expecting of me.
This was the part of Lerner’s character that I most related to.
At the end of his fellowship in Spain, Adam asks all the same questions I asked myself and reading that in the novel brought all those memories back. ‘I was convinced I should go home… that this life wasn't real, wasn't my own, that nearly a year of being a tourist, which is what I indubitably was, was enough… this is experience’ (168). I held all the same thoughts and ideas, the turmoils of what leaving meant. I would go back to my old life and London would cease to exist, ‘all of this, all of Spain, would cease to be real if I went back; it would be my year abroad, a year cast out of the line of years… but it would not, in any serious sense, form any part of life’ (170). Adam’s words here are important, because it is the first argument I had seen against travel as being life-changing.
Unlike Adam, who stayed to live his fantasy life in Spain at the conclusion of the novel, I moved back. My life continued like normal. And I didn't change. I wasn't automatically cooler; I wasn't more special than anyone else. There was no neon sign above my head saying, ‘I've had a profound life experience’. But I was expecting it. I thought all those things came with the package deal. Where was my extra intelligence, my new outlook on life? Had I been ripped off? Does this come with a rain-check?
The thing is, you don’t change. At least not in my experience. Just like the poems Adam talks about throughout the novel, meaning is subjective. You are not different as a whole, just because you visited a different country. The only change is your perspective.
I have never been here.
Understand?
You have never seen me.