You can’t escape yourself
I’ve been traveling for a month now, from Portugal to Morocco to France and now I’m in Bali, where I plan to stay until going home in time for Thanksgiving unless I can get an e-Visa for a short visit to Vietnam (phở, phở-eva). I’m in all these new places but I wake up every morning and I’m still me. I wake up and I’m unsure what I’m doing with my life, unsure how I’ll make money again, unsure how I’ll get what I want out of my life — or even what it is that I really want. In some ways I feel like this trip is about escaping — escaping a life I no longer loved, escaping the demands of making long-term decisions, escaping my own sadness and struggles. That last bit though, you cannot escape. I know that; I’ve known that all along. I knew I’d wake up to myself no matter where in the world I roamed. I knew the pain in my heart, the pain of loss, the pain of lack, the pain of struggling to believe in the love and life I deserve would remain with me. But I also knew that with each step forward, each new day, each new place I’d be agitating that pain, forcing it to move and expose itself, to go beyond the superficial reasons it lingers and break into the deeper place where it lives and reveal what it feeds upon.
This trip has forced me to think a lot about identity. When you spend weeks mostly alone, tethered to no place (be it a home, a job, a travel group), you begin to struggle to relate your life to other people. You forget how to talk to people, or rather, you feel like you never learned how to do it in the first place. How did I talk to people when I was a kid? When I had no job, no home, no experience? Before I was “Loryn, the head of HR at a tech start-up in NYC, where it can be frustrating and tough but I love the people and I really want to do great work. Loryn, who lives in Queens — Astoria — in a charming 2-bedroom apartment with a backyard, where I love to cook and entertain friends, and get my daily coffee from the Queens Kickshaw*. Loryn, who practices yoga at Laughing Lotus and is a member at the Rubin. Loryn, from South Jersey (who thinks the ‘South’ part in important), who loves to go home every fall for the Tuckerton Boat Show, and Country Living Fair, and to just enjoy the weather and the company.”
I don’t remember how to be without these identities. Now am I “Loryn, who quit her job and is traveling until the money runs out.”? That sounds kind of dire. Really, it sounds temporary. And that is terrifying. All identities are temporary, but there is a shared lie we’ve all become complicit in, that once we reach the “good identities”, you know, the “right” ones where we have the house and the job and the white picket fence with 2.5 kids, that those identities are fixed. We’ve made it! End of sentence. End of story. FIN. Curtains closed. Enjoy the rest of your life, it will always be like this, you will never struggle, you will never want more, and if you ever feel out of place or off-balance you probably just need therapy or a new car or a bigger house, or, well something that is just a better version of what you have because you have it. Don’t worry that now you’ve contradicted the lie of not wanting more, it’s a loophole, if you are simply, um, upgrading. Yeah, that’s it. It’s like a new operating system, it’s new, but not too different. It still stays in the lane. You have the life of everyone’s dreams. So quit whining!
Of course, this is bullshit. We all know this is bullshit. But that doesn’t stop us from playing along, from believing or acting as if we believe that we are these identities, believing that there are “right” things to want, and that by having them struggles and sadness are not valid and are not to be investigated. We forget we are all people first, all part of the whole big thing, all breathing and moving and living and dying together. That we are at once infinite and fleeting. That all the things we cling to, because we love them or we think we need them or they are comfortable, were all once things we didn’t know or have or even want.
Now I feel like I’ve flung myself into the great wide open. Not just because I’m traveling; because I’ve ventured past having any sense of what comes next. This isn’t a vacation, it’s not a break or an escape, not really. Really, it’s my life. Today, I’m “Loryn, who is traveling, who often feels anxious and uncomfortable and like she knows absolutely nothing, but who mostly gets out of bed anyway because that’s what you do.” I’m having a really hard time owning that and being present. Every time a friend asks when I’m coming home, every time a recruiter emails me, it catapults me forward in time. When am I coming home? Where is “home”? Should I email that recruiter back? Is all of this a big foolish mistake? The spiraling ensues.
Coming home is a strange concept right now. I still have my apartment in NYC, thanks to a former colleague taking it on a very last minute sublet. I don’t know if I want to return to the city though, and I doubt I’d be able to afford living there for a while even if I did. When I think about home, it’s returning to my parents’ spare bedroom which is at once comforting and stressful, and unarguably temporary. In yoga, we talk about coming home to yourself, to your own being and body. It always felt theoretical, but now, with so much distance from all the things I’ve called home — people, places, things — it feels imperative. How could I possibly exist if my home was tethered to anything external? To anything whose lifespan differed from my own? If I am my home then my home is everywhere, everyone, every moment. I’d really like to know what that feels like. So even though Bali is hot and uncomfortable and I feel out of place and unsure of myself nearly every moment, I’m here and I’m staying put until my visa runs out because something beneath all the fear is telling me it’s what I need to do.
*Coincidentally, the Queens Kickshaw started a transformation of their own this year after 6 years building on their original concept of a coffee, grilled cheese, and beer joint they shuttered and are starting a brand new concept in the same spot. Read their farewell and buy tickets to the new opening at thequeenskickshaw.com.
