Where I’m Coming From: Reflections on a Liminal Year

I’m sitting in a public library in Brooklyn and for the first time it’s hitting me that I’m actually going.

I’m actually about to head off on a backpacking trip around the world with no return date.

I’ve dreamed of doing this since I was very young. Traveling has always been one of my favorite things to do, and from the moment I took my first solo trip while studying abroad in college, I knew that at some point I wanted to do a big trip — a true adventure, one that involved a shoestring budget and months and months on the road.

My original plan was to start this trip in May 2022, when I was but a young child of 24, but that didn’t happen for a number of reasons.

After leaving San Francisco, I visited some old friends in France and then returned home for my cousin’s wedding in Maine, and then lived with my parents for a while. I had just gone through some challenging personal events which I will perhaps someday relay in a memoir about my time in San Francisco but which now must remain at least semi-private, and I knew I needed to heal.

At that time, a therapist advised me to wait to travel; she said it seemed like I was running away from my problems. I was still working my job and didn’t want to quit so soon after starting it, and I was also feeling very frazzled and overwhelmed. So I moved back to New York City, where I’d gone to college and lived for a year pre-pandemic, for what was supposed to be a three month stay.

My intention was to get myself in order, to calm my nervous system, and to lay down a more supportive foundation for my trip. As part of those efforts, I decided to finally take care of the persistent knee pain I’d felt since mysteriously injuring it in the summer of 2021 in San Francisco. I signed up for physical therapy and an MRI.

The scan revealed that my meniscus was completely torn, so badly that a physical therapist later told me that usually you see these types of injuries in football players whose legs had been crushed.

It needed surgery, I was told, and so I consulted with a surgeon who told me that it would take about a week to heal. I slated the surgery for December 7th, two months out from my planned departure date.

That, to say the least, did not happen. My leg was swollen, scarlet, and in constant pain after the surgery, but the pain far outlasted a week. My surgeon told me not to walk on it, and so I did not.

I also had next to no friends at the time and so spent New Years’ Eve alone with my dog in my grandmother’s house, which I was staying in because it didn’t have stairs. By January, I was lugging my crutches to Mexico on vacation with my mom and rolling through the airport on a wheelchair.

By February I’d realized I wouldn’t be able to go traveling when I’d planned, so I resolved to leave in the summer at the latest. By March I had watched the entirety of Game of Thrones (I always did my physical therapy while watching Game of Thrones; for months, every day, it was me, my stretchy green band, and Tyrion Lannister).

When April rolled around I was just beginning to use a cane instead of crutches, and shooting pains still ran up my knee whenever I put weight on it.

I was also seeing dozens of doctors, who were all floating different ideas as to why my healing was taking so long. I gave vial after vial of blood and consulted specialist after specialist.

I finally hit the end of the medical road when one suggested I might have a somewhat terrifying connective tissue disorder and told me to sign up for genetic testing, which I’d have to wait months for, and my cousin, a genetic counselor, also told me that she did not think I had this particular disorder and I decided maybe I’d rather not know.

Nobody ever understood why this had happened. All the best doctors and surgeons in New York had been bested by one tiny and mystifying knee.

My trip was now on an indefinite hold.

In May I ditched my surgeon, who was a completely unhelpful asshole throughout the entire process and typically left me in tears (and I normally cry about once a year — yet another mystery).

By June I was able to walk without much pain, and after a third MRI, another surgeon gave me the green light to begin to exercise and walk normally again.

By then my whole plan, to quit my job and travel, felt further away than ever. I still couldn’t do a child’s pose or carry grocery bags without pain; how could I jet-set across the world?

So I let it go.

I continued working at my job, and though I loved parts of it, I knew that celebrity news was far from my real passion or purpose. I tried and failed to make decisions about any part of my future. I couldn’t really commit to my life or to relationships in New York, because part of me knew I’d be going away at some point, to grad school or elsewhere. Yet I couldn’t commit to a grad school either.

I became obsessed with labyrinths. I felt like I was stuck inside one, wandering the hallways, half-living, paralyzed by indecision, looking for the way out.

In November, close to a year after my surgery, I got an email that announced that my whole team had been laid off at work. This is an unnervingly typical occurrence in the vicious magazine publishing industry, but it still came as a complete surprise.

My knee was feeling almost entirely better at this point except for certain types of movement, and I had decided I no longer wanted to put my life on hold for it.

Suddenly there wasn’t much tying me down and it was time to go.

But I didn’t feel excited to travel anymore. This felt insane, but it was how I felt.

I procrastinated on booking my ticket, languishing in indecision about where to go. I had been feeling so fatigued and unmotivated for so long and could not imagine myself plunging into solo travel.

I believe that this apathy was mostly because I had had to let go of my travel dreams over and over again. It had hurt too much to be disappointed over and over and so I had completely sublimated my desire to go. Plus I was also, if you hadn’t guessed yet, just a bit depressed, and one of depression’s most notoriously malignant qualities is that it can make it difficult to appreciate things that normally ought to bring you joy.

But then, cushioned by the liminal expansiveness of the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I bought the ticket.

Now, two months after my layoff, and a month out from my departure, in this library in Clinton Hill, surrounded by screeching babies and sullen teens, I suddenly feel a spark again. It’s been coming on for a while and I’ve felt flashes of it, but this is the brightest yet.

I always knew that traveling was what I really, truly wanted to do at this point in my life. I didn’t ever really want to go to grad school or get a new job or start a band yet because what I really wanted to do was travel.

I never really wanted the world of content and KPIs and coffee being the best part of my day almost every day (though I will always love my coffee).

I wanted to feel the warm winds of distant oceans, to walk barefoot in strange woods. To follow my intuition wherever it leads.

I’ve always known how deeply fortunate I am to have the opportunity to do this at all. But now, my perspective on traveling is completely different from how it would’ve been had I left a year ago.

Now I treasure the ability to walk. To move my own body, to dance and jump, to carry food across the kitchen without assistance. To race up and down staircases to elevated subway stations, something I hadn’t been able to do for nearly six months. These are all miracles.

Now I will never take my health for granted again. To be inside a functioning body, without pain, is an unimaginably sacred gift.

This year also humbled me greatly. The whole time, I felt immense gratitude for where I was, for my job and the stability I had. And yet I also met a version of myself, and saw a version of my life, where I didn’t follow any of my dreams. Where I settled for a half-life of sleepwalking through my existence. Where I felt sick and tired most of the time. Where all I ever really wanted to do was order food and watch TV. Where life was simply tolerable, simply fine. Where I was, truly, not fine at all.

This is not to say that I was entirely miserable this year — not at all. I’m grateful for so much of it. I love New York, and this year reminded me that Brooklyn is my true home and always will be.

I made a few wonderful new friends and reconnected with beloved old ones. I went to moon circles and elaborate rituals, and then I hosted them. I recorded my first album and released the first single, all of which was way more work than I thought it would be, though that’s another story.

I dutifully went to therapy twice a week, every week, and while my progress with my mental health hasn’t been as linear as I’d hoped, I definitely received new insights about myself and my patterns.

I got back into reading with the help of an e-reader and a library card. I interviewed some amazing people for my job. I went to an all-expenses-paid music festival in Las Vegas and realized I absolutely do not belong anywhere near influencers. I worked on disrupting the self-critical thoughts always swirling around in my brain. I thrifted a truly incredible leather jacket.

I practiced acceptance. I wasn’t ever too upset about my knee, really — sure, there were moments of rage, but I always knew I couldn’t exactly change my situation.

I hoped there was some good reason why I hadn’t been able to go traveling as planned, even if it was a reason I would never know.

I trusted that eventually I would realize, with my whole body and spirit and not just my too-smart superego that too often fails to convince the rest of me of what it knows to be true, that there was never a labyrinth. That my lostness was always just an illusory manifestation of my own fears.

Of course I still don’t have any sort of clear idea what I’m doing with my life or where I’m going next. I don’t know my life purpose, and I’m terrified by how quickly time is passing, and constantly feel like I’m not living up to my potential. Sometimes I feel paralyzed by how much I want to do and create and experience. Sometimes it feels like barely a few months have passed since the pandemic. Sometimes I still feel so much frustration with myself that it makes me never want to show my face in the world again.

Now I know how easily our best-laid plans can be smashed to pieces. Now I am more afraid than I was before, more aware that my body could break at anytime. At any moment all of this could end.

And yet, I’m going, fear and all. The ticket is bought, and nothing is certain, and I will take nothing for granted ever again, and yet I’m finally going, doing what I’ve dreamed of doing for nearly a decade now.

I am not surrendering, not yet, to the life force-draining melancholy that threatens to pull me into an existence of disconnection and numbness, which I swore I’d always run from when I was a child, feeling the call of the wider, stranger world that shimmered beyond the veil of the mundane.

This is the world where art and spirit live, I think, and it is the world I seek now.

I have always wanted to see and feel it all, to breathe deeply, to see beyond the veil, to know the colors, the flowers and forests, the angels and temples, the myths and the magic and the stories that tie us all together.

I got a touch of this in California, but it went too far and was unsustainable. Now I walk with much more trepidation, knowing too that hurt is a part of living.

I don’t know what will happen on this trip. Maybe it’ll be a huge letdown. Honestly, I’m nervous and scared to go for many reasons, far more nervous than I was before what happened with my knee.

I know that I will want to settle down at some point in the future (I do want cats and eventually a dog, after all, as well as consistent community and maybe even romance, though the pets are definitely top priority).

I know this is a rare and fleeting opportunity, perhaps a once-in-many-lifetimes chance. I treasure it more than I can say.

I am finally, finally remembering why I am doing this. I finally am doing something that feels aligned with my spirit. There is a fire in my heart and light in my veins again.

Of course, traveling around the world is not the only way to rekindle one’s inner life force. Ideally one might feel the fire of aliveness simply by being deeply present in one’s own life; ideally we might see the transcendent in the ordinary world; ideally we might learn not to desire so much at all. I will be working on that as long as I live, no doubt.

But for now — though I may feel far less ready than I did once and may not be as young and fearless as I once was, now that I have reached the formidable age of 26 — I’m going.

At last!

This is the beginning of a new story. Of course I will carry the old stories of where I’ve lived and who I’ve been with me, as we all do wherever we go. I will never stop loving New York. It caught me when I fell and held me until I was ready.

I love this world so much, and have always loved it.

Finally it’s time to really see it.