The Beginning. Or something like it, anyway.

I don’t really think I’m what you would call your average travel writer/blogger/whathaveyou.

Personally, when I think about travel bloggers, I’m picturing a tall, thin, and beautiful blond with a cocktail in her hand, wearing a dress that would look like a potato sack on me. I think about flexible yogis sitting on beaches in impossible positions that I know for a fact I could never bend my bones into. When I think about adventurous travel bloggers I think about young men with bodies like Adonis trekking through Tibet shirtless with nothing but a backpack and a camera and, if they feel like it, a tent and sleeping bag.

I am here to tell you that I am not tall and thin and tan. I’m not a beautiful bohemian queen, or an incredibly handsome man with a backpack. I’m short, chubby, asthmatic, and impossibly pale. I hate hiking and backpacking and sweating and I tend to stumble over nonexistent cracks whenever I’m pressed to move faster than my short little legs are used to. I like the beach in theory, so long as I have a large tent to sit under, a chair, a hat, 100+ sunscreen, and a cooler of beer. That said, I loathe seawater about as much as I loathe sea*food*, and that’s saying something. I’m allergic to seawater, in fact. Whenever it touches me, I break out into hives.

“Why on Earth are you trying to be a travel blogger, then?” I can hear the question ringing in your head already, and I haven’t even hit ‘publish yet’. “Why are you trying to be an adventurer when you can’t even get in the ocean?”

(I can get in, actually. I just have to dump freshwater all over myself immediately after exiting.)

The answer to that question is complex, and trying to answer it completely would be like someone trying to map out the entirety of the universe – you simply can’t. I’ve haven’t even been able to tip the iceberg, and let me tell you, I’ve been jumping up and down for quite a while now. What I have figured out is that via my own personal travels and ‘adventures’, I’ve begun a process of self-healing and growth that I am still, to this day, working on. I don’t think a person is ever truly done growing. There is always something else to learn – not only about the world, but about yourself as well.

My urge for wanderlust came at a young age. I wasn’t what you’d call an ‘average’ kid – I grew up on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere Florida, and was the only child on my street until I left home at nineteen. I had to find ways to amuse myself, and when I wasn’t terrifying my mother by wandering off towards the river, I was reading, or being read *to*. My childhood reading consisted of Nancy Drew, the Narnia Chronicles, D’aulieres greek myths, Greek and Celtic mythology, and Egyptian history. Most kids my age wanted to be doctors, nurses, princesses and superheroes — I wanted to be an archaeologist. Egyptian, specifically, but I reckoned I’d take any old position they threw at me.

I said over and over that was what I wanted to do, from age three to twenty-three. Roughly between 2001 and 2002, while I was still attending community college, I volunteered at the St. Augustine Archaeological society (Carl Halbirt, the city archaeologist, has held the position since April 1990 and still does to this day) and spent several afternoons in the freezing cold picking through trays of mud and dirt, locating what literally amounts to trash. That’s mostly what archaeology is – data analysis, lab work, and picking through dead peoples garbage to learn about how they lived.

This was what I wanted to do more than anything, ladies and gentleman. Dig through layers of archaeological lasagna and unearth actual garbage. It seemed so exotic before I volunteered; I imagined I would be like Indiana Jones, questing around the world for precious artefacts and saving them before the ‘bad guys’ sold them off to the black market. It was quite an awakening after I volunteered for a few months, but I was determined.

Life is weird, though. It throws you twisty curveballs you can’t hope to catch, and it can be incredibly unforgiving. I ended up in a relationship with a boy that loved me as much as someone like him is able to love a person, but treated me like a dog. Gone was my freedom, my dreams of being an archaeologist. I felt like I had to explain every move to him, every decision, every action. I was groomed to think I couldn’t possibly achieve my goals, and that the life I was leading was as good as it was going to get. He molded me, shaped me, broke me – and I never saw it happening. He was a narcissist, and I was his gaslight project. Those five years of being talked down to, torn apart, mentally and verbally abused broke something deep down in my core, and for a long time I lived under his thumb and by his rules, until I broke free in 2007. I left him in August of that year, and in November I took a journey to Ireland that changed my entire life.

I’d forgotten what it was like to be free. I’d forgotten what it was like to set foot on fresh soil and breathe in air without a cloud of depression hanging heavily over my head – If only for a moment.

I spent nine days traveling around southern Ireland and seeing the sights, and during that time the sense of wonder and curiosity I’d had in my adolescence came bubbling back up to the surface after being suppressed for the previous five years. I needed to see more. Experience more. Do more. And I’d spend every penny I had in order to do it.

I immediately enrolled in classes at a college in Tampa so I could cash in on the student loan money and booked a trip to Greece that would keep me overseas for three weeks. I didn’t care how it was paid for, only that it was, and thinking back….I’d do it all over again.

 

That trip to Ireland breathed life back into my soul and gave me the courage to start living again, to start seeing the world like I’d always wanted to do. I can identify that specific trip as my first step to recovery after a relationship that changed the direction of my entire life. I don’t regret it, which might sound strange to many people. But the reasoning behind that will likely be explained in further posts as I invite you to join me in the sharing of my story thus far, along with my travels in the future. I’ll be working my way across the world in the quest for some peace and self-recovery.