As I sit here late at night, I hold back tears. Some part of me feels like I have missed an opportunity to find my true self; my true place in this world. The irony is that my true place, may not be a place at all, but a collection of places. When I see images of our world, my heart nearly bursts out of my chest with a desire to see them for myself. I've got what people call "the wanderlust". I yearn to travel. In fact, this morning I was having a dream that my husband and I were in Paris (one of many places I haven't been) and I was actually mad to get up. Pissed. Ticked. Sad. Slightly devastated. And it wasn't even real. I'm pretty sure I could completely dispose of our material life here and pack up my husband and leave. I would be completely happy with no address, no money to my name and the world at our feet.
Now of course I can't know this for sure because I haven't experienced it. This year, I will be turning 30 and I have never left this continent. That's right. The girl who wants to see the world so badly it makes her want to cry, hasn't. been. anywhere. So herein lies the question... Where did I go wrong? Why haven't I started checking of my very long list of places to see? I'm not really sure.
I'm turning 30, we're talking about starting a family, I'm extremely tied into a business I've owned for more than 6 years, and we live paycheck to paycheck. Right now I have family living in Japan that I would give anything to visit and we just can't afford to go. Now personally I would empty the entire bank account for the tickets, but my husband happens to be the practical one. This personality trait comes to great advantage in many cases because, as you can see from my rantings, I would never have a dime to my name if it weren't for him. But at other times, it can be a complete buzz-kill. I love him. More than anything, in fact! So don't get me wrong, but sometimes I wish he had that raw desire like me. It would make it so much easier to convince him that we need to take off.
But now my concern seems to be time. Have we missed the chance of our lives? What if I get pregnant? Will that close so many doors? I'm sorry, but when I'm 50 or 60 I'm not going to want to sleep on trains overnight in Europe or bunk in a hostel. I don't want to wait until retirement to get out and see the world. My 20-something body and energy is months away from being classified as my 30-somethings (hubby's already there) and already things aren't as easy as they used to be. Of course this is to be expected, but I have no false sense of reality when it comes to this fact; it's only going to get harder! So much of me wants to be a mom. Start a family, grow my business, but I worry it's a trap. The years pass by so quickly and my fear tonight is that it's slipping away.
This was all prompted from drooling over my favorite travel company's brochure tonight. I get their emails and follow their facebook and have spent many hours scouring their trip catalogs. They do the kind of traveling that makes me the most excited: Hike, Bike and Raft Spain. 9 Days walking the Amalfi coast. 40 days trekking through Africa. (hold on, I need to wipe the drool off my keyboard) Each of their trips had a classification and difficulty rating based on the amount of physicality required and the kind of comforts afforded to the traveler. It seems as though I tend to gravitate towards a couple specific types of trips: slightly athletic, fairly basic accommodations and travel means (it just seems more fun to travel by taxi/boat/camel than to get in a tour van). Well it seems many of these trips fall into one of their specific designations. A category they call YOLO. It's their trips directed specifically (in their words)for the 18-30-somethings. And you know what YOLO stands for? You Only Live Once. Yup. That's what sparked my whole internal panic attack tonight. You only live once. I was married, without kids, young, and excited the entire course of my 20's and I never left the continent. What the hell was I thinking?!?!
Ugh. I need to go to bed. Maybe I'll have another dream that will take me someplace else I want to go. At the rate I'm going, it'll be the only way I get to see those places.
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