Wanderlust

Travel had always been my way of escaping from the exhaustion of my overachieving, perfectionist, workaholic tendencies. Dead, robotic, overwhelmed hours of everyday life stretched endlessly between the glittery travel highs. If only I could scientifically understand what was wrong with me at home and what was right with me abroad, then maybe I could fix my life once and for all. Thus, I spent an entire year searching the world for all the things missing at home. 

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I hypothesized that the hole in my life had something to do with awe, beauty, adventure, play, and joy, but ultimately, I was forced to confront a hard truth: studying travel wasn’t going to solve my aliveness problem, it was the problem. I would never understand emotions, presence, or aliveness by studying them in a lab. I had to feel them. I would never repair broken relationships with my mom or rewire old patterns with my daughter by meticulously highlighting journal articles. I had to reconstruct my identity as a mother and daughter and human being. I had to live travel, not study travel, to find aliveness. 

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My heart and soul already knew how to thrive, had been born knowing how. I'd simply forgotten amidst the demands of surviving in a culture that tries its best to make us believe we’re not enough. Travel reawakened that deeper knowledge and suddenly I found awe, beauty, adventure, love, and play everywhere, even in the “rural wasteland” of my hometown, even in the routine hours of day-to-day living, even in the most challenging relationships.

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By the end of the book, readers will understand how to thrive not just on vacation days, but every day. As nice as it may be to have travel deliver that intoxicating neurochemical cocktail on a silver platter, the exact same cocktail can be achieved in a shaker at home.