What Happens when you Stop Traveling?

Article

by Elysha Enos

I packed my bag again two weeks ago. Not Godzilla, the 45 liter pack that’s carried my life in it for years, but two pieces of square, well-wheeled luggage. Then I hopped on a bus, to get a life, get money, find stability away from bedbugs, old men looming over my bunk, drunk kids passed out in the stairwell, and meals of bread spread with the local goo.

I’m twenty three, and business life is the last thing I haven’t tried. For the last five years I’ve been living on a shoestring, slapped together, and I need a change. I may backpack and play guitar down the coast in another five years, but that’s in five.

My peers hold against me that they haven’t lived yet and take for granted, due to proximity of age, that I haven’t either. To end the fun via a business ladder in my early twenties is ridiculous to the kids still thinking about potentially doing something with their lives. But their free-spirited posturing is fed by the fear of leaving a small pond and being nothing in a bigger one. I’ve fallen into art to escape, spent hours numbly drawing my feelings out, hundreds more playing music in meditation, and traveling bodies of water looking for home. And now, I’m in a slow nine to five.

I’ve lost track of all the different places, people, and personas connected to the past five years of my life. The first thing was dropping out of school because my eighteen year old wisdom led me to believe that life in Montreal was played out. I moved to the U.K. because at worst I could be a bag lady sleeping under park benches, and if that made me happy, it seemed like a pretty good life. I didn’t become an eighteen year old bag lady, but close. I scrubbed toilets, slept on dirty sheets in an abandoned tower, and ate what the compound I worked for fed me (fried bread). Not a soul in Europe knew me, but that freedom from my previous life wasn’t enough to make me happy.

I flew back to Canada to go to school. The most disappointing infusion of reality was understanding that my life wouldn’t be as simple as I had once pictured it.

I backpacked every summer after that without much serious ambition of living outside of Canada. On my cross-Atlantic trips I saw so many museums and churches that they all started to look the same. Without much money, trips became more about how much physical and psychological discomfort I could take than experiencing other countries. Sleeping in airports, bus stations, ferry decks, washrooms, being frozen to the bone with muscles I didn’t know I had--convulsing, so affected by stress that even after returning to Canada my eye tick lasted for months. Rigorous backpacking eventually lost its appeal.

Then I got the itch to move again. I wanted to plant myself in another country, and also make a success of what I had failed at when I was eighteen. At twenty-one I moved to Scotland. It was far enough, they spoke English, and the plane ticket wasn’t expensive. An all-around winner. I lived in a brothel-cum-hostel, worked in a tartan store, and got drunk every night on the floor of “Room E” at the Princes Street East Backpackers in Edinburgh. But the experience eventually wore down the glamour that hostels and backpackers had for me.

For months the live-ins would enjoy travelers passing through and sharing strange accents and stories. Some would end up living there. About fifty of us slept in prison-issued bunk beds and worked shit-jobs to pay our board and buy vodka. As many laughs as we had, relationships happened quickly and were guillotined with similar efficiency.
The hostel live-ins went numb when friends left as a matter of emotional survival. When it came time for the Canadian chick dubbed “Miss America” to go, even “Fairy,” her closest friend, barely raised an eyebrow. At the invitation, he made a fuss over how he was expected to attend everyone’s going away party.

I flew back to Montreal days before the new school semester. Having had nearly no contact with my friends while I was gone made me question the supposed stability of those friendships. Spending months away from everything that kept me defined, I came back with a much different perspective on life, free of a lot of childhood crap that had previously blocked me from who I wanted to be.

Having spent the summer in cloudy, cold Edinburgh, I felt the pull to catch up on lost time in the sun. I also fell into a tragic love of heavy metal. The L.A. scene demanded my attention. The city seemed built on non-reality and I had to know how glitz and ghettos collided in a desert made tropical. I met some very interesting characters there, like a shaman on a street bench who told me about star configurations while he jingled with homemade jewelry, or the woman at the bus stop who laughed while describing a girl who’d faced the many tragedies filling her half-hour monologue. She told me she felt safer in the ghetto than the in the suburbs. “Ya, people get shot, you just gotta be smart about it.” I admired her spirit immensely.

Even though I’d only booked a one-way ticket, with the intention of working under the table and living in a hostel for a month or two, when I got to L.A., I just didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel like doing it all over again. I was so disappointed with the realization that the setting wouldn’t renew my desire to live in a hostel, meet travelers, and work in a new city. Two weeks later I booked a ticket home and stuck around to finish my degree.

After building and abandoning social circles and not knowing which corner of the globe would entice me next, I find myself welcoming stability for the first time. I have moved away from the artsy incubator of Montreal to business-minded Toronto. I am the newest entry-level employee at Mega Corp. A vision that I always thought would send shivers down my spine is a wall I’m tackling for lack of more bohemian enticements.

Am I not meant to know my own accent or home? Am I for making meaningless connections, one after another, until caricatures of me live in the minds of hundreds of others like myself around the blurry globe? I questioned these things in the weeks preceding the completion of my degree. But with loans to pay, the choice made itself.

Is it possible to have a jovial, love-of-life in a button-down suit? Can someone identified as a traveler have a grounded, well-rounded life in one place? I still feel like a messy haired backpacker, but as supervisors and gossips introduce me around the sky-scraping headquarters, shifting gears from impulsive, pseudo-boho to career-minded young woman offers the uncharted territory I can’t find in a new city anymore.

The next time I fly to an exciting new place, will it be with a reservation at a four star resort? A sojourn in Disneyland, and a tombstone in Victoria after that? Escaping has lost its novelty, so now I’ve given in and joined the parade.

I have a well-unionized fifteen days off a year. I suppose I could use them to backpack around Thailand. Would I be able to relate to people in the hostels? Will my sensibilities have shifted to IKEA comforts and business lunches to the point where roughing it isn’t a release anymore but an unpleasant sputtering faucet and a bug-infested shower stall?

After spinning like a free radical for years I feel like I’ve just stopped, and now the world is throwing me off balance. I like the idea of making money, having that freedom. What I hate is that I’ve lost my will to go out and get beaten around. Worse than my decision to stay still, is the fact that there is no spark inciting me to quell my desires elsewhere.

I often hear of hotels having problems with bedbugs; maybe that’ll be my throwback on future business trips. Or maybe jaywalking in Montreal will get me hit by a car on the way to headquarters.