confessions of a virgin traveler

I’ve been in so many situations where someone has brought up their travels abroad. I’ll be totally honest with you. I always found it a little bit annoying. “Oh, it will change your life.” “You should really go, just go.” “It’s just so amazing.”

I mean, yeah, I’m sure it was amazing and it changed your life. But, not once in my life did I feel financially stable, able to step away from what I was focused on, to make it happen for myself. And I was never offered the opportunity as a student to do so as a part of my education. At points in my life, it’s actually felt physically uncomfortable when I’ve encountered these conversations about going abroad. I felt (unintentionally) judged for never just getting on a plane and heading abroad. I felt like people were judging me for choosing to be fiscally responsible, for choosing to spend my money on paying off my student loans, for never feeling comfortable enough to plan a trip to go somewhere. I felt like people felt sorry for me, because I’ve never been anywhere foreign except for Canada (and before you say “that’s abroad!” no it’s not. I grew up in North Dakota before you needed a passport to go to Canada, I’m sorry, but it’s not the same thing friends).

Language studies were NOT a required part of my high school education- I had to choose between language arts and arts arts and I always chose visual arts, choir, band, speech, drama. Spanish was the language choice available, and it just didn’t speak to me, and it honestly felt like a waste of my time in high school when I was focused on 3-4 dance classes a week, plus rehearsals for the musical, state music festivals, piano and voice lessons, and speech meets. Like I had time to study Spanish on top of everything.

My family loved to travel but we focused on road trips in the summer, which I always loved. But, I’ve actually never flown on a plane with my family. It wasn’t something we did. The love of a road trip is still ingrained in me and my husband and I are now dreaming of a big road trip in a year or so. But flying abroad wasn’t even on my radar.

During college, I tried a couple of semesters of Spanish. During my second semester, I quit just at the drop deadline because I found the homework overwhelming. I consider myself a teacher’s pet, but this class gave me such anxiety that I just couldn’t imagine pushing through it. The teacher was so sad to see me go, but I had other things I felt were more important than having anxiety attacks over practicing my Spanish.

After I graduated from college, I found myself engaged to a man who was a world studies major- with an emphasis on Spanish. If I’m honest with myself, I tried to do those two semesters of Spanish because of my love for him. But, weirdly enough, we were never inspired to travel the world together. We found that a few years into our relationship we were literally going nowhere, like literally NOWHERE, and I called it off after a trip on my own to New Mexico to “find myself”. Just days after I broke off our engagement, he made plans to travel to Mexico, and off he went, found his life partner, and as far as I know he might still be living in Mexico doing his thing with his wife there. I wouldn’t know because we did not stay in touch, but I truly hope that all of his dreams came true. It was clearly meant to be, his living abroad, and it was meant to happen without me in the picture. I don’t regret any of that time with him, as I learned many lessons, but still didn’t step foot outside of the country even after all that.

After that I found myself back in New Mexico, in a relationship that was NEVER meant to be, in an utter bind, running through any savings that I had, with a car loan I could not afford, and living off of food stamps. That’s a longer story than this one blog post can contain, but after I left New Mexico, I headed straight back to Minnesota, where I currently live now. I took a few years to settle into a beautiful, loving relationship with my now husband, went car-free to rid myself of that debt I shouldn’t have taken on, went from being on food stamps and the cheapest medical insurance the state would provide to finally being able to pay for all my bills. I worked my butt off to just be able to survive, then thrive. I learned SO MUCH along the way.

And people still continued to bring it up. “Oh, you’ve never been abroad? You have to go to…. I remember when I went to… Oh you should go to…”.

Oh thank you so much for reminding me.

*****

Finally getting on a plane to go across the ocean tomorrow is a HUGE F’ING DEAL FOR ME. There is so much complex emotion going into this trip that I can’t even explain to anyone right now. It’s terror/excitement/anxiety/happiness/ohfinally/gratitude/sadness/anger/lettinggo/curiosity/?. So when people ask me “Are you excited?” and I hesitate on my response, here’s why I’m not sure how to answer that question. I don’t know how I feel. I only know that I look forward to figuring out how I feel about it all once I start my journey.

To you, out there, feeling the feels. I’m feeling it with ya. Here’s to feeling the feels together.