How Do You Find Yourself?

I really struggled to write this. I wrote the beginning over and over and over – in front of a beach, in front of my desk, on a plane. I couldn’t get it right. Being honest is a cornerstone of Grit Mag and, hopefully, who I am. I want to find who I am, I want everyone to find who they are. I want to be like Anthony Bourdain, and I’m jealous of all the things he could do as a man that I’ll never be able to do alone as a woman. This world is dangerous. I’d like to say I found myself traveling, but it’s not the same for me as him, and I don’t think that statement really is true for me.

I want people to admire my experiences and to see what I see and to ask me for advice, ask me to have fun with them. I want to be a waitress and bat my eyelashes at anyone who will look my way, and make little baby girls laugh at my tables. I want to run away, always be on the run, and do whatever I want, and be around things that inspire me. They’re never far. Everything inspires me. People inspire me.

I want to flesh out this piece, and talk about these things that have happened to me and I’ve made happen to the world through my travels, and really get it across. Make someone cry, or laugh. But I don’t know how. I’m too impressionistic, too modernist, too edgy. I do think things should be hard to figure out, yes. I’m hating everything I’m writing right now, so I can’t be being honest enough. It’s not possible. I’m feeling so, too sensitive. We need to find ourselves. How do you find yourself?

I think you can’t be lost if you’re peddling on even feet, right in the moment. I rode a bike around the mountainous island of Gozo, and I hit a curb and smashed my chin. In those moments in which we get hurt, your body thinks for you. Lucky me – my thighs took most of the brunt. I didn’t think about it, they just protected me anyway.

Or the opposite, being very involved in a pleasurable experience, your body is controlling you rather than your mind. Something primal, right near the adrenal gland, the same one that makes you sweat and run in fear. Pain and ecstasy lay separated by a single nerve ending, but we’re able to understand the difference so well. There is undoubtedly a difference. But you stand there and only there in that moment of sensation. Sparkling on your even feet.

When you travel, you feel these sensations more. There’s a pressure to be more present, to do more, to live more in the now. And so you do. I do. You’re anxious, doubly so as a girl, but you have to be much more alert than you would at home. This snaps you into the now. I always thought that I was most myself when I was waiting tables, I could really entertain in the way I loved to. It’s so fast paced, so unpredictable – you get to use so much charm. I think I found myself there. Being a waitress presents you with a shifts worth of impressions – those flashes of energy and personality I love so badly. Standing on your even feet.

I rip at myself for being so restless. Irresponsible and fleeting. But if I was the opposite I’d crumble. I find myself in these impressions. How do you find yourself?
Very well thank you! And you…?

This is my story of my travels, and the 3 suns I slept with in my different apartments in Rome, how (where? why?) I find myself in all these places. And I hope you can find you too.

New York. Amsterdam. Brussels. Rome. Valletta. Victoria. Florence. Pompeii. Phoenix. Frankfurt. Athens. London. My home.