Wednesday, July 13, 2011

almostfearless.com

almostfearless.com

Opening a New Chapter…

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 07:37 AM PDT

I’ve been hiding out for the past week, sitting at home, watching movies and TV shows… like the entire 5th season of Dexter… plus eating my weight in Thai curry and well, feeling a little blue. I wallowed. I needed that.

Sometimes, when I was working a desk job, I’d call in sick for a few days and do the same thing. Now I just have call over to my husband and say, “What should we watch?” and you know what? He never says, “Get back to work!” but he does sometimes say, “Transformers 3″ which is probably just as bad. Wallowing is good. Being happy all the time is overrated. It’s exhausting! Smiling, enjoying yourself, feeling good feelings… that takes work. Sometimes what you really need is to curl up under the covers, pretend like your looming deadlines aren’t so looming and download The Office through a series of illegal third party proxy sites (life as an expat: all the good sites like Hulu block non-US access). Ah, bliss.

This latest transition, coming off of a year of hard travel to now resting and working in Chiang Mai has felt jarring. I feel peaceful and calm but also sort of blank. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m struggling with adapting to a stay-put kind of lifestyle. How did I used to do this? Just… live somewhere. That shouldn’t feel weird, but yet, it does. It’s sort of like getting used to your neighbor’s loud music and then one day it’s gone. You don’t miss it, really, but it feels way too quiet and you’re aware of everything. The hum of your refrigerator, the squeak of tires on the street, your husband typing, the unidentifiable creaks your house makes… it’s so quiet and it feels empty, but really nothing has changed.

One chapter of my life closed, slammed shut with the blur of an overnight flight. We were in Cairo, now we’re in Chiang Mai. We’ll be here until Christmas. There’s a new project coming up, a big one, but that starts after the New Year. Just out of luck the end of the documentary filming coincided with the beginning of a brand new project — I literally confirmed some of the details about it the morning we left Cairo and now I’m shifting gears here in Chiang Mai. I’m writing. Planning. Researching.

It’s probably one of my favorite things about travel, this clean-slate, start-over and reinvent-yourself aspect. Well, I can reinvent myself to an extent. I have pieces of my life strewn around the world. A friend from India just Facebooked me (and yes, I’m verbing Facebook, can we just admit that’s a verb now?) and asked for pictures of Cole. Another person, a traveler passing through Chiang Mai contacted me, and we’re sort of known each other online since 2008. Friends of mine are returning home or heading out again after a long break but we all keep in touch and root for each other. Heck, I write about my life online, and it’s not long before most of the people I become friends within real life do a little google action and figure out that they can pretty much download the last three years of my life if they are at all curious. So I’m still me. I’m still the same person being passed from place to place. But I can’t help to feel a little hopeful, a little bit excited at the idea of starting over. It’s like a second chance. I can forget all the bad ideas, terrible plans, and wrong turns and say, “This time it’ll be different.” And then I promise myself that I’ll get up earlier, exercise more, stop swearing so much and eat more vegetables. And floss.  (And this time I mean it!)

There’s a lot going on in Chiang Mai in the coming months… the international food festival, Loy Krathong (the festival of lanterns that was so beautiful last year I honestly cried a little) and the massive return of all the travelers who call Chiang Mai their temporary home.

Everything is different. Everything is the same.  I wonder what will happen next.

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