This week has been a vast improvement from the malaise of last week. I picked up a few small freelance projects which have provided just enough work to motivate my own creative projects (you know, the inevitable, work from home procrastination). I’ve learned this week that there is nothing better for the creative process than a deadline and a need to occasionally render video.

I thrive in the sun and loathe the cold, and so it is typically my mandate to spend February in a place that is not Toronto. If this place also has a beach and cheap beers, then I am just about the happiest girl in the entire world. I am not sure if I have earned a trip this year. I have lost focus and I am debating whether a trip would be a distraction, or worse, an undeserved reward.

I am steeling myself for a cold one (and by that, I do not mean beer, but then again, yes I do mean beer. I love beer). It is very cold outside so I’ve been listening to music from sunny places because I know something that many people don’t: music can take you places. A song can be like a short story, a portal to the past. If you want, you can put your headphones on, close your eyes, and be at the Copacabana. I put this music on like I am wrapping a blanket of my travel memories around myself.

This week, I have started to read My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem and I was struck by this part:

Even the dictionary defines adventurer as “a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures,” but adventuress is “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.”

When women did travel, they seemed to come to a bad end, from the real Amelia Earhart to the fictional Thelma and Louise. In much of the world to this day, a woman may be disciplined or even killed for dishonoring her family if she leaves her home without a male relative, or her country without a male guardian’s written permission. In Saudi Arabia, women are still forbidden to drive a car, even to the hospital in an emergency, much less for an adventure. During the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring, both female citizens and foreign journalists paid the price of sexual assault for appearing in the public square.

As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”

I have distinct memories of landing in foreign countries, aware of the severe stress and anxiety it has always brought my Mother. She can’t sleep at night and I need to confirm to her that I am alive. At the same time, I am also the happiest I have ever felt in my life. I imagine that it is a similar experience to someone who is gay having their first sexual experience (is this a strange parallel to draw?) Everything is heightened: curiosity, fear, elation and most of all, like a sentence that in my mind is being bolded and underlined: this is what I am meant to do.

Here is another passage from “My Life on the Road” :

I wish I could imitate the Chinese women letter writers of at least a thousand years ago. Because they were forbidden to go to school like their brothers, they invented their own script—called nushu, or “women’s writing”—though the punishment for creating a secret language was death.  They wrote underground letters and poems of friendship to each other, quite consciously protesting the restrictions of their lives. As one wrote, “Men leave home to brave life in the outside world. But we women are no less courageous. We can create a language they cannot understand.”

This correspondence was so precious to them that some women were buried with their letters of friendship, yet enough survive for us to see that they wrote in a slender column down the center of each page, leaving wide margins as spaces for a correspondent to add her own words.

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” as Ursula Le Guin wrote, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”“

I want all of it. I want the quest, I want the companionship and I want to tell stories. It’s like breathing isn’t it? The quest is the inhale and the storytelling is the exhale. I want both, and I want more than that.

Yesterday I was talking to a girl in her early twenties about traveling alone. She asked very earnestly: “What do you do when you travel alone?” The short answer is: whatever you want. The long answer is: you meet people that you would have never met had you stayed at home. You see, hear and smell things that you would have otherwise overlooked. You get to be alone with your thoughts and then you frame them against the world you are from and the world you are now in. Being alone is just one part of the journey. It is just the starting point.

Reading My Life On The Road has been a gentle reminder that traveling is the substance to the stories I want to tell. The stories that I will wrap around myself up in on a cold winter’s day.

Queue the music.

30 Minute Playlist: The song