On Having to Go x "She Got Up and Walked Away" by Stevie Smith
There’s a few things I say over and over again when it comes to travel, and you might have heard them all before, quietly making its way in to the paragraphs of a range of articles and musings here. The one I’ve said most often is along the lines of “immersing yourself in a new city like a local”. But the one I’ve repeated, maybe here, maybe in my journal, and maybe in my many attempts of explaining why I travel to my loved ones is this: Travel is my reset button.
Albeit, a relatively expensive one. I wish I could be one of those people who went out on jogs in the park and feel completely refreshed (what I do like to do is blast Kendrick Lamar and pretend I’m running, and then getting back home with even more thoughts in my head).
I just had to get up and go away. Just for a little while. Just for a breather. I wasn’t unhappy in any way, but something just didn’t feel right. Maybe there wasn’t any problem at all, and I just needed to get out of a rut. And so I did.
I don’t really know what was clouding my head.
Was it the post-travel blues? Given that I just had five month trip of a lifetime just before that?
Was I in a limbo, trying to reconcile who I was before and who I have become now?
Was I struggling with a really bad case of an imposter syndrome?
Was I lonely? Or was I surrounded by too many people that I needed a break?
Maybe all of the above, maybe none at all. It was getting darker.
This feeling isn’t something new. First, it’s a feeling any human has gone through, if not multiple times throughout one’s life. But I’m that maniac that just needs to fix things. A stressful week? Relationship problems? A project roadblock? Well, if you need me, I’ll be sitting in that corner with a legal pad writing the pros and cons and Plan A to D of how I’m going to strategize my way out of it. I cant steep myself in a problem long enough before attempting to resolve it. So I just had to do something.
On top of that, I have a problem of associating most of my cherished memories in travel moments. Before I went on my travels last May, my happiest time was my five months of travel. And before that, was a month long summer camp in the Western part of Norway right before I turned 15. If you catch me staring blankly, that means I’m daydreaming of the days I was there. If I have trouble sleeping, I picture that time I found myself in a remote island at the Western-most tip of Java, with the sky turning purple, sitting on soft sand with a small deer and hog a few meters not far behind me. So I guess I have a problem with staying present and actually really enjoying the moments where I’m ‘home’.
It felt like I my time was ticking, as I approach a more ‘adult’ life with an actual career. Somehow it felt like the very last time I could spend my time. Youth is wasted on the young, and I’m trying as much as possible to do the opposite. I guess I’m afraid that once I become an ‘adult’ I’d worry too much about, I don’t know… adult things (Taxes? Children? Retirement?), to even think to explore the part of the map I haven’t pinned. Stevie Smith’s poem captured that sense of urgency.
The dialogue-like style of writing isn’t exactly how the people who know me would talk about my travels. It’s true what they think: it’s out of the pleasure of adventure and meeting people. But it’s not just that, and that’s what they didn’t get, or more like, what I didn’t really share enough with them, or here, on this blog. The dialogue feels more internal, a conversation between myself and I, trying to understand why I have to do what I do.
In fact, it wasn’t the last time. It wont be the last time. I know along the (hopefully) long journey ahead of me, there would be moments I don’t feel my best like the next person, and I’d venture out in need of a reset button. Then again, what’s so wrong with that? Isn’t that what we do? We go on a ‘self-care’ day and pamper ourselves silly. We train for marathons. We buy something that we don’t need and is far beyond our spending power, and say “why the heck not?”
If travel is still a drug for me, I hope it stays recreational.
“She got up and went away” poem by Stevie Smith. Read the poem here. I found her poem as an epigraph of KUDOS by Rachel Cusk in a book shop in Paris.
Stevie Smith isn’t an extremely well known poet, but the New York Review describes her better than I ever could: “She is a female William Blake, an Emily Dickinson of the English suburbs, a mixture of Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and the Brothers Grimm. Her reading style, which became legendary, with her cropped hair, baleful expression, little-girl dresses, and singsong lugubrious chanting voice, was described (by Jonathan Miller) as a cross between Mary Poppins and Lawrence Olivier’s Richard III. Seamus Heaney called it a combination of Gretel and the witch.”
Words by Nadia Pritta Wibisono