How to create your version of a mobile adventure – Part 1 of 3.
A year ago I had the book launch for my first published book. On June 28th, 2018, my friends, clients, and family gathered together to celebrate my success; it was the last day of my “normal” life and the jumping point for my latest adventure, My Mobile Life. June 29th, 2018, movers came to my house and put everything but the bare necessities into storage, officially beginning my homelessness by choice for the remainder of the year.
I traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Anchorage for the first six weeks. I returned to Virginia, staying with a dear friend, until my two boys were settled in for the fall and hopped on a plane – with a standby ticket courtesy of my flight attendant friend – heading for anywhere in the world that piqued my interest. I settled for a bit in a Portugese coastal town, being served fantastic fresh seafood dishes by an innkeeper who didn’t speak English and who I couldn’t speak Portugese with – we ended up being great friends – while I started writing my new book, based on my mobile life. My writing was mentored by Stephen King himself – or, at least, indirectly through his new book Elevation which was published during my travels.
As I sat in a softly worn wooden chair, laptop in front of me and a salmon dish having been devoured set aside to my right, I took a break from writing and glanced over the scenery in front of me: small white adobe houses with weathered red roofs nestled into the rocks and crevices of cliffs, gently sloping into a sea of fishing boats and beach umbrellas. I was having a hard time accepting this scene: how could I deserve this trip, this experience, when I had left my children to fend for themselves and when I wasn’t sure if I could afford to be away from work for so long. Anxiety bubbled up in me, my thoughts spiraling in my head to the point where they seemed to take up every small space in my brain.
But suddenly, I had a flashback of a vision board I did, where I wanted to write a book in a beach town with Stephen King as my guide, and felt that this gift of adventure, however hard for me to first accept, was already creating the life I had always envisioned for myself. And soon, a client would give me an opportunity that would pay for my travels entirely. The universe is a friendly place.
From Portugal, I moved on to New Zealand, where I was given an apartment and a car for a month by kind souls and where I was surrounded by female friends to encourage me on my journey. It was here that I got into dating for the first time in thirty years: my friends urged me to download Bumble, one of the more mature dating app options on the market, and through which I met George, a gorgeous New Zealand man who quickly ghosted me – that is, stopped responded to my messages completely and out of the blue. While this stung at first, I had let my heart rupture, shedding some of the armor that had grown from my past life and allowing myself to feel love and happiness, while also realizing that with those feelings comes rejection and sadness at times.
I came back from the world and settled in Richmond, Virginia, near my oldest son and away from the hustle of the D.C. suburbs, where I’ve found kindness in spades and feel comfortable saying that I have found my true home.
I look back at the past year and I almost feel like it was a dream, but then I remind myself that it was reality, and that I deserve a reality which makes me feel as lucky and grateful as I do now. All I had to do to get here was to open my heart – much easier said than done however – and let my light shine.