Not All Who Wander Are Lost But I Sure As Hell Am

on muddling through arduous inner journeys

Hi y’all. In September I shared this piece on rebuilding my self-worth when a long leave of absence from work caused me to question my existence:

Escaping the "Validation Vacuum"

While I stand by what I said in that post, I wrote it while in an “upswing”—I was feeling great about life and positive about what the future held. Now more of the hard realities of living abroad are setting in. I’m feeling a sense of loss as a very different future from the one I’d envisioned starts to take shape. So this week’s essay is a reflection on trying to find my way again, interspersed with photos taken while roaming through the parks and nature preserves of Northern California.

I know this too will pass, but in the meantime, tell me—how do you ground yourself when you feel set adrift or like you’ve lost your way?

Have a wonderful rest of your week,
Sam

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I have wandering feet and a wandering mind. Like a shark that swims to keep from drowning, I feel the need to move constantly, and I often sink deep into reflection as I meander. Fortunately, I am an excellent navigator and hardly ever get myself lost. But once, on a gray, muggy summer afternoon in New York when I was twenty years old, my mind roamed so far I went into a trance, while my feet carried me of their own volition. I was crying—maybe for a reason, but more likely for no real reason at all—and had blocked out the world in favor of my cluttered thoughts. I stumbled forward with bleary eyes, staring without seeing, until eventually, like a startled sleepwalker, I came to and found myself on a corner where I’d never stood before. A twinge of fear plucked my heartstrings. I had no idea where I was, or even how far I’d gone.

I’m reliving that moment over and over lately. Even though I have a gorgeous life that allows me to travel and see the world and do things I love, I feel that somehow I’ve drifted off course and I don’t know where to go from here. I’ve always promised you authenticity, that I would shine a light on our inner journeys. I intend to keep that promise even when the journey in question is more quagmire than enlightening voyage of discovery, because I want to tell the truth. And the truth is, I am hopelessly lost. After a succession of flukes and decisions—both obviously important and seemingly small when I made them—I’ve awakened in a reality I neither recognize nor understand.

I think this happens to everyone at some point. It creeps in slowly. We have an idea of what our future will look like, then life happens. It forces us to make uncomfortable choices, to close some doors. Then one day we realize the future we’d imagined is no longer possible, and we grieve for it.

My impossible future was a little brick townhouse in D.C., with an English basement that my parents and in-laws could live in during extended visits to their grandchildren. It was neighborhood restaurants and old friends around the corner and an herb garden out back. It was father-daughter coffees on Sundays during visits to California.

But now I’ve moved to a far-off country. I’ve effectively lost my job and more importantly, I’ve lost my dad. There won’t be Sunday coffees anymore, and probably no brick townhouse. It’s as though a once-familiar landscape morphed around me into something sinister—like mountains erupted out of level earth, hiding the path ahead from my sight. I know neither how to find it again nor where it leads.

That’s a first for me. I’ve often flown by the seat of my pants, but always had, at the very least, the sense that my course was directionally correct. There was a semblance of a plan, even if I knew I’d tear it up later in favor of a new, improved one.

There is literally no plan now, no trajectory to speak of. I float through life unmoored. I go to my tennis lessons, I go out to eat. I play mahjong with other embassy wives and gossip about the royal family. I sit in my apartment, watching the daylight turn from soft white in the morning to afternoon’s pale yellow and finally to cornflower dusk. I feel stagnant and frivolous. I haven’t got a clue what I’m driving at.

Writing is a refuge, and I want to keep doing it forever, preferably in a way that makes me enough money to live. But I have no plan for that, either. And because I’m not sure I truly understand reality anymore, my thoughts seem to lose all coherence as soon as they hit the page, like marbles spilled across a hardwood floor. The more I draft sentences and paragraphs, the more I forget what the main idea was. I take this all as evidence of just how lost I am—I can’t even map my own damn brain—and it makes me question how I can continue to exist in this strange, alternate timeline where I live in Egypt and have no job and no dad and nothing but my increasingly frazzled wits to sustain me.

I am in suspended animation on that New York street corner, one foot off the curb, unsure of where I should plant it to find my path again. I fear the unknown. I fear I’ll head the wrong way.

In hopes of rediscovering my path, I am clinging to the thing that helped me find my way home from that drizzly block somewhere south of Union Square: my innate sense of direction. It’s my superpower, and it’s all I have left. I have to trust it now. So I’ll shuffle ahead, like a hiker in the dead of night, stepping gingerly as I test the trail ahead for safe footholds.

The road looks dark now. But day must break eventually, and it will light the way.

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elsewhere

• Big congrats to my friend gkgaius who just published his novella, EMELIA, a historical fiction thriller. Check it out on Amazon!

• Egypt is hosting COP27, an international climate conference which many world leaders are attending. The Egyptian government is facing criticism over an alleged crackdown on protests and activism ahead of the conference. [CNN]

• Frommer’s best places to go in 2023 includes unexpected destinations like the Yukon Territory, West Africa by expedition ship, and Macon, Georgia. [Frommer’s]

• The fiercely independent North Macedonian “micronation” of Vevčani (population 2,400) issues souvenir currency and passports as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to assert its autonomy and promote tourism. [BBC Travel]

“a flower may be stomped on, but in time it will stand back up”

While I was staying with my mom, I went through a pile of my childhood artwork and came across this gem. I had a real flair for the dramatic as a kid, and must have produced this nonsensical, inspirational platitude in one of my more wistful moments. Yes, that is me quoting myself. Confucius better watch out, because baby Sam is going to give him a run for his money! Sarcasm aside, it feels weirdly poignant following this week’s essay—I may be down now, but in time I’ll stand back up.

See you next Tuesday.