Who we become when we travel

One of our Ireland-based Destination Editors, AnneMarie McCarthy, reflects on travel experiences and how they have helped shaped major life decisions.

We’ve all played that game: “What would my life be like if I moved here? Who would I be?”

Most of the time, it’s not the place. We love the version of ourselves we are while traveling: relaxed and free from most responsibilities. Some destinations sing to us the minute we emerge on their streets. Despite a swirl in the human soup of air travel, we are suddenly invigorated. The destination is the looking glass, offering a glimpse at a different you. Bewitched, you are tempted to throw mundanity away on what you see.

And then you return to your desk. You never wear the daring dress or the dapper hat you bought. That was your holiday self. The possibility of that different person fades to a hum, and then to silence. 

But it never disappears completely.

Sometimes those alternate selves percolate under the surface of your day-to-day and pop up to rescue you when you least expect it.

I tasted independence in New York City, USA

It’s 2002, I’m 14 and I’m in New York City for the first time. I’ve walked straight onto a film set, at once wholly strange and deeply familiar. There is a crackling energy I can almost taste on my tongue, like the Pop Rocks I’m still young enough to enjoy. This city is clearly the center of the universe and I ache to join in, desperate to shape some of the boundless possibility fizzing inside me.

Nothing would stop New York Me because the only thing I am certain of is that something is stopping me, and it cannot be the simple fact that I am 14 and want to be 20. 

No, the real me would come out in New York – someone cool and independent, but in the vaguest possible sense, because I’m not totally sure what independence means. I just know I don’t want to be told what to do anymore, and am possibly the first person in history who has ever felt this strongly about it.

My NYC experience was so shallow it can’t even be cliche. I barely see the city, outside of the Met and a walk down Broadway. But I know that somewhere here, The Strokes and the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs are doing stuff in another New York that I have no idea how to find. The closest thing I get to the alternative scene I’m desperate for are some black accessories from Hot Topic, a money box souvenir in the shape of a yellow taxi cab and fuel for my desire to do my own thing, whatever the hell that is. 

And then…

It’s 2005. It’s the summer before I turn 18, my stuff is packed and I’m moving out. Not to New York, but to a room near university. I work more than 50 hours a week to make it happen, spending my days alternating between offices, cafes and restaurants. I fall in love, I get my heart broken, I stay up to meet the dawn the night I turn 18. 

When college starts again in September, I move to an even more decrepit room with carpets and wallpaper older than I am. My yellow taxi cab holds my tips on the dresser. New York Me has arrived. She lives in a dump she pays for herself but it’s her dump and she’s never going back.

I felt connection in Kratie, Cambodia

It’s 2013, I’m 24 and I’m staying at a hostel overlooking the river Mekong in Kratie. I dangle my feet over the wooden deck. I’ve been on the backpacking road for four months, leaving a well-paid sales job that was gold dust in a recession-struck Ireland. 

I’ve lost one gold ring, two t-shirts, one pair of headphones and approximately 15 lbs (sensible Asian portions and one acute case of food poisoning, thanks for asking). Also on the missing list: crippling panic attacks, the decade-long pretence of being blonde and my patience with working an unfulfilling yet financially rewarding job. I’ve diverged from the normal timeline, stepped off the frantic treadmill of earning. I ran until I could buy myself the breathing room to ask the question “What is this all about anyway?”.

Looking at the birds and the river, with a belly full of fresh seafood and skin still warm feels like a natural state of being, but even the inhabitants of this paradise work, and work harder than I could ever dream. How can I continue to feel this connected to the world without having all the time to enjoy it? One thing is for certain: I’m not going to find it selling computers over the phone. I decide – then and there – that I won’t go back to call-center life. The hunt to find meaning in work is on. 

And then…

You already know the ending to that story, though it takes a while to get to the point where I’m casually publishing essays for Lonely Planet without calling my mother in excitement. 

After an exhausting diversion into the charity sector, I land at a Lonely Planet desk I have yet to leave. I get up in the morning with a sense of purpose and genuine excitement. I know how much travel can change you for the better; it’s impossible to feel scared of the world when you have seen so much beauty in it. I may not be my calm and purposeful Cambodia Self every day, but I’ve never lost the unshakeable center of direction that I found on that quiet moment on the Mekong.

I dreamt of endings in Oxford, UK

It’s 2016, I’m 28 and I’ve dipped down to Oxford for the weekend after a London work trip. I’m the kind of person who does that now, even if I’m still in a hostel bunk bed. I amble the streets of Oxford which are utterly familiar to me despite never having been there. 

I sit on the lawn of Christ Church College and daydream. It’s not idyllic (shout out to the man in the souvenir shop who tried to humiliate me about my Irish accent – I’ll remember you forever!) but the experience has the quality of revisiting a cherished memory. 

The air feels heavy with the written word. I gaze on the carved door said to have inspired C.S. Lewis. I drink in the same pub as Tolkien. I feel emotional sitting on Lyra’s bench at the Botanic Gardens. But around me, the new students are beginning their matriculation ceremony in the sun and there it is; nagging, gnawing jealousy. Because it’s the first time I realize that a door has closed. I can be many things in life but I will never be in my early 20’s swigging champagne and starting out in the most beautiful university in the world. That part of my life is already written.

What is not written in is the notebook I insist on carrying, filled with stubbornly blank pages. I take it out again on this Oxford Sunday morning. There are some drabbles, observations, pleasant turns of phrase. But there is nothing complete and everything I’ve tried, I’ve either failed or failed to even try – my brain unable to sit still long enough to craft a narrative.

Writing, my second love, came swiftly after reading but although my paperback library is fairly impressive, my output is not. The giants of Oxford literary past taunt me as much as the first-year students; there is a gap unfulfilled and the clock is ticking. 

And then…

…I am 38 and sitting at my desk writing this. I have three novels sitting on my computer and a few short stories published out there in the wide world. Slowly, slowly, I trained myself, like a first-day student, to unrot my brain, accept my ADHD-like traits and learn to work with them instead of pretending I’m someone I’m not. 

The unreachable became my daily reality, and I fell right back in love with writing as it did. Today I feel like my longed-for Oxford Self, about to open a door on some of the most formative years of my life. Champagne optional.