IMPORTANT UPDATE: I have realized so much more about my life and background and self-protective mechanisms since writing this essay. Which is something I always feared about writing: I would write something and share it and it would be as true as I knew it to be… and then I would grow older and wiser and realize I wrote half-truths from half-understanding. But the only alternative to that scenario is to not write or share my writing at all. And that’s not a real option for me. So please read this essay just knowing it is incomplete …and I’ll update it when I can. And know I really do love adventure and travel and that the walls I built around my heart were for more complex reasons than just moving a lot. Though if you read the essay, you can probably guess that! Also, my love for adventure is actually much more authentic than I felt it to be at the time I wrote this essay. I was just working through things. But I hope even in it’s imperfections, this essay can connect with the tendency we all have to self-protect and hide even from ourselves sometimes. Anyhow…
I fear I have cloaked myself in the idea of adventure– and hidden the heart I have for home and love and connection– since I was a small child. I remember the moment I first closed my heart off: a child uprooted once again in the move to a new place, I was lying on my bed in a new room staring up at a new ceiling and telling my heart, “Don’t attach to people, because they won’t be in your life for long. And if you don’t get attached to them, it will hurt less when you have to say goodbye.” It was a wise thought to a child with so little control over life: I couldn’t control moving to new places and who was in and out of my life, but I could at least try to control how attached I got to people. And in that way, perhaps I could protect myself better from pain which I otherwise had no real power to avoid.
One thought we take hold of in one moment can shape so much of ourselves and our lives. But such moments are rarely isolated, but more often a culmination of moments. To me, staring up at the ceiling and telling myself to close off my heart was but a moment that culminated many moments: moments of feeling helpless and lonely, moments of missing people and rehearsing memories of people and places so I wouldn’t forget them, and moments feeling like the weird, new kid who doesn’t fit in– all eyes in a room turned on you, because you are so clearly the thing that doesn’t belong there. Indeed, as a shy and sensitive Navy kid, living in houses where some boxes were never unpacked in anticipation of the next move, I knew all those feelings well. With the transient life of the Navy, if I wasn’t the one moving away and leaving to go threaten other people’s space and status quo, it seemed I was the one being left behind, as Navy friends moved away from me too. So there was a lot of pain already which built that brick I laid in front of my heart when I stared up at that ceiling and told my heart not to do what hearts are meant to do.
I don’t remember the exact moments I laid the other bricks around my heart, though. I just know I was still a child when I also started to soothe the fears of living in a new place by telling myself that if life didn’t work out wherever I was, it was okay because I wouldn’t be there long… and maybe life would work out in the next place. Maybe I would feel like I belonged there. Maybe I would meet people I instantly connected with and who understood me. Maybe I would finally make friends. This kept me always looking for the next place whenever it seemed like life wouldn’t go the way I wanted it to where I was. This detachment was another brick around my heart.
But if things were going okay, I would also remind myself: I never know how long I will live somewhere. I would remind myself of that over and over again, for fear I would forget and let my roots creep down and dig deep… only to be painfully uprooted again. After all, you can’t be uprooted if you don’t let your roots down. So I kept my roots curled up tight and safe, repeating guarded thoughts to soothe my fears, building up mental and emotional bricks of what seemed like self-protection around my heart starting at a tender age, living in detached uncertainty to try to stay safe from pain.
Having been just a child, I have to admire my own craftsmanship: the bricks I built of detachment and uncertainty soothed my fears and made me feel safe. I was just a child trying to protect myself and trying to be there for me. And with only a child’s resources, I built a near impenetrable wall out of rather brilliant bricks. Which is a skill I think more of us have than we realize. So I’m not bragging here. But indeed, I built such a solid wall that I have struggled in adulthood to dislodge one single hidden brick of it.
Indeed, as an adult, I have still soothed myself with escapes in my fantasies to the next place I might live when life is not going how I want it to go. So when I’ve had trouble connecting or feel like I don’t belong where I am, I imagine perhaps finding that belonging in the mountains of Colorado… fantasizing I can find the camaraderie again that I once found in snow boarding. Or when I’ve felt like either rejection or loss are imminent where I am, I imagine dissolving the pain of rejection in the saltwater while I surf in Hawaii. As saltwater heals everything. So, it’s not at all that I want to move: it’s that I want to feel emotionally safe. So I escape to safe places in my mind when where I actually am doesn’t feel safe. Running away in my mind, just like I have since I was a child.
Similarly, I have still warned myself that I never know how long I will live somewhere. Even though that is not out of my control in the same way it was as a child. I can makes plans and make choices now. But my heart hasn’t quite grown up. Into my adulthood, my heart’s still followed it’s childhood command to not get attached. Indeed, I have spent a fair amount of time as an adult not letting myself just be where I am– wallowing in an uncertainty that shouldn’t even hold much weight in my life. Because I am in control of my life decisions now. Yet with all that control I’ve still had the feeling and practice that I can never plan my life more than 3 months in advance. And if I start to plan, it feels like I’m forming an attachment to where I am that is fraught with vulnerability. This all seems so complicated. But all the complication is just me trying to soothe my fears, avoid pain, and grasp for a feeling of control without being quite honest with myself.
So what does adventure have to do with all this?
Well, to go back to the beginning with an epiphany for which I have long looked: adventure is the cloak I’ve used to hide the ugly wall of bricks around my heart. Because building metaphorical walls of pain bricks around your heart is rather sad. But adventure is fun and exciting. It’s a surefire way to live life to the fullest. It’s also just a fortunate coincidence that adventuring through life also allows one to not attach to people or places and that, at least how I fashioned them in my mind, “adventurers”– oddly enough much like homesick, misfit children who are frequently uprooted– never know how long they will be somewhere and don’t bother to make long term plans*. But unlike those children, adventurers have control over their lives. And as an adventurer, the change and uncertainty of life is transformed from something sad and scary to something exciting and glamorous.
So, I don’t think it was any coincidence that the same time I started building a wall around my heart, I also started dreaming of being an adventurer when I grew up. Indeed, it’s taken me a long, long time to see it, but I have used the vague idea of adventure both to run towards life and to hide from life. And now, in the current deep and true adventure I find myself in– of tearing down this wall around my heart with self-honesty– I am holding the cloak of adventure in my hand and scrutinizing it.
Because I have made such a confusing mess of my dear friend adventure.
I feel this is because I have misused adventure as this cloak for the wall around my heart. Consequently, I have used adventure for something for which it should never be used: I’ve used adventure to hide my very heart– my heart for home and family and friends and belonging and connectedness. As I might have dreamt of growing up to be an adventurer, but I dreamt other deeper dreams as well. I just would barely let myself dream them, because they felt so much further out of reach than adventure and I felt more vulnerable in dreaming them somehow.
As those dreams were dreams of home and belonging and love and connection. They were dreams of family and best friends and true love and feeling rooted and grounded and home. I even dreamt of making a home for the elderly and orphans and wayward animals, so they would all have homes too. But in moving from place to place struggling to even make friends… those type of dreams seemed like the most out of reach fantasies. And indeed, they seemed so much further out of reach and out of my control than ideas of adventure did. And to dream of adventure was to dream of uncertainty and change and feeling out of place as a good thing, transforming the very nature of what was out of my control. So to dream of adventure made me feel powerful, not vulnerable– like dreams of love and home and connection did. Especially as adventure could also keep me safe from the dangers of attachment.
In short, like most coping mechanisms, my idea of adventure has been a bit complicated. Consequently, I have always used the term “adventure” in multiple ways. Just as I’ve used “adventure” itself in different ways in my life. As I certainly have used “adventure” as a means to run towards life. Like when, as an incredibly shy and timid person, I appealed to the spirit of adventure to challenge myself to admit the things I actually cared about and wanted to do. That appeal ignited the boldness and adventure with which I truly wanted to live. This was a life-changing move towards deep authenticity for me. Indeed, living the idea of being an adventurer as one who faces their fears and approaches life with openness and wonder and gratitude and presence and radical self-honesty, helped me come alive and grow more outwardly into my true self. To me, this expansive concept of adventure, which I now distinguish as “deep and true adventure” for clarity’s sake, has always been at the heart of me wanting to “be an adventurer”.
Yet at the same time, “adventurer” is confusingly synonymously used with “traveler”… specifically, “world traveler” or someone who lives a life of adventurous pursuits, not just someone who lives life itself in all its forms with the spirit of adventure. And, indeed, I also complicatedly dreamt of being an adventurer in this more conventional way as well, largely inspired by the movie, The Chipmunk Adventure, and my parent’s cool Marine friend who would always bring back neat presents from wherever he had been around the world. Indeed, watching animated chipmunks sing their way around the world and holding that tiny, silk Japanese change purse from a cool Marine lit the spark of adventure in me. But also, I now realize, my fantasies of adventure were additionally fueled by my subconscious desire to transform things of sadness and fear in my life, like uprooting and change and uncertainty and lacking connection and being the new kid, into something good and fun. Ironically for such a thing as adventure, the idea of adventure held the comfort of control for me.
But nevertheless, I never wanted to be that type of traveling adventurer for more than a year or two. As ever since I was little, I just had the idea of taking a “grand tour” of the world for a year or two after I graduated high school or college, or even as an extended honeymoon after I married Cowboy from Newsies. Those were my childhood ideas of that sort of adventure. Except when I needed the thought of adventure to soothe my fears. Then I imagined flitting around the world invulnerably forever. But even in that imagining, I never actually wanted to be that adventurer as a lifestyle forever: I only wanted to always feel emotionally safe and transform scary and sad things into fun and excitement. And have life not feel so out of my control.
As you can tell, I’m having a bit of an identity crisis as an adventurer. But I really do think I have a love of adventure which didn’t just spring up from attachment issues. Indeed, I love the heart of adventure and how it can wake us up to life and make us more present to experience. And I like how it’s fun. But adventure is just not the primary passion I’ve made it out to be in my life. As I didn’t even travel the world after high school when I had the chance. Then I didn’t travel the world after college when I had the chance.
Rather, when I went to college, my freshman seminar professor challenged us– in between tales of Agamemnon returning home from Troy and Oedipus Rex marrying his mother– that if there were anywhere else we would rather be and something else we would rather be doing, we shouldn’t be in his classroom or we were wasting our precious lives. At this assertion, I remember sinking in my seat at my desk, face turning red, feeling like he was somehow personally calling me out. As for years I had said I didn’t even want to go to college. So when faced with his challenge, I seriously considered if I was betraying my dreams of adventure to be in college instead. But in my introspection, for all I’d been telling myself for years, I strangely found in my heart of hearts that I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Yet I had always told myself I wanted quite the opposite: I didn’t want to go to college, let alone in my “hometown”. It was as unconventional and unadventurous as I could get: living still at home in a small town, going to the same school as all my siblings, going to college even though school was “the man”. Yet somehow it was absolutely where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing.
And I loved it so much. Yes, I spiced it up with tree climbing and fountain hopping and hide-and-go seek in the library stacks and signing up for adventure literature classes and undertaking impromptu road trips and taking winters off to pay for school by teaching snow boarding. And I spent a LOT of time dancing. But I loved just about every bit of convention and routine as well. And I loved being home and having slumber parties with my college friends like it was middle school, eating my mom’s homemade pizza and watching Adventure Time. And I loved just still being with family and friends in familiar places so full of memories. I loved being home.
So why hadn’t I ever known myself well enough in life to be able to know where I truly wanted to be before my professor called us all out? I think it’s because of how I’ve hid my heart throughout my life, even from myself, starting with that first brick I placed in front of that heart.
As when I graduated college, I finally did run off to see the world to live my childhood dream (And item #2 on my life list) of sailing tall ships. But my childhood dream was to learn to sail tall ships, not to stay on them forever. Yet when I was on tall ships, I also had the world at my fingertips. I could have so easily finally traveled the world. But I didn’t. Instead, I cried myself to sleep in my bunk in Sweden because I was homesick. I wanted to see Scandinavia with my family, not without them. And I skipped exploring Southern Europe to fly home early from Norway to go to my friends’ wedding and to finally eat my mom’s homemade pizza again. Then I turned down a dream job sailing the Caribbean (Originally item #3 on my life list) to witness my nephew’s birth and spend Christmas with my family. And when my parents moved away from my “hometown”, I also grieved the home I didn’t know I’d left behind for good to sail tall ships– wanting in my grief to be able to have such a home again so much more than wanting any adventures.
As the truth is, I am an adventurer who chooses home and family over adventure again and again. My true north is home. My true north is family. And of course– Sunday school answer– my true north is Jesus. These are the things I find myself turning back towards again and again, wherever life has taken me. As love is indeed the star to this wandering bark. And I think it’s time I owned that. I think it’s time to admit I don’t really even want to travel the world– even for just a year or two– as much as I want to be home, sharing life with people I love.
Because once upon a time as a child, I lessened the intensity of my tumultuous feelings of being uprooted from every home I ever knew by comforting myself with thoughts of adventure, which transformed those tumultuous feelings into something not so sad. Then as an adult, I used adventure to perpetuate not just the thought patterns I’d used as a child, but even the patterns of uprooting which had made me sad– because they are the patterns I know and find comfortable.
And now, still subconsciously following the command of my heart to not attach to people, I’ve unconsciously and guardedly kept people from getting too close and knowing the me beyond “adventure” by basically pointing behind them and saying, “oh look, adventure!” and then running away. Yes, I’m still there standing in front of you regaling you about that one time I biked down the West Coast with only my Dad’s sea bag on a fixie-to-3-speed bike from the 80s and found a buffet of cheese cubes in Oregon. Yet at the same time, I am hiding and you can’t find me or my truest heart under the looming shadow of adventure. But it’s time to step out of that shadow.
So dear adventure, I’m so sorry for using you. I’d like to stop. I’d like to be honest with myself and take off adventure as a shield. As that is deep and true adventure: to allow myself to feel utterly vulnerable and exposed in laying aside adventure as a coping mechanism. To admit to myself that I truly would rather be where I am, than living a life of snow boarding in Colorado or surfing the waves of Hawaii. To admit that I don’t really care so much if I ever take that “grand tour”. And to be honest that I escape to those ideas of adventure in fear and insecurity, not in the bold spirit of adventure. It’s time to be honest about my deeper values of family and love and connectedness and appreciation for LIFE itself, instead of so often taking up the designed-to-make-me-feel-safe pretense of being an adventure driven person.
But does being honest about this aspect of the true role of adventure in my life mean I am not an adventurer anymore? I don’t think it does. I mean, I will always take the spirit of adventure into my life, regardless of what I am doing. And I still like to have adventures, like I always have. I do love adventure. Indeed, my authentic love of adventure is what allowed me to hide behind it so well. So, it’s not that I don’t love adventure, it’s just that I love home and family so much more. And so, what I want in my life even more than adventure is to foster a sense of home and connection and belonging and to share that with the people I love. Along with some dancing and road trips and adventurous shenanigans of course.
As I’ve never been just a simple adventurer anyway. Indeed, in high school, when I had not hidden myself as deeply in the idea of adventure, I called myself an “adventurous homebody”: someone with an adventurous soul who simultaneously loves to be at home, someone who wants to have an adventure one day and stay snuggled inside a homemade blanket fort listening to old radio shows the next, an adventurer with a strong proclivity for pajama pants and a longing for home. And that is who I am: truly a complicated creature of deep attachment issues and existential ideas of adventure who wants to feel home even more than I want to adventure anywhere. And yet, in all of that complexity, I am just another human. Because don’t we all, in one way or another, confusingly hide from ourselves and others by building up walls of pain bricks around our hearts, protecting ourselves where we’ve most felt wounded by turning our pain into walls?
Indeed, I’m just human. Though my friend described me as a butterfly once. As she felt I flit from place to place and thing to thing, un-tethered and carefree. And yes, sometimes I am simply a joyous butterfly, letting myself just be in the beautiful moments of life. But in this case, my friend was misinterpreting my path of flight: I was not flitting around like a butterfly because I was carefree– I was exhaustedly beating my wings, afraid to stop and land.
As I don’t want to be an un-tethered adventurer ready to travel the world on a whim: I want to be home. I want to be deeply rooted and connected with the people I love. I want to be honest with myself about how much people mean to me and value them rather than run from them. I want to make myself at home where I am and invest in where I am and make plans more than 3 months in advance. I want to reconnect to my dreams of love and connection and rootedness. It’s just that I have felt fear rise in my heart whenever I admit that. As to just be honest with myself about how I care for home and people and to just let myself be where I am is to leave behind lifelong defense mechanisms. It’s to abandon my ramparts and step into vulnerability. As people and staying put are not safe like adventure is. To alight in one place means I can be caught. And if I can be caught, I can be hurt.
As I have simply long been afraid of getting attached to people that you can’t trust will stay in your life. I fear investing in where I am and committing to be there, just to have people I care about leave me or to find– for all my investment– that I still never end up truly belonging or, even worse, will actually find myself finally feeling at home only to be uprooted again. Indeed, I’m afraid of the pain of staying put to be left, of attaching to detach, and of rooting to be uprooted. It’s what I’ve known and have long avoided. Whereas investing and being where I am as fully as possible… letting people in and letting myself attach to them… I’ve practiced the opposite for a long, long time. Ever since, with a fear that felt like strength, I laid that first brick in front of my heart.
But I am tired of being a frantic butterfly afraid to land. I want to be home.
And just admitting that feels like its own homecoming. Simply because it’s reconnecting me to myself and my truest heart. And what has actually permitted me to finally have these self-realizations is that, in my fear of sending roots out towards people and places, I became rooted in myself and rooted in the love of Christ. And I’ve used the joy and peace and goodness found in that inner-rootedness to remain self-contained– not having the neediness needed to reach out and connect with people. But that sort of self-containment is not quite a good thing and not what people were meant for: we were meant to need each other and reach out for each other and connect in that need. And now I’ve realized too that the sort of inner stability and strength I developed in my own rootedness can actually make sending out other roots to people and places feel way less vulnerable and so somehow doable. Because my life supply doesn’t rely on only those roots I send out. But even if that were not the case, I still wish I could go back to myself staring up at the ceiling and tell my heart instead that people were worth the pain. So…many realizations and epiphanies later, I am finally letting my roots down and sending them out.
That is to say: I’m home.
*Obviously there are adventurers who do make long term plans and adventurers who don’t have attachment issues like me. So, I just want to be clear that this essay largely addresses adventure as I have used it as a coping mechanism for life and isn’t about simply good and lovely and fun adventure itself. I think that’s clear. But I know so many awesome adventurers who, unlike me, are adventurers through and through and quite straightforwardly. They have the true hearts of adventurers, and not the heart of an adventurous homebody like me. So, I just want to acknowledge that and draw some distinctions here. 🙂