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The Map Beneath My Skin (About my Wanderlust)

There’s a map folded beneath my skin.


Not a flat map, not the kind you pin on a classroom wall or tuck into a guidebook. No, this one is alive. It burns and pulses with a hidden light, woven into the fibers of my fascia and the sinew of my longing. It shimmers when I sleep and flares when I’m still too long. It knows things I haven’t lived yet… roads I’ve never walked but ache for anyway, landscapes I’ve only seen in dreams and movies that feel like memories from another life.


It’s not printed in ink or drawn on some old pirate parchment, but stitched into the fabric of my being… a quiet, shivering compass pointing in every direction at once. North tugs at my collarbone, East sings beneath my ribs, South presses like warmth into the soles of my feet, and West whispers always just behind my eyes. The directions don’t compete… they coexist, like longing and stillness, like hope and pain.


Maybe you could call it wanderlust. But even that word feels too tame, too curated, too ready-made for throw pillows and cookie cutter Pinterest quotes. What I feel is older, wilder, less polished. It’s not about vacation brochures or bucket lists. It’s about a holy ache, a kind of sacred unrest. It’s the ache to witness, to become part of something larger, stranger, and endlessly beautiful. To befriend all over this Earth before my death.


From the time I was small, I lived with this hunger I didn’t have words for. Adults mistook it for fidgeting. For daydreaming. For some kind of childish rebellion against my circumstances. But it wasn’t rebellion… it was yearning. It wasn’t that I didn’t like where I was (I mean I didn’t, foster homes, group homes, abusive bio-family… I wanted to run and I did sometimes) It was that it wasn’t enough (some of it was). Not because I was ungrateful, but because something inside me had always known there was more to see. More to touch. More to learn. More sky to take in. More strangers to smile at and be a part of their lives. More questions to ask. More answers to receive.


It wasn’t necessarily a hunger for international and unknown food because of how in-picky and adventurous I am with food, (though. I’ve known food insecurity)… It wasn’t for fame, though I’ve longed to be seen. It wasn’t even for safety, though safety often felt like an unreachable luxury. It was a hunger for elsewhere. For otherwheres. To know in person of stories not mine. For languages I couldn’t yet speak. For sidewalks that carried the weight of lives I’d never understand, but desperately wanted to.


I was the girl who pressed her cheek against car windows, watching scenery blur by like streaks of paint. I would whisper silent questions to the mountains. I would stare at passing houses and wonder who lived inside them… what they ate for breakfast, what they laughed about at dinner, whether they believed in ghosts. I wanted to trace every highway like a line in a poem (I try so hard to put every experience of mine into poems but others experiences are on a whole different level of beauty), every mountain pass like a metaphor for something just out of reach. I didn’t want the destination. I wanted the everything.i want to experience more than any human I know can think of experiencing.  That’s the legacy I want to leave behind me.


And yet, for so long, the world stayed out of reach.


Not metaphorically… but quite literally.


I didn’t grow up with the luxury of a passport. I didn’t grow up with frequent flyer miles or savings accounts or family road trips to national parks. I didn’t even grow up with stable housing, half the time. I moved from place to place not as an explorer, but as a child forced to adapt. I learned early how to enter a new space like a ghost… quiet, scanning, figuring out who I had to become to stay safe. And I did stay safe, or at least alive. I learned how to carry my own body like a suitcase… functional, necessary, heavy.


But the yearning wasn’t born from what I lacked. That would be too simple. The desire came from something innate… a current that had always run through me, regardless of my circumstances. A vibration. A call. Something as cellular as bone. I used to think it was just me… this restlessness, this daydreamy ache. But I’ve come to believe that some people are just born with open windows where others have walls. And through those windows, the world calls.


Still, it’s hard to explain this to people who’ve never felt it.


How do you explain that every city skyline makes your chest ache with something like recognition?


That seeing a video of someone walking through a market in Vietnam makes you teary eyed, not from sadness, but from longing?


That even when life is “good,” when you’re surrounded by love or structure or progress, there’s still that flutter in your sternum, that compass needle twitching, that reminder that you haven’t yet touched the soil of so many places your soul already knows?


Sometimes I think my wanderlust is a form of grief.


Grief for the years I couldn’t go. For the girl I was when I had to stay. For all the adventures I missed while I was locked inside homes where survival meant silence. Grief for the missed firsts… my first passport stamp, my first foreign sunset, my first time hearing another language spoken not as background noise, but as invitation. These are not memories. They are absences. Negative space where joy should have lived.


I remember watching other kids in school leave for family vacations… ski trips, cruises, “study abroad” summers. They came back with sunburns and souvenirs, with stories I couldn’t relate to. I tried to pretend I cared and not show my sadness, (as an adult I still try). I told myself I was different. That I was a homebody. That I liked being grounded. But the truth is, I just didn’t have the option to care. And pretending not to want what you can’t have is a skill you learn young when you grow up poor.


And yet, through all of it… through the trauma and the scarcity and the waiting… I held the dream close. Even if I had to delay it. Even if I had to bury it for a while. I kept it like an ember. Small. Quiet. Burning.


Some people dream of one place. A homeland. A specific city or climate or culture they feel called to. But me? I dream of everywhere. The whole map. The whole quilt of humankind. I want to fall in love with every corner of the earth the way I’ve fallen in love with books, and music, and moments that defy explanation. I want to see how people live differently, and what we share in common beneath all those differences. I want to walk streets that smell of spice and ocean and incense and diesel. I want to hear children laugh in languages I don’t understand and realize I understand them anyway.


I want to wake up in a tent beneath Icelandic stars, wrapped in cold and awe.


I want to run my fingers along the ancient stones of Machu Picchu, tracing history like a lifeline.


I want to drink mint tea in a Moroccan courtyard, slow and sweet and sun-warmed, the way time bends differently in places built on stories.


I want to kiss my husband under a swaying paper lantern in Kyoto, our hands clasped like prayers, our love a bridge between the familiar and the unknown.


I want to walk hand-in-hand through Prague’s winter fog, where every building feels like a secret and every corner feels like it might whisper your name.


I want to dance barefoot to street musicians in New Orleans, hips loose, heart open, body remembering that joy is a kind of rebellion.


I want to learn to make pasta from an Italian grandmother with flour-dusted hands and a fierce, kind laugh that breaks language barriers with a single note.


I want to swim with glowing plankton in the Maldives, my body lit from within and without, weightless in a moment I’ll never be able to explain fully… but will never forget.


I want to trace the cracks of my own country like a palm reader reading the future in a beloved hand. I want to see America not as a monolith but as a collage, a chorus of pain and resilience, ruin and rebirth.


But I don’t just want to consume these places… I want to feel them. I want to let them change me. I want to belong to the world the way it has always belonged to me.


To inhabit a place is different than simply visiting it. It means slowing down. Listening. Letting go of your own expectations and letting the place write its own story in you. It means learning the taste of patience, the rhythm of humility.


It means knowing that the world doesn’t owe you awe… but it will offer it, freely, if you pay attention.


And I do pay attention.


That’s something I’ve always been good at I believe… not just due to hyper vigilance from childhood trauma… but because it’s a real and deep part of who I am. I notice the way light spills through windows. I watch the way birds communicate in trees. I sit still enough to photograph a squirrel mid-blink. That kind of noticing… the kind that turns the ordinary into the sacred.. is also how I know I’m meant to travel. Not for luxury. Not for status. But for communion. For connection. For the quiet miracle of being alive in a place I never thought I’d see.


There’s a map folded beneath my skin, as I have mentioned… and every day I stay still too long, I feel it tighten. Not in bitterness… but in readiness. In hope. Because I still believe the map will unfold. I still believe I will get there. All the theres. I will meet the world not as a tourist but as a pilgrim, as someone who walks with reverence, someone who knows the price of waiting, someone who carries their own story as an offering.


I don’t want to die without seeing the world.


I don’t want to be buried in one place.


I want my soul to be scattered in a thousand footprints, each one pressed gently into soil I once walked, roads I once trusted with my body, places where I once said “Thank you. I see you. I’m here. Let me learn of you and cherish who and what awe you offer.”


Because this map inside me? It’s not just mine.


It’s inherited. It’s ancestral. It’s divine.


And it’s always calling.


I think some people travel to escape themselves. They pack a bag to avoid their reflection. They board planes hoping the altitude will make their pain seem smaller, hoping the jet stream will erase their history. I understand that impulse… I’ve wanted to vanish too. (could never afford it) But that’s not why I ache to go.


Not me.


I’ve been trapped before… in systems that didn’t see me, in diagnoses that didn’t fit me, or that fit me and I didn’t understand enough to care for, in abusive homes that broke my sense of self, in the chokehold of poverty that made the world feel like a members-only club I’d never be allowed into. I know what it is to be invisible. I know what it is to be punished for being too loud, too sensitive, too alive. I’ve lived in cages… some made by others, some I inherited, some I built to survive. So no, I don’t want to run from myself.


I want to return to her.


I want to expand into the full, wondrous shape of who I’ve always been… before the shrinking, before the masks, before the expectations and evaluations and survival adaptations. My desire for wandering isn’t aimless. It’s sacred. It’s not a detour… it’s a pilgrimage. It’s how I come home to the vastness I’ve always felt inside me but never had the room to live out loud.


Travel, for me, is not about indulgence. It’s about reclamation.


There is something holy about noticing. I mean really noticing. About walking slowly through a foreign city, not with a checklist or a camera used to prove I was there but with reverence. Letting the rhythm of a place rise up to meet you. Letting its scent settle in your bones. Letting your breath sync with the breath of the street, the breeze, getting up early to witness the baker opening her shop at dawn, noticing the man reading the newspaper in a language you can’t decode but deeply respect.


Holiness is the moment a wild bird tilts its head at you, just long enough to make you feel chosen. It’s sitting for an hour in a park where you understand no one’s language or inner world but somehow still feel like family. It’s the way the sun doesn’t care what country you’re in… it warms you just the same. It’s in the humility of not knowing. The freedom of being small… not in a diminishing way, but in a cleansing one.


We don’t talk about that enough… that sometimes, being small is a gift. That shrinking in wonder is different than shrinking in fear. In wonder, you don’t lose yourself… you shed the illusions. You become spacious. You become porous to joy, to awe, to perspective.


I don’t get bored easily. Stillness doesn’t scare me. I can sit for hours to capture a bird, squirrel or waterfall on video and people too, to wait for a bird’s wings to blur just right against the sky. I’ll watch people pass in silence, guessing their stories by the rhythm of their footsteps, the curve of their mouths. I’ll trace the movement of shadow on tile, the way light flickers through leaves like Morse code. Every detail is a secret waiting to be loved. That’s the kind of traveler I am. A noticer. A witness. An absorber of what most people rush past.


I hate rushing. I love living life as slowly as possible.


I don’t mind discomfort. My whole life has been an apprenticeship in discomfort. I know how to be cold and still find beauty. I know how to be tired and still be present. I don’t turn my nose up at strange food… I welcome it like a language. I want to know what joy tastes like in someone else’s culture. I want to eat without judgment. Drink without fear. I don’t want to compare things… I want to join them.


I’m not afraid of the unknown. I ache for it. Every city I haven’t seen is a story I haven’t lived. Every forest I haven’t entered is a cathedral I haven’t prayed in. Every whispering field is a door I want to walk through barefoot, just to feel the earth’s pulse without filter.


And yes… I know I’m a mother. A step mother… to 4 kids who don’t call me mom, 2 are adults, 1 is over 14 and 1 is almost 12… which makes it easier.


I know what it is to be needed every hour of the day. I know about packed schedules and the heaviness of grocery bags and medical bills and the endless loop of appointments and responsibilities and invisible labor. I live in a body that may one day carry both my own biological children along with my chronic pain so have had for a decade now. I know what it means to sacrifice rest for caretaking. I know what it means to love until there’s nothing left in the tank and then keep going anyway.


But even here… deep in the thick of motherhood… I dream.


Not of escaping it. Not of undoing it. But of integrating myself into the person I was always meant to be… including the mother, not replacing her. I dream of the day, six years from now, when our youngest turns eighteen. When instead of feeling hollow in a quiet house, I feel light. Free. Whole. When my husband and I… two people who have survived so much, loved so deeply, waited so long… pack bags we never had the chance to pack before. (Yes even if we have a bio kid, because then we have more of a choice together to say yes to it without a 3rd parent legally needing a say in the decision, no custody battles, just me, my husband and OUR child we make decisions together for- no that’s not in any way a dig at our 4 we currently have, it’s a dig at custody battles and the fact I never fully had any decisions when it came to the 4)

We can just pack our bags and travel for a bit with no strings attached to us. Just freedom,


Not as an act of running away, but as an act of arrival.


I imagine it sometimes when I’m doing dishes or folding laundry. I see it as clearly as anything I’ve ever known. Us standing in an airport, passports warm in our hands, grinning at each other like teenagers with a secret. I imagine the look in his eyes… that twinkle of “finally.” I imagine us slipping into the wide, glittering unknown like dancers stepping onto a long-awaited stage. Even just roadtrips!


It’s funny. Even now, while I daydream about that freedom, I also dream of another child. A baby I haven’t met yet. A soul not yet here, but whose heartbeat I already feel echoing faintly inside me like a drum in the distance. And still, the yearning to travel doesn’t vanish. It grows. Because now, it’s not just mine… it’s a gift I want to pass on.


I want to teach that child how to wander. Not just geographically, but spiritually. I want them to know how to look. How to listen. How to find beauty in the mundane. How to feel at home in a forest, in a bustling square, in a quiet museum, in a crowded train. How to know that wherever there is curiosity and kindness, there is belonging. That wherever there is breath, there is something sacred to witness.


I want all my children to know that a life can hold both roots and wings.


That it’s not a betrayal of home to want to leave it. That geography is more than terrain… it is story, it is song, it is the beating heart of people and struggle and beauty and resilience. That cultures are not costumes to try on… they are living, breathing legacies that deserve reverence. That to travel is not to consume, but to commune. To bow your head and say, “Thank you for letting me be here.”


Some days, I feel so trapped I could scream.


Not because I don’t love my life… truly I do. But because my soul is bigger than my calendar. Because I’ve spent so many years surviving that the idea of thriving feels almost inappropriate, like I have to apologize for wanting more. But what is more radical than joy after trauma? What is more powerful than a girl who was beaten, silenced, neglected… saying, I want to dance on foreign streets anyway?


In a world that tries to tell poor girls to stay small, to stay invisible, to stay grateful for crumbs… maybe dreaming of everywhere is the loudest kind of liberation.


There are playlists I keep just for this. Indie wanderlust, film scores, musical soundtracks, folk and country songs, all that sound like freedom. Songs that break my heart in the most beautiful way. They make the walls of my living room dissolve into train cars and misty cliffs and far-off marketplaces. Songs that feel like motion, even when I’m still. I play them while I cook, while I cry, while I write. They remind me that I’m already on the way, even when my body is rooted.


And then there’s movies, specifically and most recently for me… The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.


God, that movie.


It’s not just a film to me… it’s a spiritual artifact. A mirror. A message in a bottle thrown straight into my heart. I come back to it again and again, not because of the cinematography (though it’s stunning), but because of him. Walter. That quiet, overlooked, anxious man who wakes up one day and goes. Not because he stops being afraid… but because he chooses something bigger than fear. He finds courage not all at once, but in quiet, stubborn steps.


That’s me.


That’s so me.


I don’t want to escape into fantasy. I want to use it as a bridge… a launchpad into a life worth inhabiting. That movie is a prayer I didn’t know I was whispering. A prophecy. A promise. A whisper that says, “You are not too late. You are not too broken. You are not foolish for dreaming.”


There’s a line in the trailer… a quote from James Thurber… that haunts me, heals me: “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel… that is the purpose of life.” I carry that quote like a tattoo on the inside of my ribs. It aches sometimes. But mostly, it glows.


And I believe, deep down, that it’s still possible.


I believe in second chances. In last-minute flight deals. In roadside diners and midnight trains. In maps scribbled on napkins and conversations with strangers that become chapters in your soul. I believe that even people like me… people who’ve known silence, who’ve known the sharpness of being unwanted… can one day be held by the world. Not pitied. Held. Welcomed. Called by name.


Maybe I’ll never be rich. Maybe I’ll never check off every country. But I will try. Oh how I will try.


I will chase sunsets like they owe me nothing. I will cry in cathedrals. I will write postcards to myself from lives I never thought I’d get to live. I will carry my camera like a reverent artifact, capturing what makes the world shimmer. I will laugh with strangers and learn phrases I’ll forget and remember them again in dreams.


I will let the world change me.


And when I die… someday, far in the future… I hope the soles of my feet are worn smooth from wandering. I hope my hair smells like salt and wildflowers. I hope my children say, She went. She dared. She never stopped looking.


Because there is a compass inside me.


And it points, always, toward wonder.

 
 
 

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