what i’m up to

I’m back in Cambodia after a monthish-long holiday abroad, and I appear to have finally gotten over the jet-lag. Somehow it always hits me hardest travelling westward. I spent half of April and most of May in Australia and New Zealand – both places I had planned to get to back in 2020 before life as we knew it was COVID-cancelled – and briefly in Singapore. It also ticked my bucket-list 6th continent item off at long last. I had the best time exploring Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney, Christchurch, Kaikoura, and Singapore and would have made it to a few more places if I hadn’t caught COVID myself somewhere along the way and had to spend a week isolating.

While I didn’t get to see everything (like the Shire) or everyone (here’s looking at you, my friends in Auckland) I’d planned to in New Zealand, I had a wonderful, special, and certainly memorable visit (and isolation) with my brother and sister-in-law, who fortunately didn’t get sick along with me. We aren’t in a post-COVID world yet, but it is certainly nice that it is becoming more manageable and survivable (thank you vaccines!!) and that the world is slowly re-opening.

Amongst the LONG list of awesome experiences across the countries, some highlights (aside from all the time spent with friends and eating so much deliciousness) include:

• scootering around Brisbane and shopping
• seeing the ocean and relaxing in Gold Coast
• ferry rides and exploring Sydney (including bookstores as well as beaches)
• seeing a show at the Sydney Opera House
• visiting the International Antarctic Centre (and even getting to sit in on a lecture for a group who were heading down to the NZ station!)
• seeing whales and soaking up the ocean and mountain views in Kaikoura
• trivia night with my brother at his local pub
• lounging in hot springs in the foothills of the Southern Alps (or thereabouts)
• wine tasting in Marlborough and a gin tasting & tour at the foot of Mt. Fyffe
• Singapore marina by night

Returning to Cambodia has felt like such a homecoming, and as I look ahead at June and the coming months, I know I hope to continue calling it home for a while yet. We shall see what happens!

what i’m thinking

Much of my life, growing up as I did across cultures, countries, and continents, I’ve felt a keen sense of not-belonging, of exclusion and missing something everyone else seems to possess. Having an identity with roots in so many opposite and opposing cultures, traditions, and memories has been one of the greatest challenges in my life and remains something I still struggle with today. Oftentimes travelling for me has heightened that sense of being lost somewhere in between, of not belonging anywhere. But in the last month while messaging with a friend, I commented on how happy I was feeling and how obsessed I was at that moment with the stunning view out my window, and they laughingly commented that I might belong in the South Pacific. And without even pausing, no hesitation whatsoever, I wrote back, “haha I belong everywhere.”

And then I saw what I’d written, saw what I’d said, and realised it’s significance. Realised that somewhere in the last month of travelling, or perhaps in the past year since leaving the life I’d built up in Washington D.C. and the USA broadly, that it has come to be true. Because while I’ve said that before, I’ve always stated it wistfully, my insides twisted up with a longing for it to be real, to actually belong everywhere in a broad sense since I don’t belong somewhere specifically. But this didn’t feel wistful or sad. There was not even a sense of saudade. Instead, I don’t feel misfit; I don’t feel wrong; I don’t feel haunted by a sense of missing anything—including what I am or where I belong. Instead I truly feel home in myself and in the expanse of everywhere without the undertone of sadness.

Maybe it’s just for now. Maybe it’s because I’m not a hidden immigrant anymore, expected to fit in and consistently failing, constantly surprising people by yet another thing I don’t know or didn’t understand, even years after relocation, even after adjusting my accent and my clothing and my cultural references. Now, I definitely do not and cannot blend in and so I can comfortably and simply be “other.” Be all the varied, many things I am, rolled up into the very unique and constantly evolving being that is me. It’s so grounding and also incredibly freeing. It’s so beautiful and crystaline. It is breathing easy after slowly suffocating for so very long. I’m here for it, I am so happy in it, and I don’t ever want to let this go.

This beautiful thought-image comes to my mind as I ponder all this; it’s an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (which I adore), specifically, “East Coker:”

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

what i’m learning

Years ago, I worked really hard to learn how to create structure out of and/or despite the chaos in my life, resulting in a long-sought sense of some security; that feeling of finally being in control. This past year and especially the last month have helped me consider, though, that perhaps at some point structure started controlling me. I forgot that I don’t have to be afraid of chaos or be adverse to the unknown because I can handle them, because I can create structure for myself amid the chaos and I can navigate fluid and ambiguous circumstances—indeed, I have done. Importantly, I don’t need structure for structure’s own sake. I myself am solid, fluid, and most definitely ambiguous (for better and for worse)!

Travelling in general, and certainly travelling internationally with constantly changing and widely ranging rules and regulations in the post-pandemic world we are moving into, was really anxiety raising for me at first, because it’s so impossible to control or even predict. But when I remembered that I can be ok no matter what happens, that I can be fluid, too, it helped. Structure can be the palm tree that is built to bend in the hurricane winds. Structure can be the bicycle designed to ride on but that can also fold up and be carried with you on your back.

Structure can be deconstructed and reconstructed, and I find it refreshing to recall that sometimes our fragility as humans is merely manufactured and all we need to do is a little deconstructing, reframing, or shifting.

This post is a snippet from a newsletter I originally published on Substack. You can read the rest of the publication there.