Quarterly Goals Check-In #1!
Accountability time! Somehow, I’ve already been traveling for three months and five days (I’m slightly off from the exact quarterly check-in cadence, but I couldn’t find the energy to do this post while struggling to breathe or digest food in Cusco). How time flies when you’re worshipping mountains and trying new fruits and finally mastering your usted commands.
I’m writing this from my private garden terrace at my hostel in Urubambya, which is hard to say and harder to find—it took not one, not two, but three taxi drivers to get me here this morning—where I am overlooking little scalloped paths of orange-and-pink flowers hugging the bright-white stone paths that curve around the guest houses, which fade into the mountains, and the whole effect is rather lovely and well-suited to personal reflection. So let’s begin.
For this first time around, I’ll repost the entirety of my goals, as originally shared here, and then give myself a win / fail / half-credit and contextualize it. In the cases of the fails and half-credits, I’ll share why I think they’re not happening and if I still believe the goal is a good one, set new guidelines to get back on track.
Goals around getting to know the world:
1. Go experience the world. Simple enough. Explore, try new things, take advantage of my youth (in all its healthy, obligation-free glory). How? Spend a significant amount of time (at least 6 months) traveling slowly through some part of the world that I haven’t been to and that’s not much like home
So far, a win. Three months in and I’m pretty sure I want to keep doing this for more than 6 months. I’m traveling slowly, I’m getting out of my comfort zone, I’m seeing the world with wide-open appreciative eyes and, more days than not, loving every little bit of it.
2. Meet and get to know new people. Be friendly, ask questions, don’t assume I know anything about anyone. How? Travel alone, forcing my extroverted self to find connections around me, and stay in lots of different types of accommodations with lots of different people—airbnbs, hostels, Workaways, etc.
I’ll count this as a win, but let’s break it down.
In general, I am meeting lots of people and creating great relationships—I have met locals, travelers, people from all walks of life + vocational status + identities + income brackets. I count one future wedding guest (our favorite, the lovely Anne), one surrogate family (Sara & Amelie), and three completely different Latin romances (Jorge2, Maxi, and Diego) as people I will continue to talk with (and/or talk about) long past this trip, and have encountered dozens of other magical humans who crossed my path for a lovely hour or day or week, whether that time was spent cuddled up on a cracked pleather couch watching Cider House Rules in Puerto Natales or eating copious amounts of American-style brunch food in Córdoba or smoking and debating the relative merits of a nanny state in La Barra.
I’m still not approaching every situation and every new person open-mindedly, excited to see what I can learn from them, which is partly because I still think I’m better than most people (though I feel like I’ve learned at least a little humility at the feet of dozens of travel and language mishaps) and partly because, as I’ve written about before, sometimes connecting with someone new means mind-numbingly meaningless conversations that I’ve had more than enough of already.
But in not always applying my well-strengthened extrovert muscles, I’ve gotten much more comfortable spending time by myself. It’s a skill I started working on in New York, where it was easy to feel isolated in a city of 8 million and I had to build some kind of insulating sphere of confidence and calm when I either didn’t have anyone to explore with or when I didn’t want to dilute pure aesthetic enjoyment (of a show, of a steak, of the way the maple leaves drift on the Jackie O. Reservoir in late fall) with the weight of conversation and companionship. And here, on this trip, I’ve come to relish my own company and get comfortable in solitude in ways I didn’t think possible before.
So overall: a win.
Next, goals around getting to know myself:
3. Figure out if I like writing / storytelling as much as I think I do and if I need to be in a career that is more directly tied to it. How? Write at least an hour a day, every day, on a variety of topics and in a variety of forms and see how it makes me feel
Oomph. I think this has to be a half-credit, because I have figured out something about what drives me, though my design for doing it didn’t pan out exactly as I thought.
First, the headline: yes, I love storytelling, and I need to find a way to participate in it as a career. But I think that can take a dozen different forms, and probably isn’t as a full-time journalist or fiction writer.
In three months, I’ve written tens of thousands of words, and almost all of them have ended up on this blog as biographical, travel-journalism-adjacent pieces, with a bit of creative nonfiction tucked in (like this piece on feminism in Chile), and I have had little to no desire to write short stories or fiction in general, going no farther than plucking the most enticing storylines from my experiences on the road and dumping them into a word doc for later contemplation.
Like I talked about in my post on discovering my passion in life, I realizing that right now, I much prefer writing about my own life than I do in constructing ones for characters I make up. I think a lot of that is to do with how I process information—writing about my life helps me get enough distance from it to make meaning from it, which is especially important for me to do now, while I’m pursuing this singular experience. For now, fiction writer is out, and pure journalism, with its necessary distance between writer and subject, takes away the part I find the most fun, the blurring of character and author and guide.
And the how: I have not written an hour every day. Shock. I think I have probably averaged an hour a day, as I’ll go a week without writing much but then cap it off with a six- or seven-hour marathon session at my laptop, transcribing scribbles from my notebooks and listening to voice memos I’ve left myself on character sketches or particular grievances I’d like to air. I find myself living as a traveler first, and a writer/chronicler second, which isn’t quite how I’d pictured this trip, but is making me happy and is producing material I’m mostly proud of at about the clip I expected from myself. I’ll keep looking to harness my ideas into a routine, and also to expand the forms they take, but I’m comfortable holding myself to a less-rigid standard here and instead to just pursue the joy of writing in whatever ways come to me. I’ll let the “how” of this goal fade away for next quarter.
4. Create a portfolio that showcases my creativity and drive (so that by having it + a traditional resume I can tell the full story of myself). How? Design and manage this lil blog
I think this is a win. Perhaps I need to diversify my offerings a little more—finish one of those short stories and share it, or something—but the work I’m most comfortable with and confident in—my interwoven observations and personal reflections and musing on movements bigger than my understanding of them—is here, accompanied by some of my favorite photographs, and a not-half-bad web design.
If you have feedback to the contrary, please, send it my way!
5. Stress test my values and the things I think I want out of life. How? Write down what I think those things are now and compare them at the end of my traveling to what I think then, constantly try to see things from others’ points of view, live little experiments in the various places I find myself
This is the hardest one to assess, since I feel like whatever assessment I have of my evolving values is impossible to get enough distance from to judge the accuracy of. By and large, the gist of my reflections so far is that I care a lot about the people that I surround myself with and about having enough money to not worry about it constantly and to afford the experiences that I want for myself and my loved ones, and whatever structure I put around my life after this trip will need to include good people and enough money. I can now imagine a life that’s different than the constantly-hustling, always-need-to-be-the-best kind of singular focus I think I had more of before, but I’m still not ready to set aside my admittedly American values of hard work and professional success. We’ll see what this turns into at the end of my time traveling.
And last, goals around maintaining my current world & self:
6. Maintain my relationships with my family, friends, mentors, coworkers and stay a part of their lives. How? Check in with them, write to them, share stories with them, remember birthdays and anniversaries and celebrate them, even if I’m away from home
I think this is by-and-large a half-credit. I suppose I won’t really know until I get back to the States and see if all of my relationships are in the places I imagine them to be, but for now, I feel connected to so many people I deeply care about. Technology aides this a lot, as does my newfound favorite habit of just letting people know when I’m thinking about them. I’m finding this to be unfolding a lot like the first uncomfortable summers between years at college—sometimes friendships don’t fast-forward in exactly the way you’d imagined they would, but for all the micro-disappointments when reality and expectations don’t meet, there are the moments where the former far exceeds the latter, and I’m left with a glittering gem of a conversation or a connection that makes me grateful for the wonderful people I have in my life. (Particularly recent shoutouts go to Cat, Katie, Michelle, and Margaret, who I’ve loved laughing with over bad wifi connections on subjects as diverse as teasing bosses to love affairs).
But for all of the connections I’ve kept, I think I’m failing in a few areas—with a few members of my family, certainly, and with some coworkers, who I’ve struggled to reach out to without a certain shared reality to buffer the overture. I will swallow any perceived awkwardness and just do the damn thing for the next quarter, and let you know how it goes.
7. Keep my “nest egg” savings for getting an apartment / car / wardrobe for if/when I want to come back and pick up life, or if something unplanned happens. How? Literally do not touch my second savings account
Win. Haven’t touched it. You’ll notice there’s no explicit goal about sticking to my rough $50/day budget; if there was one, it’d be a solid fail…I think I’m about $2,000 over that estimation (largely due to how expensive Patagonia was + my Peruvian health scare). But like I wrote about in my trip planning page, I don’t care too much about where exactly the money I saved for traveling goes—just that I’m by and large spending it in ways reasonable, not excessive nor draconian. I hope to do a few more Workaways over the next quarter, both to give me a little more flexibility when it comes to money and to give me more rich homestay and/or professional experiences, but overall, I’m not worried about my budget or my nest egg.
8. Continue my literary education. How? Read a book or two a month (at least!) and write about them—how they made me feel, what they taught me
Win. I deserve to be smote for how long I held out on getting a Kindle. It is overwhelmingly convenient and I mourn for the all the books I could’ve read but didn’t, as I could never fit more than one or two in my beach bag or work purse or carry-on. I’ll always be a collector and unabashed worshipper of the paper book, but I’ve read 27 books in the last three months and that quick clip is due half to how much more free time I have now and half due to how easy it is to download my next novel. I’ve also kept up with my private book journal—jotting down my reactions to each one, or major lessons imparted—and will share it at the end of the year, along with more of the book club pieces I’ve already published two of (here and here). Close-reading passages and linking the meaning I see in them to my own life is the alchemic high that made me fall in love with being an English major.
9. Stay healthy. How? Work out 3x a week (hikes count! Kayla counts!), get health insurance, get fully vaccinated before I go and go to the doctor if I get sick
Oooh. Okay. So this is probably a half-credit. I’ve worked out loads when the specific strain of traveling I’m investigating warrants it—i.e., I did daily 15+km hikes in El Chalten; I walked miles and miles around Buenos Aires as I explored its different neighborhoods—but I haven’t made it a part of my conscious routine, which is something I struggle with in non-traveling-life, too. I get the thrill of endorphins, I understand how fun it is to watch your muscles ripple under your skin, but I’ve never been good at making myself work out consistently (probably due to the same root cause of my failures to write for an hour a day, too—constantly choosing the short-term consequence of having more free time with which to indulge myself). I did okay when I was working in Puerto Natales, leading Kayla workouts for my fellow volunteers, but not so hot in Punta del Este, where, aside from the weekly yoga class I’d sneak into, I spent my free hours reading novels at the beach or making homemade pretzels in Sara’s gorgeous kitchen.
My bad habits and general disdain for working out aside, I have been pretty healthy this trip: I average 3,000 more steps/day than I did when I was working full-time in New York, I don’t go out as much (surprisingly, I’ve only had a handful of alcohol-fueled adventures; nightlife feels mostly the same to me wherever I go and I’d rather spend that money and energy on exploring new museums or beaches or parks or trying new food…and also, I can’t lose my passport again), and my vitamin D levels have recovered from their depressing office-bound doldrums. (I used to imagine them as the shrunken little grey ghouls that Ursula keeps in her lair, the remains of humans from whom she’s stolen voices and life.)
And the one time I got sick, I did go to the doctor (and then eventually the hospital). So we’re doing alright.
OVERALL
In general, this trip is something I’m proud of + happy with + excited to keep doing. I think I’m doing a good job of meeting my goals, with the main points of failure being in applying discipline and not being overconfident. Neither thing is new to me, and neither is insurmountable, but both are big enough issues in my life writ large that I know I won’t solve them in a month or two.
The only thing I want to add to my goals going into the next three months is spend some time exploring different career paths for whenever I return to a non-vagabond existence. I can imagine returning to the company I left, that I still love and can see lots of opportunity at; I’ve also been entertaining daydreams of producing television or running a campaign. I know now, after seeking and occasionally finding little pockets of community around the Southern Cone, that where I am is just as important to me as what I’m doing there; I don’t know yet if my future home will be in New York or Chicago or Seattle or not in the U.S. at all, but while I’m trying on different kinds of geography and cityscapes, I don’t want to forget the entirety of the what.
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