Travel has always been a part of my life. This, however, does not mean that I always traveled. In fact, I didn’t get to travel until my late high school years, but my vivid childish imagination took me places. When I was a kid, I frequently visualized the ocean and imagined how the breeze would feel in my loose hair once my bare feet stepped on the soft white sand that resembled nothing I had ever witnessed in real life. I pictured myself walking through the streets of all these distant towns in the US where many of my relatives lived at the time. I saw myself gasping at the marvelous cathedrals in the European cities I had read about in my school textbooks. I daydreamed of the outfits I would wear and the conversations I would have with people in a language then still foreign to me. Back then, I was only a child prone to escapism by picturing myself surrounded with unfamiliar landscapes, waiting to be explored by big bold me. The reality was that I couldn’t really go, and there was nothing I could do but keep the dreams alive and hold dear to my self-created reveries of a grown-up adventurous traveler. 

The World Revealed

The first time I went outside the borders of my home country, Macedonia, was when I was 17. My high school typically organized a trip to a European country for students in their junior year. My class went to Italy. We saw Venice, Verona and Milan, and we made a brief stop at Plitvice National Park in Croatia. To this day I vividly remember most of that trip. Sometimes I wonder how those memories stuck after all these years. Maybe it was because I was sharing the experience with many like-minded classmates and close friends, all of us equally committed to having all the fun that was to be had, completely unfazed by the urgency to share our adventures with anyone but the people that were there. Or perhaps because I was fully present, from the moment we hopped on the bus and set off on our collective adventure, until the day we came back to town and reluctantly returned to our school routines the next day. I had finally gotten to step beyond the small and monotonous familiarity of my everydayness at the time, and I wanted to keep every moment of the trip alive for fear that I might not get to experience an adventure like that any time soon. For everything that it was, this little trip revealed the first snippet of what the world holds, and how enthralling the idea of going places is. Actually going places. Physically. 

I finally got to go places many years after. In the past few years, since I moved to the US, I saw places that I thought would forever remain within my childhood dreams. It’s not many places I have been to by now, but I have certainly been to some truly meaningful places. Some of them have been the places that little me put on her adventure list. Some of them have been destinations chosen based on ideas of my evolving adult self, one that explores in a different manner than she thought she wanted. Many of them have been places I visited with company. A few of them have been places I have chosen to explore solo. All of those places, though, have been special in ways that I will need to write separate reflections to capture the extent of their profound impact on me. 

People often ask me why I travel. It used to take me a second to come up with an answer to this seemingly simple question. If I’m being honest, my responses would not involve anything related to “expanding horizons” or “enriching yourself,” or anything about “seeing the beauty of the world.” Sure, these are great reasons to travel, but they are not my real deep drive. I have recently come to realize that the answer has always been within me in the form of a feeling, and I think I have finally found the words to describe it.

Why I travel

I travel because it is the only time when I feel like I don’t have to actively fight for my place in this world. When I travel, I can just be. I have nothing to prove. I don’t strive. I can be many selves, and then none, and be fine. Deeply, genuinely fine. I can just observe. I don’t need to participate. I don’t have to earn my space anywhere and with anyone. I can engage or withdraw. And amidst the feels of all this, a blissful state I get to be in for usually a week or two at once, the only thing I find myself seeking is a story. My own, the story of the people I meet along the route that I choose, the story of the landscape that I experience in the way that I myself decide. 

Stories move me. Stories open a portal to a world of genuine interconnectedness between us humans and the vast world which then no longer seems ugly or scary. They show me that we crave each other’s presence within our experiences. They teach me that the most beautiful way to get to know a new place is not so much by manically moving and doing, but simply by observing and being. During a few of my most recent trips, I have learned that it is in a state of stillness that you start to open your overstimulated senses and lift the shield of your heart. This is when beautiful narratives of substance and depth unfold around you and are co-created with you.

It is some of those narratives that I intend to share in this space. A creative writing space has been a personal mini project I’ve had in mind for the past three years. The idea first crossed my mind in 2021, during my first solo trip. I was strolling through the mesmerizing Arboretum in Portland, a small oasis nested between the pretentiousness of this supposedly hip city in Oregon. I saw, heard, and created stories everywhere I went on this trip. I wrote them down in my journal, a few I shared with friends, but many stayed just within the pages of my leather-bound notebook. Now I think I’m ready to start sharing some. 

Why I write

It feels scary to take ownership of your worded perceptions of a place in which you are only a visitor, and then let the world read them. I have many times pondered my right and ability to extract a story from a lived experience elsewhere. But having overthought this for years now, I have convinced myself that perhaps what I share here will set someone else on their own journey, in search for their own stories, in whatever shape and form they find meaning and joy.

I do not intend this to be yet another online platform for travel tips and tricks. I envision this to be a space for reflections and stories, written and visual. I want to share how the landscapes we see outwards humble us and turn us inwards. I want to share bits and pieces of random encounters with people that enter and exit our lives in a breath, just to pass some wisdom that we happen to need at that moment, or open our eyes to the vast pool of exhilarating possibilities that exist out there. I want to express how the “foreign” does not always extend beyond borders, and how familiar and homey people and places far away can turn out to be. And most importantly, I want to capture how good and how liberating it feels to keep finding your place and stepping into it, without a fight…between the peaks and plateaus of the world and life.