Giving Myself Permission To Travel

I intended to make blog posts more frequently, to chronicle all the things I’m doing as I get ready for my upcoming road trip.  But the main thing I’ve been doing these last weeks is something that’s hard to blog about.

It’s giving myself permission to travel.

Giving up one’s job and deciding on the travel lifestyle is a scary thing, first for all the external reasons (we’ll get to those in a separate post).  But far more frightening and influential are the internal voices that say, “I can’t.”  “I’m not the kind of person who can do this.”  “Who do I think I am?”

For the past several decades I’ve worked the steady job for the steady paycheck and was reconciled to being bored with my life.  My identity was based on it.  And off to the side, a second person arose: the Ideal Me, the “me that might have been,” who started younger and did everything right, who quit that job and followed those dreams years ago.  Where would he be now?  I loved to think about him, and the more I did the more impossible it was for me to change.

Now that I’m really putting the change into motion, that Ideal Me has been standing in the way.  The whole point of the Ideal Me is that it’s too late to do the right thing NOW, because HIS success was based on starting early.  Indeed, if I DO the right thing now, and succeed at it, that would somehow violate his accomplishments.  It would poke a hole in him.  BECAUSE he succeeded, THEREFORE I can’t.  I’ve done everything wrong—and that ought to count for something.

Such is the logic of the Ideal Me.

The answer to this line of argument is—not what you’d expect.  I wouldn’t start by denying the existence of this ideal alternate self.  I think he quite definitely does exist: he’d better, because I intend to ask his help.  No, I’d start at the other end, and say, guess what—I haven’t done everything wrong. 

I’ve done a lot of things right, and one of them was—wait for it—WAITING until I had the proper maturity before embarking on this trip.  The years which I dedicated to my career gave me important skills, not to mention the moral foundation of having provided for my family.  Now, as I prepare to embrace the “travel lifestyle,” I set out onto roads unknown carrying all those skills, and that whole foundation, together with all the wild dreams that the Ideal Me can whisper in my ear as I go.

I intend for the two of us to be good friends from here on out.