What inspired me travel across the world

My first love affair with travel began with my grandmother. She was a housecleaner and would work many luxurious homes in South Florida. I would spend the summers with her being her little assistant house cleaner. She would walk me around each of the homes and show me the trinkets from all the places in the world where her clients’ traveled.

My grandmother was a really special kind of lady. She didn’t finish high school but had the intelligence of someone with a phD. She loved to learn about places around the world, the culture, the food, and of course all the animals of the world. We often talked about going on a cruise around the world. We would fantasize about all the places we would go and what we would see. My grandmother turned me on to see that there was a world outside of the small world I saw in Pompano Beach, FL. This was a pivotal experience for me.

I grew up very poor with a single mom who eventually was in a relationship with a physically and emotionally abusive partner for many years. There was alcohol and drug addiction everywhere in my family. And my world felt very dark, lonely, and restrictive as a child.

To dream of places outside of this reality was transformative for me. It helped me see that I could possibly create a life outside of what felt like a small world of violence, scarcity, and chaos.

Fast forward to 2015, I had a trip planned to Bali. In the process of planning that trip, my father, who I had an estranged relationship with over the years, told me I had an aunt who lived in Fiji. This was a surprise to me, but I also didn’t know my dad’s side of my family– I never met any of my aunts or uncles, or grandparents. It was always an area of curiosity and emptiness not knowing a big part of my identity. All I knew is that they were farm people in Indiana. So it struck me that a farm girl from Indiana would find her way to Fiji. I felt that I had to meet her.

Unfortunately, I had to cancel that trip to Bali that year…I was in a life-altering bicycle accident that changed the trajectory of my life. And I never got around to planning another trip to Bali until this year. Things and life aligned in a way that I could travel to Bali to attend a training with my teacher, who I’ve been working with and learning from for several years.

The thought passed me again to visit my aunt, who I had no contact with, I just knew she was there with her own family. My dad didn’t even have her contact information. My timing in Bali was jam-packed with my training and I didn’t feel I’d have the time to make the journey to Fiji. So, it didn’t happen.

But being in Bali gave me the opportunity to step away from the hustle of life and take a look at some big life things. I felt this nudging feeling that I needed to make a shift in my life.

I had been considering leaving Florida for quite some time. It was always a temporary space for me. I moved there 5 years ago to take care of my late grandmother’s house and sell it. I was only planning to be there for 6 months and then my plan was to travel the world and teach yoga around the world. Life had other plans for me, and I’m grateful for my time in Florida, but I was also feeling like my time was expiring there.

So there I was in Bali April 2023, feeling the rising energy reminding me of the vision I had 5 years ago, and in actuality 8 years ago. I felt that this was the time. I could not put it off anymore and if I did, I wouldn’t know when the next opportunity to take this leap would come along.

The thought kept crossing my mind, If not now, when?

Over the last 8 years I’ve been repairing the fractured relationships in my family, between me and my father, between me and my mother, and between the siblings I have but don’t know. That rising energy was a desire to continue this healing journey within me about my disconnected family, and to make sense of my own identity in a dysfunctional family dynamic.

I’ve been writing about this journey for several years, but I felt that this was the time to journey across the world and get to know a family member that felt so similar to me yet I had no relationship at all except through blood. I also felt the call to live out that vision I created 5 years ago to travel the world and teach yoga around the world. These two energies came together like two paths merging into one big road to take.

As I made the decision to take this leap, I had this idea to write about this journey of reconnecting to the missing pieces of my family lineage. And this is really what inspired me to take this journey around the world.

The week before I left, I got a call from my dad. He said that my aunt had passed away at some point. He didn’t even know as he had to find out from his estranged siblings.

Initially I felt this was a setback and I thought for a split second, “well, now my whole inspiration for this journey is out the window.” And then I took a different approach. While I won’t be able to meet my aunt in real life, I still want to go and meet her family. To learn about her life in a land that is halfway across the world and seems so far from rural Indiana where she grew up. To learn more about what inspired her to take that journey, hoping I could fill in the pieces of who I am, what inspires me to be who I am, and feel a deeper connection to my family lineage.

This journey is about completing the book I’ve been writing about– growing up in a family of dysfunction and coming out of it with strength, resilience, and gratitude. And it’s also about writing the story of the missing pieces of my identity and the journey I have taken (and am taking) to fill in those missing pieces.

I don’t know how it will end, but all is now is there is no better time to answer the big questions than now.