Travel has a way of handing you things that you're not expecting.
And I’m not talking about the little things, like delayed trains or particularly long layovers. While those might be annoying, they are rarely of much consequence. I’m talking about the ways in which traveling can change you. Have you ever gone on a trip and come back with a different way of looking at the world, or a new project that you were determined to see through, or a completely different plan for the rest of your life? It sounds dramatic, but here’s the thing about travel: these drastic changes happen all the time, to everyone, usually when they’re least expecting it.
When I went to Italy for a week, I wasn’t expecting to find anything more important than some good gelato. I wasn’t on a quest of self-exploration — I was just looking for a distraction. My life had recently gone up in flames for no discernible reason (which is a common hazard of being in your twenties, or so I’ve been told), and I wanted to escape it for a little while. My complete travel checklist was as follows: eat a lot of pasta, stare at a lot of art, and maybe speak a little bit of Italian.
I hadn’t even meant to go to Italy in the first place, to be honest. I’d been planning on going to Hawaii with my boyfriend, but at the last minute, he'd had to pull out of the trip. So I’d gone to my mom and explained the situation, since I still had a week off from work and a strong desire to go somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t home. We tossed back and forth a few different destinations: Hong Kong, Puerto Vallarta, London. Then she casually mentioned that one of her best friends from college was currently living in Tuscany, and would I maybe like to visit? Remembering a trip to Florence that I’d been lucky enough to go on in high school, I said yes.
So we planned the trip, starting first in Florence and then driving through Tuscany to where her friend lived in Anghiari, a small hill town in the Province of Arezzo. We also planned various day trips to Cortona, Montepulciano, Assisi, Sansepolcro, and even Verona on the last day. I didn’t imagine that I would want to spend much time in Anghiari, and probably wouldn’t have ever visited it if my mom’s friend hadn’t happened to live there.
But Anghiari, surprisingly enough, was the highlight of the trip. The town itself was charming, with a wall wrapping around the old city, and arresting views of the Tuscan countryside everywhere you turned. It was also comfortably lived-in, in a way that the more touristy towns like Montepulciano and Assisi were not. You could tell that the people there did not think they were living anywhere special, although to my American eyes it looked like they were perpetually on a film set for Under the Tuscan Sun. It was warm and welcoming, and I fell head-over-heels in love with it. I decided that I had to move there someday. After all, with amazing pasta and pizza, 3-euro bottles of wine, interesting shops, spectacular views, and a close-knit community that I envied, there didn’t seem to be any drawbacks to this plan. Of course, I didn’t speak Italian, and I didn’t have any form of European citizenship. But these small details, I figured, could easily be changed by the time I moved there. Right?
It was like a fever dream. After several months of stressing about my future and feeling no motivation to do anything, I suddenly had a concrete goal in mind: somehow, I would get my life trajectory to land me in Italy. Specifically in Anghiari. And the sooner the better, but I was willing to wait for twenty or thirty years if I had to.
But I’m going to be honest with you, Anghiari itself was not the only reason why I suddenly became determined to move to Italy. It also had quite a lot to do with my mom’s friend, whom we’ll call Christina. Christina was my godmother, but I hadn’t seen her in years, and I barely remembered her. I expected to like her well enough, but she was my mom’s friend, not mine. But when I first met her, I realized that she was actually a lot more than that. She was the role model I had been waiting for.
Now, let me take a moment to discuss role models. Whatever you may think of the term, I view role models as people you look up to, who help you by showing you a kind of loose template for how to live life. They’re not absolutely necessary, but they’re certainly nice to have, and people's role models can change over time. It depends on what you need. Your role models don’t even have to know you, as long as you can find some way to receive guidance from them. Whether it's by reading their blog or book, listening to interviews with them, or actually speaking to them, there are lots of ways to interact with your role models. My particular role models are:
My mom. I am lucky in this regard. I have a very good relationship with my mom; I consider her to be one of my close friends. She’s a psychologist who also worked as a lawyer for some time, and she has taught me many things. Whether it's how to apply psychological research to my relationships or how to apply mascara without poking myself in the eye, she is always willing to answer my questions. She also has a serious case of wanderlust, as did her mother, and I consider myself lucky to have inherited this semi-reckless sense of adventure from both of them.
Theodora Goss. She is an incredibly talented writer, a professor of creative writing at Boston University, and an amazing person. I worked with her once at the Alpha Young Writer’s Workshop, and while I have not spoken to her since, I have followed her blog avidly. You can read it here, if you’re curious. She is an example of a role model who may not be fully aware of my existence, but because of her blog is an excellent role model all the same.
Sarah J. Maas. She is the author of the Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses series, and I may or may not desperately want her life. I may or may not have also read all her books, be subscribed to her newsletter, and stalk her Instagram as if it were a religion. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to attend one of her book events, but this isn’t particularly important. What is important is that I envy her, and envy will often tell us a lot about what we want in life. If I am ever invited to the same writing conference as Sarah J. Maas, I will be able to die happy. (But that, of course, requires that I write a book first. * chuckles awkwardly and then slinks off to the shadows in writerly shame *)
Christina. Now, explaining this one is going to take a moment, so bear with me here…
You see, being a young twenty-something with artistic persuasions is not the most comfortable position to be in. From personal experience, I can tell you that it involves a lot of angst about the future, a lot of questioning your dedication to your art form, and a general sense of panic when people ask you about the future. Because, to be perfectly blunt, you have no idea where you’ll be a year, five years, or ten years from now. You just kinda vaguely hope that you don’t end up living in a box under a bridge. And while most twenty-something artists can handle this anxiety with aplomb, over the course of the last six months, the anxiety had started to bury me alive. I was, creatively and mentally, stuck.
This is where Christina comes in. Christina had a graduate degree in art history, and also experienced the lovely twenty-something-with-a-passion-for-art-but-no-discernable-future conundrum (or TSWAPABNDF, for short. I’m sure that will be a hashtag soon. Just wait). But now here she was, with a beautiful villa in Tuscany, two remarkable children, a similarly artistic husband, dozens of Italian and ex-pat friends, the cutest dog I’d ever seen, and a successful business that made use of her artistic eye. Her life seemed pretty close to perfect.
Over the course of the week that we stayed with Christina, I studied her closely. I wanted to know what she had done, how hard she had worked, what she had compromised to get there. I wanted to know what she regretted, if she would do it again, if it was all just a facade, on and on and on. And by the end of the week, I had my answer: no, this life wasn’t a facade. And while her life wasn't perfect (whose is?), it made her happy.
With this realization, all the anxiety I’d been carrying around for the last several months started to fade away. It was like the universe had said “Come to Italy, there’s something you need to see…” and pointed to Christina. My thoughts about the future morphed from general, directionless panic into a calmer sort of determination. After all, if she could do it, then I should be able to do it too. I had seen proof that what I wanted in life was achievable. I had a blueprint, or if you will, a role model.
I hadn’t been expecting to find Christina when I went to Italy. I also hadn’t been expecting to find a deep-seated desire to move to Tuscany, or to find a way out of my TSWAPABNDF spiral (yes, I just used it again. I can already hear the booing from the peanut gallery). Like I said, I had just been looking for some gelato. But it’s been a month since I came back, and I’m still determined to learn Italian. The boyfriend who couldn’t go to Hawaii? He’s had his ear talked off about how I need to live in Tuscany someday (to his credit, he’s enthusiastic about this). I’m not as anxious as I was before, and my mental paralysis is finally wearing off.
And, most important of all, I’m starting to write again.
Grazie mille, Italy.
Interested in the photos? I took all of them on my iPhone 7, since I am not the most accomplished photographer and my dinosaur of a DSLR is heavy. Since they are my own work, all the usual copyright rigamarole applies.