Some Words About Finding Direction

It’s been a weird couple months. To say the least. This is probably a prime time for me to write and post on here a lot, but I’ve either wanted to shut my brain off and just watch TV, or I’ve been really busy making masks for hospitals and friends and also doing content writing for several nonprofits. I feel very busy but totally restless at the same time. Is that from poor time management or is that just how everyone feels? I don’t know.

There’s an essay I wrote exactly a year ago for a Nonfiction Writing class that I keep thinking about. The situation isn’t relevant anymore (anxiety over joining the Peace Corps), but the story is. It’s a personal essay about learning to reorient myself, no matter where I am. At the time, I was overwhelmed with college graduation and thinking about studying abroad the year before and moving to the other side of the world the year ahead. But over the last few months I’ve learned that reorienting can happen when you’re home, doing the same thing every day. That can be just as jolting. 

I’m pretty proud of this essay, even though I don’t think it’s in its final form. But it’ll never be “ready” or “good enough,” ya know? So I’ll leave it here for you. Feel free to read. I’d love to know how you’re reorienting, too. Comment, email, or text me your story.  

 

Reorient

I stood among old white and blue ceramic vases, somewhere on the sixth floor of the Victoria & Albert Museum, down the street from my London dorm. I was having difficulty familiarizing myself with the museum map—disoriented without a blue dot. I could have been anywhere in this labyrinth. Maybe somewhere between the jewelry and the Greco-Roman sculptures; maybe for-real lost. I found my way back down and around eventually, though, with many stops in between to read the plaques. 

And then I went back. The next day, then the day after that, then the weeks and months following—soaking up as much physical history as I could in the limited time I had in that city. I returned every week for the artifacts themselves, not the building, but I can still guide myself through its halls in my mind a year later. 

In museums—my sacred spaces while abroad—wandering is the point. It’s expected; it’s safe. There’s no Google Maps for museum floorplans. Only me and the paper map, or just me alone. When leaving the V&A and stepping outside onto Cromwell Road, I’d be hit by loud and chaotic bursts of London life—horns beeping, languages intermingling, people rushing. Intimidating, definitely, but electrifying. I reached for the small Tube map in my back pocket, not really needing it to get around but just wanting it for comfort. A security blanket. But what kind of awkward, bygone tourist would I look like carrying a paper map around? 

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on maps and the roles they play in our relationship with our inhabited spaces. I’ve always been obsessed with maps. I’d hang atlases around my room, read coffee table books about cities, and trace the journey from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit. I drew a world map and hung it in my room this year, complete with little colorful thumbtacks to signify my successful expeditions as I check places off my list. Sometimes I worry that this “list” and my map are what’s actually compelling me to travel, rather than a desire for unfettered exploration. I seem to have created an inescapable catalyst for discovery. 

My obsession with setting is potentially a side effect of my introversion. My place determines my mood—is the lighting right, do I feel comfortable here, is there a space I can escape to when I feel overwhelmed? Sometimes this is to my detriment, this feeling of powerlessness to place. But other times, when I’m hiking mountains and welling up with tears at its magnificence, or just walking the mundane route home from class every day, I’m gratefully indebted to setting. My experience of a place doesn’t accumulate without imagining a relationship to it. 

I recently read Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker’s Unfathomable City. They created countermaps of a receding Louisiana coastline, imploring us to reexamine our relationships with our lived spaces. While traditional maps may make distinct boundaries between land and sea, for example, the reality of rising tides and Louisiana marshes create an in-between space where land and life become not so black-and-white. New Orleans, it reads: a contradictory city imperiled by erosion and corruption and immortalized by music and culture. Geographical and cultural nuances can be some of the most confounding aspects of travel. I think I know a place until I get there, and even then—if my mind is buried too deep in a map—I may miss something.

Unfathomable City likewise points out particularly impersonal problems with GPS navigation. The autonomy we have with a paper map, and with personal exploration, disappears on our phones—we can become complacent and subordinate. We don’t trace our own routes, so we hardly really come to know a place in the same way we would with pen and paper or with our own internal course-plotting. 

. . .

I was stranded in Lyon, France for a few days last summer. Not a bad place to find myself adrift, but also not part of “the plan.” Train strikes in the country prevented me from going to the other cities on my list, so I had to make-do with a city I knew nothing about and hadn’t spent weeks researching. My vague familiarity with the city was limited to its good food and good museums. This time, I didn’t want to spend these days exploring the past, so I opted to discover this place through its food and its streets instead. Wandering around the city—up the hills and through the medieval alleys—was invigorated without expectations. I shared these small discoveries with my friend, and valued our unaided exploration together more than I would have expected. 

My most enlivening moments in Europe were the ones where I’d turn my Citymapper app off and just walk around. It didn’t happen often, and I wish it happened more. Traditional cities, like the ones in Europe that are meant to be experienced from the ground rather than from afar, are vast with life I’d never find on a map. Modern maps show highways, roads, and streets, but not histories, economies, ethnic groups, and the thousands of other contexts that make a place more extraordinary than its planning. I want maps to share these mosaic landscapes so they may guide my experience, rather than just dictating to me where to go next. A contradiction of my life is my temperament of wanting to arrive, but suspecting that the thriving, in part, comes from the chaos.

How Solnit and Snedeker reimagined Louisiana is similar to psychogeography—the study of the precise effects of a geographical environment and how we feel and behave based on the places we go. It’s an avant-garde artistic concept that encourages people to create a new awareness of the landscapes around them. How do we re-navigate and reimagine our urban environments?

One of my first shifts in spatial perspective was learning to drive. I saw my city with a newly expanded focus, driving around for miles to explore, discover, and understand. My parents’ house sits on a ridge overlooking the Ohio Valley, a place I had never fully valued until then. We had moved to the area from several hours away for my dad’s new job. As one of my first tastes of discomfort in my life, this loss of an old place I had come from sometimes felt like the end of the world. In those early teens, I couldn’t fully appreciate how creating movement could make me value all I had gained—in friendships, family, perspective—rather than all I thought I had lost. It wasn’t until those couple years later, when I could drive, that I reclaimed that space for myself. I couldn’t have gotten to that point without cultivating an insatiable curiosity, even if I still feel restless today. But I now have an intense, unique bond with that valley, no matter where I find myself, because of this renewed perspective. I can step out my front door and imagine the lives of so many people. Sometimes I feel like God, but I mostly feel inconsequential.

. . .

I have to admit that every time I went back to the V&A last year, I still carried around that museum map. Sometimes I stared at it more than I looked up from it. Why did I continue to stick my face in two dimensions when I already knew where I was going? Why can’t I allow myself to be comfortable in liminal space?

The first time I left the country, I looked at a paper map and couldn’t believe that I was physically in a place I felt was so far away just days before. My place on the map seemed unfathomable. I had a similar feelings in Europe years later, wandering around London and Eurailing between countries. Real life feels much different from the thumbtacks on my map. 

I’ve been spinning my plastic globe around recently and tracing my finger from my home now to my future home on the other side of the world. I constantly examine the lands, trying to remember random city names, looking up distances between islands, Googling train routes from Kediri to Jakarta. I’ll be teaching English 10,000 miles from the valley, where maps may not matter as much, when life runs on a different timetable, and where I know I will have to rely more on people than paper. I must learn to ask for help, and more importantly, to grin at unpredictability. Five short months in London made me more poised in my ability to navigate both my surroundings and my life among the unfamiliar, but still, can I do it again, and this time for a couple of years? I don’t know, and I’m still learning how to be okay with this uncertainty.

Maps are so incredibly important to history-making, place, and relationships, but when my coordinates becomes my master instead of my tool, I eventually have to trust in some innate sense of direction and adventure in order to reorient myself. I wonder if I’ll be able to stretch my travels and my life outside museum sanctuaries and far beyond the edges of maps. Maybe soon, after I’ve left the steady pace of the monotonous and familiar walk to and from campus, finally free of my comfortably predictable schedule, I’ll be able to lose myself. The empowering and terrifying difference is that I don’t know where I’m going this time.