Another Dinner, Another Dream
Move over Eat, Pray, Love.
At dinner the other night at an albergue in Molinaseca, I was sitting at a table with a bunch of retirees. 3 Germans, 2 Aussies (by way of Europe more or less) a Swede, and further down the table a French woman and Chinese-French woman. Ethnicities not pertinent but just to give you a taste of the table in which we were served lentil soup, salad, spaghetti bolognese and yogurt all prepared by a French(?)-Spanish woman who’s partner said she was French even though she refused to claim it. Whatever that was about didn’t matter to me because I couldn’t get over the fact that there wasn’t a lot of meat in the bolognese sauce.
To be fair I don’t think the collection of passports here was even the most impressive I’ve been in the company of, but the UK-Aussie gent sitting beside me asked if I was writing a book. Out of nowhere, mind you. He wanted to know if I was a travel writer. Little did he know that just that morning someone else had mentioned me writing a book about my traveling adventures and since then, my mother has also gotten on board with the idea of me turning the very thing that causes her restless nights into a tangible story between covers. I can see it now, for other readers it’ll be an amusing travelogue, for her, a horror story. Seeing as I’ve now traveled to Portugal by boat, and now on a bike, plus my solo journeys in and around these two slow voyages, people must be finding something interesting in these tales from the road. But do I?
Earlier this year, I saw Elizabeth Gilbert in conversation at the American Library in Paris. It’s been 20 years since Eat, Pray, Love and one of the interesting things she spoke about that evening was how much the response to that journey she embarked on was wrapped up in it somehow being a detour from her “real” life. People thought and remarked that what she experienced traveling was just a thing for the road, not something she was meant to carry on in her quotidian because who has the right to do so much lavish self-introspection every single day of their lives, write about it, and get paid for it? And that the book has now inspired generations of women to take an EPL year to find themselves is regarded as the same thing. A kind of rite of passage but just something transitional. A chance to get out all the restlessness before entering into the “real” period of one’s life.
Recently, I’ve been feeling bored with the writing I do here. To be completely honest, I think it’s because I quite literally write here for the witnesses or the applause or the day that one day it’ll snowball into the writing career that I dream of having—because apparently it’s not necessarily about the work, it’s about being visible. Or, it’s because the writing I most want to be doing is fiction and writing about myself feels pedestrian. Like I wrung out the simple act of changing a tire or reading a book and deemed that enough material to make readers spend 3-5minutes of their morning with my words. Yet even within the boredom, I’m still precious about every word. Wanting to make sure that what I’m saying is clear, concise, elicits a laugh. That I’m exercising and honing the voice I’ve been discovering and developing, even if the subject is myself.
But that same discipline of writing weekly newsletters doesn’t translate to the fiction I want to be writing because I am not in that. I mean, I’m in it to the extent that it’s my imagination at work, taking shape in many different characters and settings. But there’s so much more that must be called in and given space to actually exist on the page. I’ve said it before over countless drafts but the stories I work on don’t ever give me anything good to work with until they know I’m serious about them. Which is why my discipline and my dreams never seem to align because I’m always doing something else and expending my energy and resources towards other endeavors and can never seem to keep a consistent routine that convinces my stories that I’ll show up the next day, and the day after that, to make sure I channel and craft the story correctly.
That’s why I wonder if this newsletter sometimes is my detour, or this new nudging of becoming a travel writer is another iteration of that. Like I’ll always be circling my real life—the real work—of crafting fiction because I’m constantly trying to be visible and show myself working, or I’m in a transitional period trying to expend my restlessness, or that I’m constantly responding to the stimuli that is the audience. Performing for what they want, going in the direction they’re pointing to just to get and keep their attention.
The thing that Gilbert said that day that really stuck with me was that all of it is her real life. It’s not just that this one year was a thing where she got to experience happiness and self-discovery and creative inspiration and then she had to leave it all on the road to return to what really mattered, a 9-5 and a mortgage. It was that all of her observations, all of her adventures in food and meditation and lovers, all lend themselves to the fullness of her life. Instead of pushing full speed into the embrace of that sentiment though, I find myself backpedaling, concerned that it’s all so self-indulgent. Worried somehow that I’m only ever practicing myself as the story instead of practicing myself as the writer of other stories. The ones that live inside me now but have the potential to exist outside of the confines of my little self.
And, of course, I can see this as a limitation I’m self-imposing. Writing about my travels doesn’t take away from my writing about anything else. And it doesn’t mean that it’s all about me, which is where the real worry lies. Because at the bottom of all of this is a fear of not being interesting, or interested, enough to sustain readers with my thoughts and observations. I can’t help but think that we underestimate the capacity of our observations because either we don’t think our perspective is all that original after all, or because after writing in silence for so long, we haven’t received sufficient audience approval to validate or recompense our efforts. Or quite simply, we’re just tired of hearing our own opinions and nothing’s funny anymore. Actually wait… what does a hungry cyclist—who’s burning lots of calories and needs as much protein as she can get—call a bolognese dinner that’s just pasta and tomato sauce? A bowl of nays. Okay, yeah like I said, nothing’s funny anymore.
I’m not even sure any of these things are connected or makes sense, only that it’s what’s looping in my head currently. I’m also not sure if I’m up for striving for another thing at the moment, not even sure if I’m capable yet. Not just of the striving, but of simply dreaming another dream. But what I am sure of is that when I write, I care about creating feelings in the reader. The experience the words evoke more than my ability to craft a certain kind of story. And if on one day multiple people can nudge me in the direction of writing more about my travels, perhaps those are the feelings I need to follow. Even if the story continues to be about me and not all the characters I keep trying to invite onto the page. All I can continue to do is collect my observations about the people I meet, the stories they inspire and follow my self-indulgent obsession with trying to make it all make sense.
One last note about that dinner because while I was sitting there wondering why there wasn’t enough meat in the bolognese, and focused on why the Spanish-possibly-French woman didn’t give us enough protein it occurred to me later that she actually was looking out for our proper nutrition. Because the salad had tuna in it, the lentils and the yogurt were great sources of protein too (and it’s possible that all the beef had fallen to the bottom of the bowl), plus there was so much food that I’m fairly certain we all had about 3 helpings while in deep conversation about where we all came from and where we were all going.
As always, thanks for reading and for being here…and for traveling with me?
For what it’s worth, Molinaseca was literally a dream to descend into. And I do mean descend because I climbed to the top of Cruz de Ferro just before (1500 meters!), which is why, dear reader, I was particularly hungry this day.
