A Wandering Soul

I am a Wandering Soul.

For as long as I can remember, I have always felt the pull and tug at my heart to travel and explore. I have never really felt content in just one place and I see myself traveling through the World and exploring the unknown. Ask anyone who really knows me, and they will tell you that I have been dreaming of Italy ever since I started talking really. I could spend hours writing on Italy and I have never even been there. It has always been a dream of mine to go and spend time there to really get a feel for who I am. I can tell you with 100% certainty, that I could pack my bags and move there tomorrow and be perfectly content in a foreign country and nobody can convince me otherwise. This is by no means a reflection on the life that I have. LOL. I love where I am and what I have, and I can’t imagine my life to be any different than it is now. I just simply believe that I am a person who yearns for as much knowledge, passion, and worldly experience as humanly possible. At the age of 28, I still believe in dreams.

I spent most of my adolescence moving from state to state all over the country. When people ask me what school I went too, or if I still talk to my childhood friends, I laugh a little and explain to them that I didn’t stay in one place my whole life. These people ask me if it was hard to bounce from school to school, state to state, and if it was because I was an army brat. I tell them no… It wasn’t. And no, I was not an army brat. Was it hard always being the new girl? Maybe at one time it was. However, I have never been one to shy away from talking to new people… I also have never been one to really care what people think. I didn’t need a large group of friends, I didn’t need to be popular, and I didn’t need the approval from other kids to feel ok with myself. Of course I made friends with a select few, but I have always had a certain peace with just being me. People either liked me or they didn’t, but that was never something I let define me. So when these conversations are brought up, I reflect on how those travels throughout my childhood molded me. I was able to experience new towns, new people, new cultures and new histories with each place I went. I was able to see so many different parts of the country. I picked up on different accents, different lifestyles, and different traditions that each state had. With every state that I lived in, it became a part of me. It opened my eyes to so many very important life lessons that most people may not ever experience. For me, I feel like it helped me to see things differently; I have more empathy for people and I know that every person has a story. I also feel like moving from place to place is what ultimately gave me my wandering soul.

I was 8 years old and living in Katy, Texas. It was warm and almost always humid. The palm trees were very tall and skinny. The bugs were a lot different from the bugs “back home” in Maryland. The ants seemed angrier and the wasps looked as if they had been pumped full of Jekyll and Hide bionic fluids. When one would buzz past your head it was almost as if you were dodging an incoming bullet. There was no need for pants and sweatshirts and, at the time, the neighborhood kids I had met had never seen the sight of snow. I was in a sunny paradise minus the beach and minus the paradise. LOL. I was at an age where everything seemed like a dream. I was best friends with a girl from down the street; I had the biggest crush on her older brother and would often pretend the chain on my bike was broken just so he would come look at it for me. I was eight years old!! What was I even thinking at the young age of eight?! I owned a little boombox and I thought I was so cool walking down the street (to the stop sign of course, because I wasn’t allowed past the stop sign) jamming out to “The Sign” by Ace of Base. Oh to be young again….

Anyways, I remember feeling happy in my 8 year old self… Happy but not content. One day, my father took the whole family to Galveston Island. It was a beautiful beach. I hadn’t seen the beach in such a long time and it was breathtaking. I remember my dad telling stories about the island and the time he had spent there before I was around. My dad had been everywhere and he always had a story to tell. It always made me feel like there was a chance for me to travel and get to know places the way he did. He took us through so many shops and I was in awe of all the beach memorabilia that, as adults, we tend to cringe at now because it is so overly produced. However, I was still just an 8 year old little girl… The awe had not yet worn off on me (There are moments I realize it still hasn’t completely wore off on me). We were browsing a little shop when I saw it: A miniature hourglass sand timer. It was this sand timer that was enclosed in an ocean blue glass casing. I held it in my hands and kept turning it upside down and then upright again, watching as the sand slowly sifted through to the other side. I was mesmerized. For some reason, I felt that I could stop in that moment and hold onto what was right in front of me. It was the one thing I knew I couldn’t go home without…

There was something about that timer and the sand that was in it. I knew at a very young age that change is constant; nothing lasts forever. I was a little girl but I have always had a sense of “knowing” that was well beyond my years. I knew that I would not be there for long. I knew that there were other places we would be moving too and that was okay with me. I wanted to know what was out there and I wanted to experience every last town, city, beach, and park. I always knew that there was so much more to life than one stop. There were so many places and people that I needed to see and meet. Standing in that little shop, holding that timer, I knew that I wanted to see the world. I knew that I would never feel 100% at home in one place for too long and I knew that I only had so much time to see everything I wanted to see.

We only lived in Texas for a little over a year… I still have that ocean blue sand timer. I bring it out every once in a while to remind myself of that little girl who made a promise to never give up on whatever it was she wanted.

I am a Wandering Soul.