Our Friends Think We're Crazy

Quit our jobs, rent out our house, and travel for a year? What were we thinking...

Would traveling together for a year bring us together or tear us apart?

When My Guy and I decided to quit our jobs instead of our marriage and travel for a year, the decision was more electrifying than make-up sex. Grabbing my coffee the next morning, I danced around the kitchen and bumped my hips playfully against his.

 “Hell Yes!” I told myself. “This is what it means to be all in.” 

The next night? I woke up at 3:00 am, my T-shirt drenched in sweat. For a middle-aged woman sitting smack in the eye of the hurricane named Menopause, this was not an infrequent occurrence; however, it wasn’t hormones that woke me up. Sheer panic had me silently screaming, “What the @!* are we doing?”

 I kicked MG. 

“Whaaat?” he answered sleepily. Clearly, he was not going to be any help in sorting out my existential angst. 

“You’re snoring,” I said, getting out of bed and padding downstairs. Cradling a mug of warm milk, I stood at the living room window staring out at the empty street, the yellow glow of street lights my only company this time of night. As I took in the stillness of the world outside, I thought about the disequilibrium we’d just created in our own.

The yellow glow of the street lights, my only company. Photo by Daniel Stiel on Unsplash

All the changes we were making in our lives: quitting our jobs, leaving our family and friends, setting ourselves up for financial stress...were they worth it? I could hear my friends’ questions, 

“What are you going to do when you return? 

How can you afford to quit your jobs? 

What’s your budget?” 

I knew what they were really asking. “Are you crazy?”

“I don’t know!” I wanted to scream. The one thing I did know? I was petrified. I wanted to think of myself as someone who embraced change, a gal who mixed things up to keep life interesting. The truth was something quite different. 

I was scared of coming back as a 56-year-old woman looking for a job. I’d watched too many friends struggle with ageism. Once you turned 50 the world presented you with an invisibility cloak instead of a gold watch in reward for experience. Right when you felt like you could lean into your job – and still had a lot to offer – younger colleagues grabbed the baton. Would I be able to find a job when I returned or would I tag myself out of the employment market? 

I was scared that we were jeopardizing our financial security. Were we truly ready to give up a year of income? My news feed was deluged with articles titled, “How to Save for Retirement,” “Here’s How Much You’ll Need in Retirement,” or “10 Tips to Boost Your Retirement Savings.” Not one ever mentioned ditching a job and dipping into savings. What kind of a hit would our finances –our future– take as a result of our impetuousness?

I was scared of missing my children. Intellectually, I knew they probably wouldn’t need us while we were gone. But what if they did, and we were too far away to respond? I was still trying to figure out the empty nest thing. I longed to wrap my children around me, but the ties between us had begun to loosen as they sought to build lives more and more separate from us. I no longer had a sense of their days. I didn’t know their friends. With both of their careers in tech, I struggled even to understand what they did at work. Where once I had merely stood on the sidelines of their soccer games, I now stood on the sidelines of their lives. The thought that traveling might push me even further into the stands filled me with sadness. 

I was scared about being away from my friends. Would friendships cultivated through 25 years of putting down roots in this city survive a year away? Monthly dinners with our supper club, happy hours with girlfriends, and my book group’s annual beach weekend – the events and activities that wound us around our community like a tight ball of yarn would all happen without me. 

I was scared of leaving my 89-year-old mom. Taking care of her often meant leaving work or canceling plans to meet her in the emergency room as she battled one UTI after another. It meant weekly visits where I bundled her into my SUV for an outing or pulled up a chair in her room to chat as she lay unmoving in her recliner. It meant regular conferences with her doctor and caregivers who updated me on her medications, meal plan, and visits by the art therapist. Leaving my mother was no small thing.

I was scared that traveling together for a year might push My Guy and me farther apart rather than bringing us closer together. We hadn’t exactly had each other’s backs in the last few years – each of us trying desperately to get our own needs met. Somewhere along the way we’d forgotten how to bring out the best in each other. What if traveling simply revealed that bringing out our best meant saying goodbye?

What scared me most though was what would come after we returned home. I’d lost so much of myself over the years, but what if I didn’t like the woman I found? What if we spent a year on the road only to discover that nothing changed? What if the answer to “Is this all there is?” was “Yes.” What then? Where did that leave me? Where did that leave us? My head swirled with unanswered questions.

“Why were we doing this?”

I’d been accused of running away when things got difficult, of hanging up the phone when the conversation turned uncomfortable, and leaving the table when I felt pressed. “Was this just another case of me trying to avoid the tedious and sometimes unpleasant responsibilities of adulthood? Was my irritability and exhaustion because I was a menopausal woman with too many discs swirling around my head or was it something more? Was it too late to change our minds?”

I set my mug on the dining room table and rubbed my arms together attempting to warm myself and provide reassurance.

 “You want this,” I told myself.

I thought about the many years MG and I had spent building a life together. All the things we’d acquired in our quest for stability: fairly successful jobs, a home, kids, a dog, and, of course, stuff...mountains of stuff. None of it had turned out to be exactly what I’d envisioned. I felt stuck in a grind of daily obligation, caught in a wheel of shoulds. I was so tired of trying to hold everything together. I wanted out. 

“Well, girl, I thought, No worries on that front.” I was certainly getting out. 

Perhaps if we threw everything we knew up in the air to see what came back down we’d find some answers as to the way forward. I used to tell my children when they were facing something that felt beyond them, 

“Everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” 

“Be brave,” I told myself that night at the window. 

I was afraid. But I also started to feel just the tiniest bit of exhilaration at the thought of seeing what was on the other side. I did want this. I wasn’t running away. I was finally running toward the sound of my own voice telling me that the only way to live the next chapter of life was to wring every bit of experience and meaning out of it. Our year of adventure was an opportunity to re-imagine our lives – to throw everything out and intentionally choose what we would bring back in. I was in search of my own holy grail – that elusive sense of purpose and connection that might anchor me for the second chapter of my life. I wanted to die with a bucketful of memories –  those were the souvenirs I wanted to bring home – not an attic full of dusty dreams.

A bucket full of memories …