I’m currently in the process of trying to format my “world tour blog” into a book of sorts, just to keep. It’s a slow process, not least because I find myself endlessly re-reading some of my favourite entries. It sometimes seems surreal that I was there, I did those things, I wrote those words. In retrospect, I feel as though I was a different person on that trip – someone I have often longed to be in my day to day existence, someone I was able to fleetingly allow myself to become, someone I was able to capture in my journals, however briefly. With no strictures, no obligations, no expectations, I was able to become the experiential, self-aware, intuitive, free spirit I always wanted to be. That may have been the biggest gift of our trip.

Every time I make a new friend, without fail, at some point early in the friendship they reveal that when we first met each other, they thought I didn’t like them. Always. For years now, people have told me this. Which is rather painful, actually – because almost invariably it’s someone who, upon first meeting, I thought was really cool or wanted to get to know better. So even if I really liked them or was excited to hang out with them, they experience the exact opposite. I’ve never been able to put my finger on why, and it’s a hard thing to know that I come across that harshly on first impression. And no matter how I try, I can’t seem to change it. My insides are not matching up with my outside.

Which is why I desperately wish that I could bottle that “travelling jen” that I am so nostalgic for now. I want to be able to always be that confident, that easy going, that adventurous. I’d always dreamed of feeling that free – I’m not sure what holds me back from expressing that in my day to day life. I remember feeling much freer, more “myself” in New York, which leads me to suspect that part of the difficulty is London itself. Part of it is probably age (what happened to that girl who dyed her hair blue and didn’t give a fuck?) But once again, there’s a disconnect happening on a fundamental level between my internal yearnings and how I live my actual life. I want authenticity. I want to reconnect. I want to live the way I feel.

I once wrote:

we watched “the motorcycle diaries”again tonight – the movie about che guevara’s seminal road trip through south america. i remember seeing it before, but i am struck by the difference now. i see flashes of familiar – places i’d only dreamt about when i last saw this, now mine in memory. these are parts of me that i get to keep. i have these, tucked away under my belt for reminiscing, tomorrow or a lifetime from now. when it is winter in london, i will always have summer in bangkok or spring in beijing.

these are parts of me i get to keep.

at the end of the film, che says “i am not the me i once was”. there is truth in that, i know. i am not the same me who dreamt of someday seeing machu picchu – i am now the girl who climbed the inca trail in the rain, saw dawn over the sun gate, bowed low to enter the temple of the condor. i have breathed the mist into my veins, felt the cool stone beneath fingertips, heard the echoes reverberate off the green peaks.

so i get it now, what this deep stirring ache is at the bottom of my heart. i recognise what these growing pains are. it’s clear to me what is happening.

it is not, as i originally thought, that i simply see the world differently. it is that i am different because of the world.

That is the real me. I need to find a way to let her be free.

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