this is a picture of the last tattoo i got, 4 years ago – it’s a bit abstract to some, but for the purposes of moving things along i’ll tell you it’s an elephant. (ah, there’s the lightbulb!) i got it in thailand for what were, at the time, very meaningful, very sincere reasons. a) i love elephants to a completely illogical extent and b) it was meant to remind me of my travels. or, to be more specific, it was meant to remind me of who i was during my travels.

sounds silly, right? i mean, “who i was during my travels”. clearly, i am me. i harbour no illusions of being some mysterious person, nor do i have any additional personalities that live in alternate realities. i guess what i meant was that part of me that i was able to be during a time when i was unfettered by the grind of daily life. because without any ties or responsibilities, it turns out, i’m actually quite a fun, easygoing (!), adventurous person. (i know, i know – i too was shocked by this discovery!) when footloose and fancy free, i can be very laidback, whimsical, and confident. who wouldn’t want to keep that jen?! she’s much more appealing than the set-jawed, furrowed-brow, anxious, and unhappy person than i am these days.

so as i am contemplating how to break out of this rut that i’m in, and suppressing an overwhelming desire to run away, i made the mistake of re-reading our round-the-world travel blog. big.fucking.mistake.

i’ve been here in london for over seven years now, and fairly soon, i will have lived here longer than i’ve lived anywhere else as an adult. i lived in new york city for eight years, and i loved new york. i’ve lived in london almost as long, and i’ve never loved london.

but even if i did, i would be feeling itchy. i’m convinced that wanderlust is in my nature. in fact, i have a theory that those who grew up in one place as kids, are drawn to a mobile lifestyle as adults, and those who were bounced around as children, want nothing more than to put down roots.

i spent 17 years in the same house, wanting desperately to leave america behind, and my ideal lifestyle would be to move to a new city or country every few years. jonno moved about 30 times as a kid, has lived here in london for 11 years and *still* says that he feels like he’s living out of a suitcase. i would love to do more extended travelling, jonno has to be forcibly dragged on holiday for a few weeks every year. i go to places like paris and rome, and find myself saying, “i’d love to live here for a few years.” i turn to him and say, “wouldn’t you?” his answer is always a flat, unequivocal “no”. i see my maroon passport and think about all the places we could retire to. jonno is emphatically *done* with europe. i have never been interested in owning a house, jonno browses the real estate listings in vancouver. i still daydream about joining the peace corps. jonno has made it clear that while he’s happy for me to do that, he would not be joining me.

how do you reconcile those incredibly disparate desires? i don’t know.

neither of us wants to be here – and moving there is proving much harder than we thought. this difficulty is compounded by the fact that my idea of where “there” should be, seems to change every few days. do i want to live in vancouver? yes. am i also terrified of finding myself feeling trapped in vancouver? undeniably. and in the back of my brain, i still have all these wild impulses to just go somewhere (nyc, nz, spain), find a job, and make it all work. (don’t ask me what “it all” is, by the way, or how exactly i would make it work – details are the devil of dreams.) or alternatively, to cash in my half of our savings, throw on a backpack and head off into the unknown (or as much of the unknown as one can see with that meagre amount of money – in other words, a few weeks of seeing not much!) these may not be realistic or mature impulses for a late-thirties-woman-with-husband-job-and-cat, but these days they predominate my brain nonetheless.

it’s all making me feel so mixed up i can’t think straight. i look at the tattoo on my wrist, and feel such a desperate desire to get back to that person i was. that warm, laidback, wide-open jen is locked inside this uptight, unhappy, pinch-faced facade i see staring back at me in the mirror, and she’s being starved of oxygen. something has got to happen, but i don’t know how to break her out of the shell…and i don’t know what that means for our future plans.

and yes, i’m going to leave that big giant question mark hanging there. there is no other way, at the moment, to end that thought.

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