Eastern Maine Medical Center 2019
There’s a shoeprint on my ceiling.
I didn’t notice it when I first moved into my apartment. I was probably too busy ordering the right dining table, planning future gatherings, and fussing over how to hide the stains in the carpet. It wasn’t until after the COVID19 lockdown started some three months later that I even bothered to look up.
And there it was. Completely unremarkable, and yet, the most exciting thing to happen to me that week.
A shoeprint.
On the ceiling.
As I’ve gotten older, I can more clearly see how I’ve changed through the years. I can more clearly see why I changed too. Just over two years ago, something strange happened that I didn’t understand the full significance of until many months later. At the beginning of 2019, I was ramping up to a new stage in my life, a new way of being, and I was getting cold feet.
I couldn’t ever shake the feeling that I was living in a box. It seems counterintuitive, I know, for someone with a travel blog. But at the start of 2019, I was becoming hyperaware of all the expectations that had been built around me. I alluded to it a bit in my first blog post of that year, saying how I wanted to “give up my brand” and just follow my curiosity. My blog wasn’t the only problem though. It was everything. My day job. My living situation. I created a life that I felt would appease everyone else when they looked at it, and at the same time, I created a life that left me completely unfulfilled.
Completely miserable, actually.
I try to use vague phrases in blog posts. I feel like it’s “unattractive” or “unprofessional” to let people know that I’m sad. It doesn’t quite fit the idealistic mold that I spent my academic years encouraging, which was to be
Acadia National Park, ME 2019 viewed as a woman, who was careening towards
success and bursting with potential.
It was a series of difficult days to realize that I had outgrown that mold. I used to love being recognized for my potential, but as time went on, I realized I was being defined by it. I don’t want to be recognized for all the things I might be, no matter how wonderful and exciting. I want to be recognized for who I am. I wanted to feel like my real, living, breathing self could be more interesting than some idea of me.
So, after lots of careful planning, I quit my job. My hand was shaking so violently the moment I handed over my resignation letter, you never would have guessed that I had written it several months prior.
Before long, I was arriving across the state for a month-long archaeological dig. If the opportunity hadn’t fallen into my email inbox, I may never have quit my job, but the universe was speaking to me. It was telling me it was okay to push the boundaries of my interests and explore how far my love for things could take me.
I studied archaeology for years from the back of classrooms and cold museum display rooms, but I had never gotten the chance to be in the field. My feelings for archaeology were complicated and even tinged with an air of melancholy, but I knew my exposure was still limited. I needed to see if my love for archaeology had left me or if it had just changed. On my first day, I shyly dumped all of my supplies on the floor in front of my roommate, who was aiding in the running of the dig, and confessed that I had no clue what any of it was for. She picked each piece up and began to explain. And so I began to learn, which was all I was there to do.
Machiasport, ME 2019
During my daily phone call to my mom, I told her about the new development. A shoeprint on the ceiling. How strange. I stared up at it for about 15 minutes, wondering how it got there, listing off all the most likely possibilities such as (1) someone broke into my apartment in the middle of the night to press their boot to the ceiling before leaving without touching anything else and (2) a ghost.
It quickly became clear that it had always been there, and I just never noticed.
A strange feeling consumed me during lockdown. One that, ironically, I felt when I was travelling abroad. I was existing in a transient space. While time kept moving forward, life as I knew it was suspended. This feeling really set in during the last couple months I stayed in Ireland. I carried around a sense of detachment. It was impossible for me not to, as I knew that the places I frequented and people I saw every day could not come home with me. The life I lived abroad would have to stay abroad, and in the summer of 2017, I would go back to the life I had always known.
With detachment came observation. The few weeks surrounding my departure from Europe left me feeling skeletal, existing in that place between self-realization and self-actualization. I was noticing the parts of me that I could not see until I had spent months with only myself as company. I witnessed my strengths and my flaws, and I waited until getting home to implement lifestyle changes in a time and space where it would actually matter.
COVID, I thought, would be no different. I just had to make it to the departure date. When things got hard, I would keep pushing forward like I always did for a month.
A couple months.
Maybe a year.
I can’t be sure anymore.
Even when the dig had ended, I wasn’t done. The mold was cracking, and I wasn’t who I used to be. I spent the rest of the
year trying things just to see where they would take me. I only had one rule: I refused to hold onto things that hurt me. I could not return to my box.
I said no to bad jobs and yes to exciting opportunities. I pursued web design, cultural resource management, and education research. Some things didn’t take me far. I loved them to their limit, and when things no longer served me, I learned to let them go, even when it was hard and deeply terrifying.
Later that year, I was walking with a good friend of mine, and I admitted that I was nervous because I had so many things I wanted to do in life and no clear plan to do them. She said, “You’ll figure it out. Because Brittney does what she wants.”
I had a momentary out of body experience. I realized that when my friend looked at me, she saw a woman of intention and action. She saw the type of person I always looked up to, and for the first time in my life, I could feel the person I wanted to be aligning with the person I was.
And that person was finally prioritizing all the things that were important to me. All of my potential turned into opportunities for experiences, new places to call home, and new people to call friends. I was engaging with life on a different level. There was so much freedom in embracing Burlington, VT 2019
the ephemerality of all things. There was always somewhere to go.
Something to do. Something to love.
It took me about ten whole seconds to get over the fact that there was a shoeprint on my ceiling. Now 499 days since the first stay-at-home order, it’s still there. I never bothered to wash it off. It doesn’t particularly matter; there's no reason to look up most days.
Shoeprint on my ceiling 2021
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