Hi there, welcome to my first post on the history of me – not a complete history, just a background of who I was and where I was at before I left on my travels. I’ll continue with these posts, through my travels, falling in love, getting home, breaking up and trying to put myself back together again, all the way to where we are today. You can get an idea behind my motivation of why I’m doing this, and why I want to leave Australia, teach English, and continue indefinite adventuring.

You can’t unexperience something, good or bad. I don’t know which you learn more from, or which causes more trauma; to live through a really horrific, violent and hateful situation and to be finally set free, to rehabilitate and learn to live with the physical and mental scars, or having experienced true joy, true happiness, even true love – and losing it. The latter seems to cause a deeper and more insidious pain, but I’m still learning from the experience and so incredibly grateful for it, even for the pain.

It’s a little difficult to describe the person I was before my experiences on my travels and everything that’s happened since then; while some things remain the same, it’s my mind,

what I want out of life, how I relate to other people and my whole way of seeing the world that’s changed. I’m Australian, bisexual, in my early 30’s, a university educated jack of all trades and master of none, generally floating about the arts and media for the last few years without any particular end game. Once I wanted an Oscar for acting or directing by the age of 30, then it was a PHD by the age of 35, then, before I left for my trip, it was a sugar daddy who wasn’t too demanding and would leave me to my own devices most of the time before I was too much of a faded beauty queen. I don’t own a car, I can’t see myself ever owning a house, I never intended to get married, and since I was not going to have children I wanted to make porn, with men ushering a silent prayer to me each time they come, long after my inevitable overdose, and in that way I would live for ever. Overeducated, underpaid, oversexed, often manic, other times depressed, narcissistic, paranoid, rapid cycling between over emotional and cold bastardry – but these same traits in low doses make for the insightful, sensual, vivacious, ambitious, friendly, funny, sensitive, charming and generally nice if somewhat eccentric character I am most of the time.

Experience is not like theory or abstract concepts or the news that can be ignored, I could ignore that México even existed before I went there; it was just romantic images on a screen or words in a book, cartoons, films and legends. Maybe it’s an Australian

thing, being an island nation on the ass end of the world as a former Prime Minister put it, but it is very easy to treat the rest of the world as a half reality unless you’ve been to these places, met the people, and had the experiences.

Some not so pleasant experiences that happened to me – I spent several years in an abusive relationship, physically, verbally and mentally. I won’t go in to the details of what that fucker did to me, but it left me pretty broken for a long time, diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar type 2, PTSD, all treated intermittently with too much alcohol or too heavy medication, both of which I was happy to take because it meant I felt nothing, no love no hate no fear no anger – which is probably what kept me in that comfortable hell for so many years. Not to mention, with all that emotional numbness I either never learned or forgot proper coping mechanisms that most adults have to deal with emotional issues, memories, pain and stress – we will come back to that later.

In 2014, I got out, I had to, or I was going to die, one way or another. We remained quasi friends I don’t know why for the next two years till I cut him out altogether during my travels, but finally, I was single, and I loved every minute of it! I got in to shape, and I was banging, or getting banged by, every pretty young thing in Sydney! Well a lot of them weren’t that pretty. And most were older than me. But still, lots of banging, and I was happy. I had a kind of nihilistic confidence, a ‘Yeah I’ll do that, doesn’t look too high, I’ll jump off that, I’ll strip naked on a stage, I’ll fuck what ever ‘cos fuck it we’re all slowly dying anyway!’ kind of confidence. That’s something that’s definitely changed actually, more of an internal change, now the internal monologue reads ‘Every day is a gift, and so are the beautiful wonderful people of the world, I want to get to know them all and explore this amazing place! And who cares if other people don’t like me, it’s time to dance and be happy because I deserve to be happy! So come on, let’s fuck!’. An example of one of the mental shifts that may not be apparent from the outside.

So, what brought me to go adventuring?

I was working as a Research Assistant, my first job I ever had as a result of my degree and starting to make some money, which I feared. I didn’t like the idea of having money, the job was a one year contract and I didn’t want to get to the end of it with some considerable savings only to have it whittled down on bills and food and nonsense. Ever since I was a child I wanted to travel, to live in other countries, and up to this point, aside from a few jaunts in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, my inner child’s been missing out. Thinking of my inner child, I actually had known for some years my first travel destination – The Burning Man Festival in Nevada, U.S.A. – The best place in the world for adults to play! To discover themselves and each other, to appreciate the universe and – wait I’m getting ahead of myself, I didn’t know that and so much more then, that’s for a later post. I don’t know, it was the art, the environment, the music and the philosophy that drew me to the festival, but it was after watching some YouTube videos of people at the festival or having just come back, there was just something, something in their eyes, they knew. And I wanted to know too.

I decided to book my flights, for better or worse, through a travel agent. It was useful actually, having someone to bounce ideas off who was familiar with my trip, especially after it became increasingly complex and expensive (although that was largely after her suggestions). What started off as a week at Burning Man and two weeks split between San Francisco and Vegas ended up as that plus a month and a half in Mexico, a week in Cuba, then back to the States for Halloween in New Orleans before heading home.

I didn’t know what to expect out of my two and a half month holiday to the US, Mexico and Cuba. I was starting my trip, (wink), at Burning Man, heading to Cuba because I like socialism in theory and communist chic in practice, but Mexico was – I can’t say exactly what it was, but I have had this recurrent desire to visit Mexico ever since I can remember, watching the cartoon Mysterious Cities of Gold, as well as the Zorro movies with, ahh… Antonio Banderas, one of my first man-crushes. But in reality, I had no idea what to expect from Mexico, even though I was spending the majority of my holiday there. All I had planned was a week in Mexico City, followed by a tour winding through the south and over into the Mayan Riviera, ending up on the island of Cozumel for two weeks, before heading to Cancun for a few nights. The planning for Burning Man was intensive, which is probably why I was so unprepared for Mexico, which turned out to be a good thing, surprises are what life’s about, more about Burning Man, and surprises, in my next post.

It seemed for a long time, to be such a long time till my holiday, until it was stressfully imminent, and then it was upon me. My parents dropped me off at the airport, I checked in and did all the super fun airport stuff, that would become oh just so much more fun with each and every leg (SYD – LA, LA – Los Vegas, Vegas – Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City – Reno – Thanks Delta!). I had no idea what to expect, I knew it would be amazing, and I knew I would have crazy, wild experiences, but honestly, I could not have dreamed, hoped, and sometimes not even wanted the experiences that happened to me. After you have seen how good it can be, that’s all you want, and that is painful.

The moment I set foot on that plane, nothing would be the same again.