To Know Yourself, Travel with a Purpose

I shot a photo of my foot stepping off the roof of my hostel, to depict that my future felt like I was stepping off the edge. I captured the faces of laughing Mexican children playing with balloons, to examine whether I could give that all up. Then I enrolled classmates to shoot photographs of me capturing children through my lens, illustrating how I cherish my free time when I travel.

My self-portrait piece was read through my words and my images. I felt torn between traveling and settling down. To me, the term “settling down” meant being strapped to a recliner with a remote control in my hand. It felt like prison.

“She’s not ready,” they agreed in English after listening to the whole piece. They looked at my images, “Ella no está lista,” they repeated in Spanish, which I understood.

“But how will I know when I’m ready?” I looked to the wise, older women at the end of the table to contemplate my fate.

“You’ll know when the time is right,” they all said, in two languages. I just didn’t know if I believed them.

Later in the week, after an inspiring field trip to an art building being restored by the renowned Mexican artist, Francisco Toledo, Wendy Ewald told me a secret. She had grown up in the affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, and had followed her own path. Later in life she adopted a son from Colombia. One of the other wise women in the seat in front of us turned around. She, too, had adopted a son from Colombia who was now in his twenties. She explained how she put all three of her kids in school when they would travel in the summers to South America.

“It can be done. You just take them with you if you want to travel. They learn another language. They adjust.”

It sounded perfect. I could do what I wanted to do with my life, and my children would be right there with me. They would be happy and adventurous and able to adapt, right alongside my Travel with a Purpose. But as the Mexican sun followed our van down the mountain that afternoon, the next logical question came silently to the forefront of my mind: Would they