by Jennifer Baljko

“Hi. I’m Jennifer - eternal student and citizen of the world.” This is how I’ve started to introduce myself. Maybe it’s presumptuous. And, it sounds silly to say. But, since I am at loss to describe what it is that I do these days, I think this sums it up.

Before - that is, when I lived a more simple life as a twenty-something-year-old married to my college sweetheart following the career-woman-wanna-be-a-mom trajectory - I was just Jennifer. Life was normal. Or, at least, it was what people called normal. I had a good job writing about the technology industry in Silicon Valley. My bank account had enough extra zeros to make me feel rich. I had a decent car, had friends that poured expensive wine, and was on the way to eventually having a couple of kids and getting that blue house I wanted, the one with the white-picket fence and rose garden.
Then - as the calendar flipped over to my 31st birthday and the first wrinkles showed up in the corners of my eyes - my neat little life no longer looked so normal. I got divorced. I quit my job. I bought a backpack, sold my car and for the first time in my life set out to do what I had always wanted to do - absolutely nothing.
Well, okay, not “nothing” in the sense of slumping into total inertia. “Nothing” in the sense that I wanted to do everything, everything that life had forced me to postpone for reasons never properly explained. I wanted to visit museums I read about and sunbathe on white sand beaches spotlighted on cable TV. I wanted to learn languages I heard people speaking on the streets of San Francisco and around my family’s dinner table. I wanted to climb mountains - or at least really big hills, to windsurf, and to practice martial arts. I wanted to persuade grandmothers from around the planet to share family recipes with me and dine next to cozy fireplaces or under star-filled skies. I wanted to talk to strangers on trains going nowhere, and sleep with men I would never see again.
Mostly, what I wanted to do was to scrap all the inhibitions that had stopped me from being who I knew I was supposed to be. No, actually, I wanted to scrap all the inhibitions that had stopped me from being who I was afraid to be.
Who I was - at the time - was a woman who was following the predictable path of going to college, getting a job, getting married, and becoming a mom, a grandma and a self-sacrificing super human being who could simultaneously change diapers while discussing the latest semiconductor features during late-night conference calls. Who I wanted to be was the female version of Magellan or other sea-faring explorers who sailed around discovering things, erasing pre-conceived notions of where life’s boundaries ended and reshaping society’s expectations.
Probably in a drunken stupor or through tear-stained eyes soaked with self-pity, I decided to wipe the canvas clean. I figured if I could do nothing for a while and just let life seep into my existence, I would give myself the space I needed to be me, and, eventually, some new road would rise up to replace the one that crumbled.
So I chased down this kind of nothing. I put everything in storage, flung 38 pounds of stuff - bikinis, hiking boots, a yoga mat and books I still haven’t read - into my backpack, and took off for the trip I’d dreamed about since I was 16. I set off for a six-month tour of southern Europe, a trip that would catapult me back in time, unshackle my spirit and leave the salty smell of the Aegean, Adriatic and Mediterranean seas forever lingering in my memory.
Over gyros and feta-cheese salads, I learned a bit of Greek from a curly-haired waitress with soft brown eyes who longed for her own adventure. I rode on the back of a motorcycle driven by an Italian anesthesiologist for three hours to run a lap around the ancient Olympia track. In Zagreb, I studied Croatian, my grandparents’ native tongue, and lived in the house near the Adriatic coast where my father and grandfather were born. I savored the gamey taste of wild boar and risotto with truffle shavings in Tuscany. I unknowingly fell in love with a man from Barcelona who would constantly thereafter re-appear in my dreams. I laughed louder than I had ever remembered. I cried buckets of tears, grieving the death of a lost love and a lost life. I stood at the edge of the sea, baptized in a wave of freedom I never imagined existed.
When I returned to San Francisco, the desire to experience life in a different way pulsed faster. Sitting still was not an option, nor was a 9 to 5 office job. There was so much yet to do, and so many things I wished to know. I signed up for a broadcast journalism course, toured the Pacific Coast highway, went camping for the first time, strolled through galleries on random Tuesday afternoons, and filled out stacks of documents that hopefully would lead to dual citizenship in Croatia and a life abroad. I lived like a college kid, sharing a flat with two other thirty-something-year-olds and making my savings last longer by eating more pasta than sushi. I thought I was crazy, pursuing something that could never be real.
Now, a few years later at 34, the pace of wanting to do nothing has quickened to an incessant pounding in my head. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it. I have become what someone at a recent conference dubbed a serial sabbatical taker, working feverishly for a few months to buy the next airline ticket and then taking a few months off to pick olives in Croatia, chat with Moroccan women in Turkish-style bath houses, or study another random language like Catalan.
And although life has brought me back to what is becoming a new home in Barcelona, to be with the man I long dreamed about, I can’t help but to gaze at the world map hanging on the wall above my desk and wonder where I will go next, which experience I should weave into the tapestry of my soul. Egypt? Mongolia? Papua New Guinea? Peru? Anywhere and everything is possible, worth considering, and even better, worth doing.
I don’t know what came first. I don’t know whether the gift of travel I gave myself when my seemingly perfect life cracked created the space - the emptiness - I needed to call forth the woman who was hiding below the surface. Or was it the deep desire to be a more active participant in my life and to re-ignite my childlike curiosity that sparked an insatiable need to travel? I suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s just the way it is, and now one feeds the other.
As I wander through my life, it’s becoming harder to answer family and friends’ questions about what I’m doing, what I’m looking for, and when will I settle down and have a “normal” life. I don’t know if I’ll ever get married again, have kids, or walk though the doorway of that blue house with the white picket fence. Remnants of my past are packed away in a San Francisco warehouse and in my parents’ basement in New Jersey, waiting to be dusted off and put back onto a shelf. But, they are all reminders of a life I don’t think I want - or need - any more.
From where I sit now, in the shadow of the world map that whispers names of far-off places and prods me to know more than I did yesterday, my life is normal to me. I am living exactly how I want to live - as an eternal student and citizen of the world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under First Annual Solas Awards Winners, Great Stories, Travel and Transformation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.