I’m 43.
It’s January 27. I open up my instagram to find a new song by Pink playing. “Trustfall.”
Solid.
I decide I like it enough to take the song and add videos to it. Water. Beaches. Anything warm.
On the video I write this post script:
“Trusting my healing. Always trusting myself. Always believing in the magic of my own life.”
Secretly I’m hoping and praying I can manifest these words in 2023.
Deep down I’m torn between believing myself and anxiety and the not enoughisms that hang out inside my head like a dormant virus that reactivates when set off.
The next day I match with someone online—a rarity considering my dating profile says I’m basically searching for a unicorn: someone with a passport, no STDs, andddd a credit score over 750. I blow them off after a day or two of texting and wanting to go to brunch but then not being able to go to brunch…. but I guess I was cool enough to stay because I got some more texts a few weeks later. A month later we go on our first date, a 13 mile hike give or take, because that's normal for a first date…
A month later on our second date we found ourselves on a two day 28 mile loop hike. Within the first 8 miles I fall into the flash flooded, rushing river. I had mapped out the hike but we failed to take the loop hike to the right and started to the left, so here we were. Trying to cross the river every quarter of a mile or so, sometimes waist deep. The river was the highest ever for the entire year, which we knew, but didn’t realize the severity until that crossing.
I have a post on my phone that I have a screenshot of that says “What is the first step to solving any problem? Don’t panic. You know more than you think you know.” And I believe this.
I play these words over and over in the moment. I trust my fall. I trust what I know: feet up and downstream. Unbuckled pack. Do not panic. Get your feet planted. Quickly. A small waterfall is coming. If I don’t get stopped, I will spill over the edge, more than likely with a fatal result. My head rushes to thoughts of my cousin losing her first husband in a drowning accident. No no no. Not me. Not today. This is NOT my time. I plant my feet on the bar in the middle of the river and refuse to move. The current is too much. On the bank stands a stranger who had been watching us cross: a very tall and strong man who moved to me instantly, almost instinctively, pulls my pack off, and then lifts me up so I can walk to the safety of the bank. His friends make sure my date crosses safely. Shaking from the trauma, I realize quickly I am pretty banged up on my back and my phone is gone. But my date and I decide to continue on, as this is only day one and we have 20 more miles to go till the end.
Fast forward to April.
A lot happens. I get an email that I am the recipient of a Fund For Teachers grant. This $5000 teacher travel grant will take me to the locations of the Waldensians in Italy, Uruguay, and North Carolina. I’ll complete my travel sometime this summer.
I have a trip planned to the women’s World Cup Down Under so all of a sudden life gets complicated. Where will I fit this grant trip into my summer?
During April I also plan a ribbon cutting ceremony for another grant, $2500 from Rural Schools Collaborative, where my students and I were able to write over 30 historical markers that the City public works department placed around town. I feel like I’m leaving my mark. But secretly I also like that my name is on the signs that are in places where my exes are employed. Karma is a bitch isn’t she…
April 20th rolls around at last. I hop on a plane, well 3, and wake up in Dakar Senegal… A dream that I had before and even in the midst of suicidal depression has finally come true: a Teachers for Global Classrooms Fulbright. Someone pinch me.
Funny. On a hot week in August when I was 41 I got an email and a phone call within about 48 hours. You’re a Fulbright TGC winner! You’re running the Boston marathon!
Nine years. This is how long it took for me to see my dream fulfilled. NINE.
I tried for a Fulbright for 7 years before I landed one in 2021. I was an alternate in the middle of those years, but I never gave up my dream. I then had to wait two years to travel due to Covid.
I’ve said time and time again that these two events, my Fulbright and running Boston were my victory lap after conquering my depression. But sometimes depression has tentavles that are years long and still alive inside your thoughts, making you believe that you’re not okay, you’re sad, and that the bottom will fall out of this career high.
But here I am nervous as hell, landing in Africa wondering if I’ll have fun but also wishing I was home.
About a week into the trip, I find myself in the African bush. Kothiari to be exact. Sometimes , well, most of the time, you can’t find it on a map, but it exists and has a school and store and if you blink you really might miss it. I’m 8 hours from the coast and supposedly two from Mali and Kansas can’t hold a candle to this desert and Vegas can’t top this heat.
My traveling partners and I woke up early on our first, I to run in a red dirt soccer field/bike path/walking path/road, and they do whatever it is in their morning routine. We head to the school in a truck that has no seatbelts, AC, and questionable safety in 3000 ways. I should note that we drove there in a car a few days later with no door handles. Safety Mike from the US Embassy would not approve, we joked. But really… Thanks US Government for monitoring the safety of this trip?
At the high school was a local DJ spinning while a culture festival went on, put on by the students. In the morning we spent an hour meeting and talking to the principal before watching students get dressed and put on their cultural makeup. We walked out to sit down and the DJ introduced us with DMX music. We watched the cultural dances and ate the food from many areas and people groups in and around Senegal. This school has around 750 students 7-12 and has over 20 cultures represented. Sound familiar? Just like Monett!!! I don’t believe this is a coincidence.
Our group, our Kothairi host Sali, and her children saunter back home. Sali’s house is two stories and around 10 rooms, all open air. We counted what we think are 32 souls who live there. Family, children of friends who live with Sali and her husband so they can get a good education, someone’s ex… I need a flow chart. We are escorted into a living room with leather couches and a mattress on the floor. Sit. Rest. Eat. Someone brings in a fresh dish in a giant bowl and places it at our feet. In true African fashion we eat family style and out of the same giant bowl until our bellies are full and our eyes can’t stay open.
I can’t sleep, but I also can’t open my eyes. It’s hot. I don’t have a thermometer. I just know it’s 112 outside and I would bet my salary on 100 inside with an oscillating fan every few seconds making it liveable. I can feel my body getting overheated. And quickly. Sali’s husband, who speaks English buttttt refuses to speak English, notices my fading.
A-ME! He says sternly. My group mates and I would jump when he did this to me. Then he motions to follow him. He takes me in their bedroom to their bathroom and motions for me to put water on myself. How awkward is it to be in the master bathroom with your host’s husband the first day in the bush. Seems safe. I do as he says--water on self--then head back to the couch.
A-ME! He stares me down and wags his finger. He then takes me into the kitchen, grabs me an ice pack out of the fridge and puts it in a bucket full of cold water.
Lord, this man’s not going to be satisfied until I am soaking wet and “showered” by African standards.
I return to the bathroom and take the ice and water and dump it on my head, face, arms, clothing. I am officially soaking wet. There is NO question in hand that I am cooled off. Of course, my body then decides that I am cooled down enough to use the restroom and I cannot figure out how to use this toilet.
Serendipitously, Sali pokes her head in the curtain. Amy! Do you need anything?
Yes, I don’t know how to use this toilet.
Sali shows me, albeit with both breasts exposed--her 8 month old on her left him, sucking at her breast, and a teapot in her other hand full of water. “Here. Use this to flush. Dump it in the front when you are finished going.”
Awesome. I made a mess with the water so half of my time was spent sweeping the water into the drain before using the toilet. What a mess.
I will be taking a very long shower this evening…
As I packed up to leave a week later, I fell on these thoughts: Africa is nothing I expected but everything I imagined it to be… Give or take. And I imagined that if Jesus was born in 2023, this is where he would choose.
But on the final day in Senegal, I found what I’d been trying to convey in a debriefing group exercise.
Resignation. Brene Brown lists it as one of her 87 emotions in her book Atlas of the Heart, and it’s the best word I had to encompass all my emotions I felt over the two weeks.
Pure happenstance: My friend Ruby sent me a message a few days prior: ‘Africa is like a secret. We (especially white Americans extra especially for midwestern Christians) were only told predominantly negative things about because of racism/elitism and the need to feel that our bubble is the best bubble and everyone should aspire to it. What I wanted to say is that I see you and I hear you - opening your eyes and your heart and your highly intelligent brain. The world always seemed small to me until I went to India the first time and then later started traveling in Africa. Africa is a secret. It’s Not the Kenyan safaris - it’s the Africa you are living and receiving now. And it will forever change you and a lot of people will say “oh be careful! And you’re so brave!” And all of that is said with good intentions
but I will say you needed this.
You are an incredible writer and your post about race/perceived misconceptions— best thing I’ve read in a very very long time.’
--
To say that travel changes me is an understatement. It always does something to me deep down.
To say Africa changed me is also very true.
For a lot of my adulthood, but a large majority of my last 10 years of living, I have been grieving leaving my past and most of my beliefs and misunderstandings of my youth and finding who I am and who I want to be without restraints or shame. I have been healing and climbing out of depression to who I am today. The past decade or more of my life has included many crises of many aspects things like Africa being only safaris and starving children that I now label “things I used to be and believe.”
As I left Africa, I noted that I resign to my old self and childhood continually, I suppose, but this trip took me to a place in the deepest parts of my core that finally feels like the beginning of the end.
And there is peace in that sentence alone that feels like a giant sigh.
Had you told me 10 years ago when I started this Fulbright journey that this would finally be my time and my place, I actually WOULD have believed you, but I also don’t think I would have been as ready, especially post-healing, to receive all of these lessons, gifts, people, and country as completely I was in my Fulbright.
Minus a highlight trip to Washington to see Joni Mitchell in concert, July and August came quickly. I decided to circumnavigate the globe. You guessed it: I put my vacation and grant trip together. I was to be gone 30 days and visit 8 countries and the grant would pay for my way home after the World Cup matches in Australia.
I’d like to say that the trip was amazing. It was. Once in a lifetime, perhaps. I slept on a lot of overnight flights, walked a ton, checked the Great Barrier Reef, bungee jumping, attended some World Cup games, and viewed the stunning Milford Sound off my bucket list.
Tracing the routes and locations of the Waldensians was sobering. I knew their history, but not really. These people were outstanding examples of faith and hope through many centuries of persecution.
But I was ready and excited to finally land in NWA on a hot and humid day in August. I had been extremely homesick, which is not normal for me. I missed my family, the person I was dating, my dogs, my house, my pillow, my bed.
I’d been gone almost 2 full months this year. It was worth it in hindsight, but also too much. If I could do it again I would only stay in NZ and Australia maybe a week total each.
Returning home was overwhelming. I cried almost daily on my trips even though all of them were amazing and life changing.
Within a month after returning home I got a phone call from a complete stranger. Is this Amy? Yes… The one who almost died in the Missouri River? Yes???
How did this person know that?
Amy, I have your cell phone from when you dropped it in the river in March. I called the last person you texted who happened to be on the hike with you and they gave me your number. By the way, your phone works.
When the phone arrived it was like seeing a ghost or a time capsule looking at the snapshot of where I was in my life this past spring. Looking through the photos had me caught in a dream and disbelief that the snapshots of that morning were preserved as if nothing had happened… but everything had happened.
One of the photos I took was for my friend Jennifer who begged me to take flower photos on the hike. When I sent her the photo of it today she noted it was a rue anemone. These flowers symbolize protection, excitement, and expectation. Those three words define that hike and most of my year so far.
I hold deeper meaning to things like this. Coincidences? Hardly. “It is written” is what Slumdog Millionaire taught me.
What is written? This was. Is. Whatever. In hindsight? It feels like a rebirth, but also like something I can’t put my finger on.
Yet.
I don’t know what year 44 holds, but I believe that this phone returning to me and what this year has brought to be is symbolic: that it’s going to continue to be a beautiful and unpredictable ride, just like the beauty in the photos from that day I almost died.
People think I could live a life of full traveling. That’s not true.
I crave adventure. I don’t have to go far to find it.
But I LOVE a home base.
But everyone always asks me the same question upon returning: “What’s next?”
Here is what’s next:
I know what I want but do I want to put it out into the universe? As if the universe cares or can do anything about it?
This year I heard a voice inside me say, “What if I gave you everything you want. All you dreamed of?”
Was it me? My own voice? God? My conscience? My future self?
I don’t know.
This year I keep repeating that line daily: “What if I gave you everything you want. All you dreamed of?” And in the following moments, I imagined those dreams coming to fruition.
The past year I’ve gone after other grants, and won them all. ELEVEN grants in 8 years. Most this year. But y’all. It’s nothing I’ve done. I mean, sure, my mom says I can write my way out of a paper bag, but 100% I can tell you this: I’m in the right school, with the right demographic of students, with the right people writing my recommendations, and the right support of friends and family.
I have 517737173 creative ideas in my head simultaneously.
I have things I want accomplished before I leave this town or die, whichever one comes first.
I want to leave everything I do better than I found it.
A lot of my dreams I just want people to come alongside me with a fist pump, an hug, or a “Hey let me help!”
What’s next?
I don’t know.
I have the NYC marathon lottery I sure hope I get in at some point in the next 10 years.
I have spring break to go on a trip and chill out. Lol. Maybe.
I have a teacher travel grant I'm hoping I get.
And more than all of these? I’m still out here looking for love.
I know I found it, but what if I’m wrong?
What if everything I wanted this year really didn’t come true and it was only 90% of what I wanted?
But what if I get everything I want and more?
What if everything I want is already here and I won’t ever lose it?
I can’t say, even though I wish I could say.
But in the meantime? Here’s to the juxtaposition of living a fully lived life while also fearing that what I want the most might fall out from under me at any time.
Here’s to adventures in new countries and meeting new friends while also missing those back home.
Here’s to be inextricably me, loving like there is no tomorrow, and that post script: trusting my healing. Always trusting myself. Always believing in the magic of my own life.
Here’s to whatever is next in my life: I’m at last 100% resigning all I believed myself and the world to be to what is finally truth.
And to that I say to my future: je n'ai pas peur!
And for the time being, I say in the words of my friend: Year 43? I needed this.
