It's A Lot

Navigating the world at this moment and figuring out how to share our experiences authentically is challenging

Valencia, Spain

There’s so much I want to share—about our nomadic travels, our life in Albania, our side trips. About figuring out who I’m becoming in this phase of life. About raising adolescents abroad. About big things, small things, funny things, difficult things. In short, a life in transition. Full of adventures and doubts, and shifting dreams and anxieties.

I have so many posts drafted. But it’s hard to finish them and hit publish. Sharing on Instagram is just as challenging. It feels like the world is sliding towards the abyss, both in slow motion and at warp speed. How could what I want to share possibly be relevant? I worry that it runs the risk of sounding tone deaf.

But I want to document our experiences and my perspectives while I can. And to carpe diem this chapter of life because it feels fleeting, for many reasons. This was part of our impetus for our global adventure to begin with, knowing that life isn’t guaranteed—and it’s taken on new meaning given the state of things [gestures broadly at the world].

But sharing is tricky. I sit with thoughts as they bounce inside my brain like a pinball. Our recent trip to Spain is a good example. It was the first time we had seen my parents and sister in over a year. It was SO lovely to spend time together and make new memories. I want to share all sorts of fun (and funny) things we did together: Shopping, cooking, figuring out how to ride the metro, exploring Valencia, playing games.

But it was also hard at times and I want to capture that, too. We each had our own priorities and way of looking at the world—things we could easily adapt to and things we were more inflexible about. Add in various states of sleep deprivation and there was some discord. That’s not as fun to write about, but it was real. Also, my parents are aging. Heck, I’m aging, and I’m aware of our finite time together. I’m also not sure when we’ll all be together again and that makes me sad. We’re talking about visiting this summer, but who knows? The climate is unpredictable. We’ll see how spring goes.

And then there’s our last full day in Spain, after my parents and sister left, when it was just me and the girls (C took a side trip of his own) and we all had various moments of melting down and bickering. There were lessons learned about how not to pack too much in at the end of a trip (which we knew but did anyway) and insights gained about the difficulty of raising adolescents who are navigating a period of massive personal change and self-consciousness against a global backdrop of tremendous uncertainty and instability. It’s hard and there’s no good roadmap for how to go forward. I want to talk about that, too, but whew!

And these are just my high-level thoughts from one week in Spain. Sure, I could write a Top 10 Tips for Visiting Valencia with Your Family post and call it a day, but that’s not me. I want to go deeper, and deeper requires reflection and space and time. Now add in all of the other experiences we’ve had since setting out to travel/live abroad that I still haven’t written about yet and it’s a lot.

I keep trying to find a red thread through all of it. Something to simplify the narrative, make it easier to digest what I share. Maybe it’s this: Life is messy. It’s multifaceted and multilayered, and various realities can be true at the same time. Expanding our ability to hold space for this is hard, and making sense of it (or trying to) is even harder. Maybe mucking around the messy middle is simply where I’ll have to be for a while, sharing posts that are varied and imperfect.