On the Road Again

Hello Blog Readers! I hope you found my blog through some cleaver form of self promotion or the swirl of the algorithm. It's a pleasure to be writing from my couch in Baltimore, with the small fire of excitement and anticipation inside my stomach. I'm starting this blog because I'm going to Taiwan in 2 weeks!

In this space, I hope to post some updates in the form pictures I take on my trip, as well as some reflections on travelling, being away from home, being a white acupuncturist in East Asia for the first time, and perhaps bigger themes.

I'm no stranger to blogging. In fact, I feel like long-form blogging is the type of technology used for social media that my particular stripe of a generation (1990 baby!) was born for. I had a Xanga, wrote MySpace and Facebook notes, columns for the middle school newspaper, and wrote all sorts of self-exposing long-winded rants about my life as a teen in Maryland at the gasp turn of the century. It felt very dramatic and I felt very clever at it.

When in undergrad, I got my big break- a scholarship-fueled study abroad semester in Quito, Ecuador. Obviously, I was thrilled to get out of Western Michigan, use my Spanish, and explore the world- but I was also really amped to write about it in Quito Fever. Hosted by blogspot, I used my rudimentary HTML skills to write poorly edited entries with a tumblr-like array of hashtags, including #uglyamerican #linguistics #deepshit #weekend update, etc. I still look back on that project very fondly. I was working an internship at a very rural public health clinic and got to follow the staff along on some pretty interesting #adventures in #publichealth, (example A, B, C) as well as just be 19 and not have a sense that binge drinking, gluten, and non-stop social interaction were things that didn't serve me. So there's some fun memories back in those entries, a lot of nostalgia.

After finishing college, I lived in Chicago and tried to pay my bills working 3+ part time jobs at a time, including an AmeriCorps position teaching health and safety classes. I kept blogging, heavily influenced by sites like Thought Catalogue and Jezebel, writing listicles like "Nine People You Meet in a CPR Class" and then changing the tone as I applied for, trained for, and then started my job teaching English at a community college in Chile. There, I still kept up my bread-n-alcohol-n-too-much-socializing habits, but overall it was a time of huge personal growth for me, as well as just like straight up reflection on the beauty of the world I was living in. Reading those entries makes me smile at the person I was in 2013-2015 and appreciate her perspective. 18 months into life in Valparaiso, I returned home to live with my family, mourn my grandfather's death, and soon after start acupuncture school and getting to know Dan. Both these things have been constants in my life since then, coming up on 10 years.

During this time, minimal travel. A trip to Oregon to consider switching schools. Road trips to the beach or to see friends. Several weddings of various levels of fun, formality and distance. My sister+mom meet up in Minneapolis when we finally felt that COVID was not an absolutely lethal threat.

And now, 10 years since leaving the country for the last time, I'm heading to Taiwan! What's the plan? Take a not-rediculous set of flights to Taipei, stay with my friend SJ for a few days, pet their dog and do not develop insanity from the time change. Travel for a few days, get to the southern city of Kaohsiung for a bodywork class. Spend a week in that routine, then traveled a week more, then head home on November 9th, arriving back at BWI only a few hours after I leave Taipei.

Writing this on my professional website because it is a bit of the internet that I am paying for, because it is authentically me, and because I am excited to take a break from being a professional for a few weeks and want to be comfortable with sharing that. And maybe a photo or a thought will be an inspiration or a moment of joy for a friend, colleague or patient who sees it.

Hopefully, the perspective of almost a decade at home will help me choose adventures that are less overwhelming/exhausting but still let me see the rough beauty and hard-won history of the Taiwanese island.

Enjoy! Comments and questions welcome.