Ivy_Augustine

Ivy_Augustine

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8 months. 6+ countries. 2 regions. $20,000.
Why’s there so much dog shit in Greece?
Sounds like a setup to a punchline, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ve only noticed it because I’ve been running almost everyday since coming here. You get real familiar with sidewalks (and the habits of Cretan canines, it seems) when you spend a half hour of your day staring at them. Because I’m certain all of you are so excited to talk about exercise, I’ll tell you why I got back into it.
Well, it helps with my anxiety, for one. Running hits the sweet spot between my internal restlessness and need for contemplation. My thoughts aren’t so important as the motivations beneath them. What’s gonna keep me running? What makes good fuel?
Now, the first emotion I’d reach for would be anger. You know the drill, put on your shoes, pop in some earbuds with BROCKHAMPTON full blast, and hit the road like a bat out of hell. It’s cathartic, every now and then. The problem was that anger used to be what drove me the most–in running and in life.
Most people who don’t have a mental illness will assume depression manifests as a prolonged sadness, and that’s partially true. Yet in my experience, the more pernicious aspect of melancholy was not the presence of sadness, but the absence of all other emotions. I would compare it to the silence of being submerged underwater, any shouts from the surface (happiness, anger, and so on) reaching too late and too muddled to be comprehended by the listener. Now imagine that after six sunken years you finally emerge to a cacophony of sensation. It’s intense, it’s beautiful, and you stand there like Dorothy in Technicolor, dazzled by all you have missed.
But the glamour soon fades. You start to examine why you went without these feelings for so long, plod through the waves that had kept you, feel a tug on your feet and what’s this?–suddenly you’re swept away by the rage, the rage which had always laid underneath.
That rage was enough to motivate me through my college career. Success was the best revenge I knew. I worked myself to the bone in all that I could do, received recognition for my output, and graduated having done quite well for myself given just four years prior I placed below average in all subjects. Despite this, why did graduation feel like a hollow victory?
When I started running in the summer months preceding this Fellowship, I learned that anger needs constant fuel. I can start a run upset and crank up my angry music to make the feeling last a little longer, certainly. Nevertheless, I’d find myself a mere six minutes into my workout having completely drained myself of that anger and in need of another fix. Nothing was ever enough.
There is no reward at the end of anger, and that’s why I couldn’t appreciate my graduation the way I should have. All I had done for four years was shadow-box myself, and it took leaving everything I knew behind for eight months to realize it.
We’re encouraged from a young age to value measurable results: from the gold star on your completed algebra homework, to an annual pay raise at your job, to the fitness app notification that celebrates achieving your alloted daily steps. We love data. Viewing life as a series of tasks with measurable results makes it uncomplicated. Unfortunately, it also means you always live in comparison to others, because how else can you have measurable results without something (or someone) as a benchmark?
Having a results-oriented mindset has certain benefits (productivity, for one), yet its caveat is that you neglect the importance of the process by which you achieve something, in favor of the achievement itself. Near the end of his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running , novelist Haruki Murakami contrasts a scene of rigorous self-inspection of his physique from his youth with the discovery moments before a triathlon of new aspects of his personality in his middle age, remarking that “no matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see what’s inside.” Some changes, perhaps the most important ones, cannot be measured. In such cases, the result is the process, which is invaluable.
At the beginning of this Fellowship, I struggled to reconcile my result-oriented mindset with the realities of long term travel. Much like a novice runner, I was becoming frustrated by a lack of immediate, apparent results for the work I was putting into the process. Compounding with the loss of my rage which was my drive, I felt like I was adrift without a purpose. My next impulse was, naturally, to compare myself to other Fellows (both current and former). Who was faster than me, who was more adventurous?
Having now gone through the process, I can recognize this initial self-consciousness is the obvious outcome of such an open-ended program as the Bonderman Fellowship, especially when you’re freshly graduated from a meritocracy. Being at the other side of the bell curve didn’t make this moment any easier, of course. It wasn’t until I could let go of the comparisons and the need for results and embraced the journey (and the discomfort that came with it) that I truly understood how much I’d grown.
If there was anything I could tell my former self in those times, it’s that there is no essential Bonderman Fellowship experience. We all start with the same guidelines, so there will be similarities across the board, but no one person’s journey can serve as a benchmark for yours. Comparison will only make you unappreciative of what’s right in front of you, because you already have your reward: it is the opportunity to change.
I know it’s cliché, but there really is something about climbing a mountain that makes you rethink your life (maybe the blisters). In the foreward to his book, Murakami reiterates the mantra of another long distance runner: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” When I was on the Annapurna Circuit, I was simultaneously rebuilding myself. In order to do that, I needed to change how I reacted to the pain from my past.
It was no longer just baggage. I, in my anger, had forged it into a sword and shield. I would use my pain to harm others, and claim I was protecting myself. But if there’s anything I learned from trekking, it’s that some things just aren’t worth their weight on your shoulders. And sometimes you need the help of other people to lighten the load.
I may run to calm my mind, but I write to ease my soul. Words have power. By writing you transmogrify the intangible into the definite. You create fantasy. You capture memory.
In rebuilding myself, I didn’t see the use in hiding my trauma. It was no longer something I needed to brandish to keep people away.
As Murakami said, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Truthfully, I don’t agree with the second half of this statement. Suffering wasn’t optional for me, because suffering was the process by which I learned the most valuable lessons about myself and others. Suffering taught me that if you seek change within yourself, anger alone will not sustain you. It’s a powerful current that will only take you further out to sea.
Instead, you have to keep your head above water, or you’ll miss the glimmer of the sun on the waves; the joy that comes from a knowledge of darkness, and is all the brighter because of it. It’s this joy that keeps my legs running, my eyes on the few paces of concrete just ahead, and me in the present.
I’d like to acknowledge all the people who were a part of this eight month process:
Before I go, I’d like to give thanks for the journey, from which I’ve grown the most.
Thank you for teaching me to be empathetic, patient, and kind.
Thank you for teaching me about fear, and how to act in spite of it, not because of it.
Thank you for every bitter wave, so that I may emerge from the foam immaculate as Aphrodite
spin my armor into magnificent gold
The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps to wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men. –“Consolation to Helvia,” Seneca
She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
domineered over this grass plot,
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and–
If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out. –“Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” William Carlos Williams
Like Che before me, I came to Israel fully prepared to offer a nuanced and well-informed perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet when I left Hebron and returned to Jerusalem at the end of my tour, I felt like the conflict took one look at my small frame and laughed. The more entrenched within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I became, the more that nuanced and well-informed position eluded me, but not for a lack of information.
Instead, it felt as if the many (and violently contradictory) perspectives on the conflict spread out as a massive tapestry before me, so storied it warped and weft across the horizon. I with my limited vision had only two options: I could view it from a distance and superficially deduce that some shapes were red where others were blue, yet be ignorant of their meaning; or I could put a magnifying glass to a few minute threads and know them in full, but only have a vague notion of what images those threads resolved themselves into.
I came to Israel in search of a well informed opinion, and came back empty-handed. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far greater than I feel capable of converting into a snappy blog post, if such a thing would even be right to do.
In short, I am a young American, a complete outsider, with no proverbial dog in this race. I don’t have a strong identification with place like the Israelis and the Palestinians do. To me, being an American is derived not from place, but from mobility (which is why white nationalists trying to narrowly define “American” is completely foolish to me, but that’s a blog post for another day). Since my great-grandparents were Polish immigrants, my roots are shallow compared to the long histories Israelis and Palestinians inherit. Being from Michigan (or even the United States, for that matter) isn’t a part of me the way being from Israel or Palestine is for these guys. To be American is to be plastic in both senses of the word; on the one hand, it is entirely superficial, on the other, it can shift to fit any mold it encounters. Anyone can be an American. Not everyone can be Israeli or Palestinian.
The reason I go off on this tangent is because I think this difference in how we form identities with regard to place is why I struggle so much to understand the conflict. Since I should put my English degree to good use, I’ll explain the moral quandary I’m feeling with books.
I can look to Seneca in his letter consoling his mother when he is exiled from Rome to Corsica, whose quote comes from a larger passage about how people have moved from one place to the next for centuries, and so he cannot be ever truly exiled as migration from one’s home is a part of the human condition. Seneca’s approach is universal; nothing in the world is new to anyone, so it belongs to no one. The Bonderman Fellowship creates the conditions of exile, though not out of punishment certainly. I would argue the goal of the Fellowship is in part to realize that one is never truly away from home in a different country. The one thing you learn from travelling to so many different countries is how similar everyone is to each other, and so you can make a home just about anywhere.
That said, travelling with the Bonderman Fellowship engenders the importance of history to a place, and how history distinguishes one country from the next and helps to form the identities of the people who live in them. In the poem “Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” Williams similarly discusses an unnamed woman’s life and the trials and travels that brought her to this plot of ground. The last two stanzas are about the importance of place in a person’s history, and how that history is then passed onto her children (ie the next generation). This ownership of place is at odds with the freewheeling nature of exile in Seneca’s letter to Helvia, because it firmly establishes how history is central to the creation of a home. Moreover, the last two lines impugn the reader if they flout history and only bring a “carcass” to this ground.
What’s difficult about this comparison is that both Seneca and Williams are right. You can make a home anywhere, but the home you make will always be tied to the history which is brought with you. Similarly, a place can simply be a plot of dirt to one person, but still have massive significance for another, and it would be wrong to ignore that. And in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that land can mean so much to two different groups of people they are willing to kill each other for it. So how am I, the American exile, supposed to grapple with two histories, when I barely have one myself?
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. –“On the Road,” Jack Kerouac
Sometimes I throw up my hands in frustration and think I’m fed up with travelling, when in reality I’m just tired of wearing the same three shirts over and over again. It’s times like these I usually raid the hostel lost and found (which often results in some dope finds, like a rainbow striped Brandy Melville crop top in Pai or a new Adidas moisture-wicking shirt in New Delhi), but my stay in Paphos has resulted in a departure from hostels in favor of a guest house. I went out in search of secondhand shops instead and found some jeans that surprisingly fit me perfectly, and thus complete my normie disguise which makes me look less like a traveller. It’s also nice to have pockets again.
Cyprus is small enough that I’ve decided to base myself in a small place in the old town of Paphos and make day trips from there. It’s low season right now, so the four person room I’m in I have more or less to myself. It’s not modern, it has a balcony but lacks some comforts one would expect of a vacation destination, but i love it all the more for that reason. The building is old, probably built in the 1920s or 30s based on the style–and it smells old too, but not in a musty, falling apart sort of way. It smells old the way cotton sheets do when they’ve sat folded in the cupboard over the winter, eventually succeeding their flannel counterparts; the first inkling of warmer nights to come. And at $15 a night, it’s cheapest I’ll find a room of my own here.
The Cyprus crowd is mostly British pensioners and young families, so as a solo female traveller, I stick out. This is most obvious when I go out in the evenings to drink a glass of wine and read (I’m an old lady, and that’s how I like it).
“Just you?” The waitstaff will ask, searching. I’ve even been told to change seats after being informed the high tops were for groups and it’s Friday night after all and could get busy so wouldn’t you be more comfortable at the bar? Nevermind the only other patrons are a British couple seated in the back. Nevermind that it’s off season so I swilled my too-sweet Cypriot rosé and read Wide Sargasso Sea to the tune of literally no one else entering the wine bar by the time I’d paid my bill. Friday night indeed.
It’s times like these I think about the difference between loneliness and solitude. The latter is something I’ve cultivated and treasured, even before travelling. For me, it’s the peace that comes with being on your own. It’s not the refusal of company so much as it’s recognizing your own happiness and sense of self are not contingent on the presence of other people. Solitude is honoring your need for space to process events and emotions, rather than treating this need like a defect.
I feel solitude when I am on my own. Loneliness, on the other hand, I encounter in the presence of others. I doubt I’m alone in that sentiment. Loneliness implies a rejection where solitude implies a boundary.
My brief roommate asked me, as if answering my internal diatribe. She was visiting Cyprus from Russia but would only be in Paphos for the night. She worked managing social media for businesses, and would be returning to do just that in Limassol the next day. I searched myself. Loneliness is being told to move because you are in the way of more desirable people who never arrive. I know that feeling well. Yet, the older I’ve gotten, the less lonely I’ve felt as I became more secure in my ties with the people who matter to me.
“No,” I replied, surprised at how true that was.
“Oh, you must not have children…” she laughed, then spoke at length about her nine-year-old son at home and how she once went to India to travel long term, but ended up cutting her travels short on account of missing him.
“So many Russians, they go to school and then work u
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