Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [2]
At work my life went on as before. I continued to interview interesting people as well as write a column. It was a challenging, sometimes next-to-impossible job and I was completely invested in it. My work was not only what I did but who I was.
Occasionally, though, I found myself wondering: was I too invested in it? At times I felt my identity was narrowing down to one thing—being a reporter. What had happened, I wondered, to the woman who loved art and jazz and the feeling that an adventure always lurked just ahead, around some corner? I hadn’t seen her in quite a while. Had she disappeared? Or had I just been too busy writing about other people’s lives to pay attention to her?
There was nothing wrong with my life. I liked its order and familiarity and the idea of having a secure place in the world. Still, the image of that woman who had gone missing kept popping up. One day, after reading about a photography course offered in Tuscany, I thought, She would find a way to do that. I had the same reaction when I read an article offering room and board on a Scottish sheep farm that trained Border collies: I’ll bet she’d be on the phone trying to work something out. I found myself wondering if there was some way to reconnect with this missing woman. I sort of admired her.
The answer, one that arrived in bits and pieces over the next few months, surprised me.
What you need to do, a voice inside me said, is to step out and experience the world without recording it first in a reporter’s notebook. After fifteen years of writing stories about other people, you need to get back into the narrative of your own life.
It made sense to me. But how to go about doing that? I thought of taking a leave of absence from my job, of traveling to an unfamiliar place where all the old labels that define me—both to myself and others—would be absent. Maybe then, somewhere along the way, I would bump into that other woman. Or, if she no longer existed, maybe such a trip could help me find out who took her place. Although the idea appealed to me, I pushed it aside as impractical, both personally and professionally.
Yet I couldn’t let go of the fantasy; it sprang out at odd times. In the middle of the night, I would get up and start figuring out what such a plan might cost and how to finance it. I spent hours in the bookstore’s travel section poring over possible destinations. At dinner, talking and laughing with friends, I would wonder about my capacity to be a woman in a strange city, without an identity, without friends.
Then I ran through all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it. What would I do with my house? Who would take care of my cat? What if some emergency arose at home? Would my editors give me a leave? And if they did, what about the column I wrote twice a week? Would it be assigned to someone else? Suppose I got sick in some strange place? Suppose I disappeared, never to be seen again?
But something was working deep inside me and, like a tropical storm, it gathered momentum before hitting me full force with its message: you are a woman in search of an adventure, said the voice inside. Take the risk. Say “Yes” to life instead of “No.”
Still I hesitated. It was time, I thought, to get some feedback from friends. When I ran the idea by those closest to me, the response was unanimous: Go. Your children are grown and, except for your cat, you’re an independent woman.
They were partly right. In many ways, I was an independent woman. For years I’d made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow, and had the kind of relationships—with the exception of sons and cats—that allowed for a lot of freedom on both sides.
But lately I’d come to see that no matter how much I was in charge of my finances and my time, I was quite dependent in another way. Over the years I had fallen into the habit—a quite natural one, I believe—of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people and what