I Travelled Far Enough I Met Myself

by Aneakaleigh-Ann Neils (Spain)

I didn't expect to find Spain

I grew up with my eyes glued to the sky. The sound of aeroplanes flying overhead made me gleefully run through my house to the nearest door or window to watch in awe as passenger planes entered or left Port of Spain. There wasn’t a time I didn’t do it either. Not that I remember of course. Every day I looked forward to it too; it was like my ritual. The desire to travel had always been buried deep within me and it fueled every decision I made as a young learner. Early on I latched onto languages as my gateway drug to uncovering the magic of travel. If eleven year old me could see herself now, she’d be floored at how much easier it is than it looked. The best part is though, if it wasn’t for the determination at that age I wouldn’t even be here. … and that’s a funny thing. Who knows why I wanted to travel so badly as a child? It couldn’t have been the thrill of adventure. As I remember me, I was always too scared to try. Too afraid of what people would think of me because I tried. Worst, what if I failed? The idea of leading a life of adventure was always something I craved but deemed scary, too uncertain. It wasn’t the idea of Parisian romance. Falling in love and flying to Paris to share kisses in front of the Eiffel Tower was never a dream of mine. Nor was samba dancing in the streets of Rio. Having grown up in Port of Spain, home to The Greatest Show On Earth, celebrating Carnival elsewhere was never on my mind. It really couldn't have been the lure of discovering the Great Barrier Reef "down under", as an island girl who's never learnt to swim this thought certainly never crossed my mind. “Wherever the wind blows,” was my only concrete travel plan growing up. Underneath it all, there was a burning desire to experience life somewhere else. My childhood self wanted to see the world as it was, for herself. Unsurprisingly, it has now been five years since I started my travels as an English as a Foreign Language teacher and the biggest, most surprising discovery I've come to uncover about travel is that I needed to travel to find myself. Madrid is the kind of city that breathes life into everyone who gets the chance to experience it. Everything is happening all at once and you're not entirely sure how to process it. You have this idea of what the Spanish way of life is like, and then the next thing you know you're learning that you were completely wrong the entire time ... and it's the same way I'd describe what meeting my self that first year in Madrid felt like. In 2018 the age-old question, “Who Am I?” played heavy on my mind. It turns out that when you start becoming more aware of the real you that exists beyond the ego, it manifests itself in many ways. The European lifestyle meant I was free to roam, and so I took advantage of that opportunity. Staying "booked and busy" made it all the more difficult. Now I had a dilemma. Here I was, living out my childhood dreams but there was an inner emptiness. A lack where all that happiness and fulfilment should have been. Here is where I had to let go of the narrative that travel would ultimately make me happy. There I was travelling but still with this dreadful feeling of unhappiness tainting the life I'd always dreamed of. I was now forced to look within and admit that until I cultivated happiness from within, I would never get it from the things of the world. Meeting myself, the true me, and peeling away the layers that made up the person I thought I was to get to that unapologetically real Aneakaleigh is the greatest travel memory I can't wait to tell my nieces and nephews.