“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” – Zora Neale Hurston
Pull the Horizon is about my life overseas since 2012, teaching full time, traveling, and writing it all down (often never to see the light of day). This website is a work in progress, as I am collecting everything in one place after years of putting it off and writing on Blogger. I’d like to think that I’ve learned a thing or two about living well on the move after almost a decade, so you can expect articles about slow, local travel, adapting to living and working overseas, mental health and personal finance, as well as an abundance of long, rambly personal narratives (like this one, you’ve been warned!).
I feel compelled to state a disclaimer right here at the start: the current obsession with the seemingly limitless social capital of travel gives me consternation when I sit down to write about my life and personal experiences. They happen to have taken place away from my home country, while working or traveling overseas, but Pull the Horizon is not a Travel Blog in the truest sense of the heavily edited, curated, aspirational content word. I much prefer the prose of travel writing and story telling to the practicality of travel guides, and I live overseas to have a home base to immerse myself in a region and go very slow when I do travel. I would rather spend two weeks in one small town and find a favorite coffee shop, or return to a favorite country, than frantically collect countries.
I’m a writer, first and foremost, and I often write about experiences that have marked me, moved me, or changed me. Many of those happened while far away from home. But you can be marked, moved, or changed right in your own hometown. Please, do not romanticise moving around the world as the answer to your problems. You will still have questions to your problems wherever you go.
My intention with my writing, therefore, is absolutely not to inspire you to believe that THE WAY to an adventurous life is a one way track to selling your things, leaving your home, and traveling full time. I am grateful for international work in a career I am passionate about, as non-stop travel is not my goal. I have previously hit the road with no job, plans, or place to live for a trip with no end date at the start, backpacking wherever the whim took me, and enjoyed every minute of it. But I prefer meaningful, consistent work, a routine and a rhythm, learning the language and culture of my host country, traveling slow and local, and figuring out how to build a healthy life in a new place.
The reality is life is hard and beautiful anywhere, and every iteration of it has its problems and joys. I manage and work through an anxiety disorder, so please do not misinterpret anything you read here as some sort of unique fearlessness, or a constitution especially suited to instability. If you stay here long enough, you will read lots of honest writing about difficulties.
I’m sharing how I’m using my particular life, and hoping it resonates with you, wherever you are. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing something as well as I can (and well has a wide, wide swing).
What I hope you take away from Pull the Horizon is inspiration to do what you want to do with your life, wherever that might be and however that might look, because it’s yours to design.
A list of random details: originally from a tiny town in Texas; an early and obsessive reader; the kid who would develop the biggest teacher worship and loved school; grew up with the assistance of food stamps, free lunch, and doesn’t take kindly to those who shame poor folks; worked since 14 in a variety of odd jobs from manual labor to waitressing to offices; an activist and someone whose earliest political memories involve gay rights and anti-war movements; a full time worker and full time student in college; a fan of any radio program NPR has ever made; a second career teacher; Atlantic, Economist, and New Yorker reader; a non-drinker who will be the first and last on the dance floor anyway; dabbles in aerial silks and guitar; needs to write more (hence this website, finally); always taking the longest and slowest route possible; last seen in Sweden, currently in Kazakhstan, previously posted in Japan, Albania, and Laos; traveled overland/sea between all of those countries, except Japan, carrying everything I owned and giving away the rest.
I had no clue what I was doing when I set off for Japan alone at 22 having only ever been to Mexico with a group of country kids on senior trip. I never imagined I would end up with a life that involved almost a decade of living overseas. None of these places were planned very much in advance (sometimes not at all) and I am thankful every day for the mix of luck, timing, support, and massive privilege that have gotten me here all in one (somewhat banged up and stitched together) piece.
Related to privilege- I know that my overwhelmingly positive experiences in tens of different countries, both as a worker and a traveler, are solidly shored up with being a white woman with a passport from a rich Western country, who speaks fluent English and is able bodied. This is often not acknowledged explicitly in travel blogging and travel influencer accounts, which is another reason I want to be clear that Pull the Horizon is about living and working overseas, and lifestyle design, and aforementioned rambling personal narratives, and yes, travel, but, no, it’s not a Travel Blog.
The iteration of Travel Blogs that makes me most want to emphasise the difference here is the recent influencer coach approach that preaches “anyone can travel and/or quit their job and be a travel blogger”. This preys on people’s unhappiness in their lives and sells them a dream via a blogging course, or a life changing retreat, or just the general (false) idea that travel can cure all ills and you will be much happier and more interesting and have a better life if you just traveled more.
Pull the Horizon isn’t a Travel Blog in the modern sense because my purpose is to tell stories, not to sell a curated fantasy built on consumption and escapism. You can find meaning and happiness without having to buy anyone’s course or pay for an overpriced retreat or take a plane somewhere. You can also enjoy travel without obsessively making it your primary personality trait, or your main benchmark of success.
A fear: Every year I say this is the year I will work to give my writing a place to go, other than the short trip from my head to my hands to a free parking spot on the internet that gets shared amongst my family and friends who love me, want to be sure I’m not dead in some foreign country, and read to keep up with what I’m doing and clarify that I am not, in fact, dead in some foreign country.
Part of my having this “About” page at all, or this domain, or this website, is taking a step away from writing on the internet in the easiest and least serious way possible to something that hopefully will build more focus. I consume a lot of other people’s art. I write a lot, and it usually never sees the light of day. I want to give it a real place with this project. I am afraid I just won’t, like so many times before. Maybe writing this oddly tangential confession on the “About” page will solidify something. Even if the You I am talking to right now doesn’t exist, I will imagine You reading this, and consider that I made a promise here that I should follow through on.
A credit: The name of this website is inspired by a quote from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The book ends with the self-actualisation of the protagonist, Janie. In the face of uncertainty, grief, and disappointment, she rejects despair and experiences redemption. Hurston’s writing visualises the ability to be the master of your life, to look back at what your experience has given you, and then look to the horizon of your future and have the faith and strength to draw it all together in your own two hands. The image of draping it over your shoulder, certain that what you had drawn to you was yours to keep- that self confidence and assurance struck me then and strikes me every time since.
“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
Zora Neale Hurston
When I first read it, I pictured Janie as a goddess bigger than the world, gently reaching out a hand and sliding the horizon off the edge of everything, claiming what was hers. As a teenager in Texas reading those words, living in a life very different from the one I have now, the possibility that gave to my own sense of confidence was transformative. I wanted to cast that net and see what came up in the meshes, too.
My exploration of Hurston led to Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, to the poetry of Langston Hughes, and to one of my favorite authors, Toni Morrison. All of that started with a small town English class, my teacher, Mrs. Clement, and the first work of Hurston’s I ever read- her short story ‘Sweat’.
Stories for me have always been overwhelming, visceral things that mainline straight to wherever empathy lives inside of me and turns me inside out. Books are more than just collections of language or plot points, characters and themes- they created spaces in my mind where I could retreat. Certain books in my life were everything to me from bunkers to hospitals, escape tunnels to hiding places.
More times than I can count, poetry has held me together more softly and successfully than seems possible for a few sparse lines offered by long dead authors.
The ability of writing to lift you out of where you are and show you where you could be, or to remind you of what you forget you were, or to explain the way to a new experience, is a power that I never take for granted, and something that still inspires a childlike awe. It’s why it’s not too strong a word to say I love teaching literature. It’s a type of magic that makes me want to create something that gives even a flicker of that feeling to others. It’s probably what leads me to circle back to the fear explained above- that I’m not up to the task or the ideal. I have come to find more and more that just struggling to reach it is a pleasure. You have found yourself at the site of my struggles. Maybe something I give you here will help you through yours.
