Traveling to Meet Who I Used to Be

A journey isn’t just about finding yourself. It’s about encountering who you used to be

Today, as I was driving my son home from school, a song came on the radio and I abruptly remembered that I went through a phase of performing at open mic nights.

Keep in mind: I’ve never been much of a musician, and I’m definitely not a singer. What I did instead was the next best thing. I’d go up on stage and recite the Bryan Adams hit song, Summer of ‘69, as spoken word.

It was very cool. Or something.

People did not always appreciate the bit, but I loved that version of me who thought pop-as-poetry was high art, who lived for the rush of a laughing crowd, who flicked her hair and sucked on a Camel Light like she owned the night.

And then my son yanked me back to the present moment. From the backseat, he burped into a plastic cup and shoveled the aroma out the window, laughing gleefully.

The mom I am

My son will never meet the woman who once performed Bryan Adams spoken word under a spotlight that flickered like a twitchy eyelid.

To him, I am the mom who won’t let him have a smartphone. The mom who refuses to turn over my own phone so he can watch videos. The mom who is fundamentally un-fun and has probably always been this bleak and boring.

He has no idea how many versions of me came before this one. Sometimes I forget that too.

But soon we’re going on a family trip to Germany — and while we’re there, we’re going to meet up with Denis.

The other life

I met Denis on a train out of Mumbai 15 years ago. I had no idea where I was headed, so when the train reached Denis’ stop, I hopped off with him.

We drifted into a few weeks of compressed intimacy, traveling together with a friendship on fast-forward. Denis, who let me grip the back of his rented motorbike as we tore through diesel-scented streets. Denis, who shared a hut with me in Goa, where our mornings began with dogs fighting on the beach and the ocean so warm it felt like stepping into a living body. Denis, who divided up a dog-eared copy of Shantaram, each chapter torn from the spine and passed between us.

A couple years later, I ran into Denis in Munich. He’d scored free tickets to see The Hives in some industrial building, and with zero hesitancy we went and screamed our faces off. I was a woman who said yes to concerts, to silent discos in India, to sweat streaming between my shoulder blades. I believed in the religion of late nights, and the philosophy that tomorrow’s exhaustion was tomorrow’s problem.

Now I wake up at 5 a.m. and ride a Peloton. This is not bad, it’s just different.

The geography of past selves

I’m a proponent of traveling as a way to find oneself. To peel down the layers and discover what makes your heart beat.

But I also think travel helps you encounter who you’ve been.

Because the ghosts of you don’t vanish. They linger in certain cities, certain bars, certain corners of the world that once held you. The you who got drunk on a rooftop in Buenos Aires is still up there, mid-laugh, agreeing to run off to a Hare Krishna farm. (Um, that’s a story for another time.) The you who ate questionable street food without worrying about whether you’d be sick later is still crouched on that plastic stool, thinking you’ve never been happier.

These past selves don’t live in your photo albums or even your memories. They live in the places you left them. And sometimes you need to circle back — or meet up with someone who knew you then — to remember those versions were real.

When I see Denis, there will be an overlap, like tracing paper laid on top of a map. He’ll be talking to Current Me, the one who carries hand sanitizer and keeps a running mental spreadsheet of how much toilet paper is left in the house. But he’ll also be looking at Past Me, the one who packed a single change of clothes and assumed everything else would sort itself out.

And for a moment, in that tiny corridor where memory walks alongside the present, I’ll get to be both.

That’s the thing I finally learned

I now know that you don’t shed your old selves; you simply stack new layers on top. The adult who makes the dentist appointment and pays the electric bill is overlaid on the zany performance artist.

My son has no concept of this yet. To him, I’ve only ever been this current edition: the mom who compares yogurt labels and frets about screen time. He can’t imagine the chapters written before he arrived.

But one day — maybe with his own kid belching in the backseat — he’ll understand that the person you become doesn’t erase the people you’ve been. Sometimes you just have to take a trip to get there.