The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

What happens when we lose the things that anchor us? What if, instead of grasping at something to hold on to, we pull up our roots and walk away? Instead of trying to find the way back, we walk deeper and deeper into the woods, willing ourselves to get lost. In this place where nothing is recognizable. not the people or the language or the food, we are truly on our own. Eventually, we find ourselves unencumbered by the past or the future. Here is a fleeting glimpse of our truest self, our self in the present moment.

I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.

Before, some places just seemed too far, too difficult to reach, but once you start traveling, you never want to stop. You want to hear other people's stories, see where they live, eat their food. You realize--and of course it's a cliche, but like many cliches, it's true--the way we are all interconnected.

At this point in my travels and in my life, I still regard changing course as a personal failing. I don't yet have the hindsight to realize that some places don't fit quite right, for whatever reason, so sometimes it's best to cash in your chips and give it a go somewhere new, even if a mere twenty-four hours before you didn't even know that place existed.

Maybe this is what travel gives you—or gives you back, in most cases—that childlike sense of wonder, and with it a kidstyle openness where you want to finger-paint with anyone and everyone who shows

It’s exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long.

...being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going.

reading is such a pure thing, such blissful enjoyment, that I don’t know if I want to professionalize it and risk, as with music, losing it on some level. I

I’ve found it freeing these last few months to let go of some insecurities, large and small, or at least to put them on hold. One

Backpacking has noble ideals: to see how the locals live, to interact with them, to be respectful and blend in as much as possible. Backpackers want to learn, we want to understand the worlds we have entered, not simply consume them.

More and more, quicker and quicker, the places I travel draw me in like a spell. I

Even the homes we leave on purpose, the families we break away from to be ourselves or someone else, call us back again and again, to a place that has long since ceased to be home yet still holds power over us.

Who you are when you are tested might not be pretty, but it's always real.

Life feels full of opportunity and possibility—and maybe even adventure.

I like backpacker me. She is easygoing. She talks less, listens more. She doesn’t wear a watch. She doesn’t have anyone to answer to because she is far, far away. She is freer than ever.

My purpose and her satisfaction were equally illusive things, both of us so desperately trying to figure out our places in the world. And we were both restless, no doubt wanderers at heart—travelers.

Who decides the parameters of this real world, where the initiation seems like self-sacrifice? Give up your personal vision of happiness in exchange for a collective vision: work hard, get married, buy a house, have a kid or two, diversify your portfolio, retire comfortably without burdening your children, die.

The House of the Spirits. I pass on the former but trade her my copy of Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good for the Allende. I don’t yet know Allende is

Growing up in upstate New York, one of the grayest parts of the U.S., meant whole weeks might pass with no more than a fleeting ray of light, a momentary sun escape before it was swallowed up again by dense, omnipresent clouds.

What I found on the road was a tiny piece of myself, the one I kept unknowingly shuttered for so long in order to play the many roles I thought were mine.

As a white woman backpacker here, I’m an automatic spectacle. Our

See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it,

Home is so far away, mentally and geographically, that I’m starting to feel like I’m not even from there anymore. My

For as long as I can remember, I have disappointed her, so I have put a wall between us in an effort to protect myself.

One day she left because the pain of staying would not retreat.

there is always something more that can be taken away.

I have always loved the validation that an acceptance letter brings, but when I received this one, I felt only emptiness.

Should you do what you love, what’s outrageous and unpredictable, and worry about the future later, or plug away at a steady job first and go off and have your fun when you retire? In

Whenever you’re traveling, you have these thoughts of home. At what point will you have been away so long that it will no longer be recognizable—or you won’t be?

Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the world, even if the most important changes happening to me abroad—many of which are imperceptible until years later—are nowhere to be found on those pages. My