03 Mar 2021 7 min read

Flashbacks and Forward Thinking

Finding my footing in a new world, new life

If you’ve known me for a while, you know I’m finding my place in my new Canadian lifestyle after a few years spent living out of bags.

In the Before Times, I got a look at a world on the verge of populism and in the throes of climate change. I couldn't have known I'd be ending my life of travel – four years and 25 countries – just ahead of a global pandemic.

So here we are.

Photo: Stairwell in Guanajuato, Mexico, by Steffani Cameron. 2016.

It's been 18 months since I stopped moving through the world as an itinerant writer, and we've seen chaos and tragedy ensue since. All the while, I've been trying to reconcile where life took me and how.

At the time, when I finished travelling, I had spent 9 percent of my life thus far with my passport at the ready and my bags nearby.

During that time, I'd seen riots, poverty, and the effects of climate change.

Anticyclones in Sicily; earthquakes in Mexico, Albania, and Bosnia; a Dengue epidemic in Thailand; unusual rainfall in the Western Sahara; splitting Oaxaca a few days before a long-running strike turned deadly; teargas hitting my balcony in Bucharest as cops chased a diaspora protest down my avenue, and so much more.

Photo: Crowds amassing on my street before riot cops battered them with batons and teargas, which wafted to my sixth-floor apartment in Bucharest, Romania. The protests would be dubbed the “Diaspora Protests” and made headlines around the world. By Steffani Cameron, 2018.

The thing about playing nomad is, the ground forever moves. I was always navigating the present so I couldn't process the recent past or research the next place on my itinerary.

Coming home was supposed to be easier. (Narrator: It wasn’t.)

For 18 months, I’ve tried finding my way again. If you've ever been at sea a while, you know the struggle to adjust to "sea legs" on terra firma.

After four years of opting out of homes or routines, it's similar but a much longer sense of reorienting oneself.

Photo: As idyllic as it looks. Home, now. Victoria, BC, Canada. Last week.

Returning to Canada seemed like the end of my unsettled life, but it'd be months before I relaxed again. I'd returned April 2019, but would lie in another 11 beds before a bed of my own come late August. It'd be nearly three months after that before I even felt close to “settling in.” Christmas was coming.

Soon, news emerged from China. By the start of February 2020, we whispered about a possible pandemic.

Each of us has suffered differently through the pandemic with our own experiences. For me, I stopped being able to write. I was so mentally overcome by ongoing anxiety – including the anxiety I’d battled so long as a nomad – and writing was simply impossible.

Photo: Autumn in Ottawa, Canada, shot from the Gatineau, QC side of Ottawa River, fall 2019.

When I returned, I moved to Ottawa – another new life, another learning curve. Even before arriving there, I’d felt like an outsider and an enigma among friends and family.

There’s a line I love from Tragically Hip’s New Orleans is Sinking, one that’s long felt relevant to me – but never moreso than those first nine months back on Canadian soil:

“Ain't got no picture postcards, ain't got no souvenirs
My baby, she don't know me when I'm thinkin’ ‘bout those years”

Because memories are weird, man. If I’m lost in a travel memory when I'm talking to someone, I fall silent and get a look in my eyes friends never saw before 2015. A “things you can’t unsee” kinda glint.

I don’t lose myself in some posh recollection of drinking wine with a Croatian cheese platter as I watched the sunset on the Adriatic. It’s darker moments, or recollections of a person or place, and all the questions about their well-being I’ll never know the answer to. Like:

What ever happened to the old beggar in San Miguel de Allende?
Did the poor bay leaf-selling lady I bought a coffee on my mom’s birthday survive the earthquake a year later in Tirana, Albania?
What about that crying boy on the Cambodian border who broke my heart with his inhuman wail that woke me on edge for weeks?
How about those beautiful young Kurdish men who had an entire underpass in Istanbul rapt as they sang patriotic songs acapella, stomping their feet and oozing happiness, whose people have since been victims of violent Turkish oppression?

Photo: Mexican man, San Miguel de Allende. Summer 2016. He’s on the wall in my bathroom. He reminds me every day of how much good fortune I have. I wonder often how he is, if he’s alive. He made me angrier about being part of those who are raising the cost of living in his city, being part of the problem that’s forcing people like him out. By Steffani Cameron.

Yeah, “memories.”

Flashbacks get wicked. I'll be washing dishes and a scene flashes before me, from one of a hundred or more cities, maybe some random alley somewhere. There I am, scrubbing off burnt cheese residue while trying to remember where the memory was, what had just happened, and what happened next. Azores. Ponta Delgada. Just bought a ribeye steak for $5. Day before the roadtrip.

I remember a friend once saying they did some “Virtual Reality” to see what I was experiencing when I was in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Yes! VR! Even better than travel shows. Immerse yourself in the sights, the sounds! You don’t even need pants, man!

What it’ll never give you is the feeling of soggy linen mashed against your back because the night air is 33 degrees with humidity kicking up at 90 percent. It doesn’t give you the smell of sizzling meats on Thai food carts with the whiff of wood smoke filling the air as nearby open sewage drains choke you with festering warm sulfuric foulness, all with a contradicting hint of jasmine blooms.

Photo: Chinese New Year in Cambodia. February 2018. By Steffani Cameron.

It is a cacophony of odors and textures and feelings – it’s not just sights and sounds. In places like Bangkok and Istanbul, it’s an unrelenting sensory assault unlike any I grew up around.

And travel shows or VR don’t give you pain-filled ankles from navigating the round cobblestones worn smooth in the streets of Plovdiv, Bulgaria over centuries, in what is one of Europe’s 10 oldest, longest-inhabited cities. It doesn’t come with annoyances like learning to use squat toilets and why open-toed shoes are unwise for them, or the realization that those fine sands of the Western Sahara have screwed up your zoom lens.

There’s so much I need to say, want to say. I’ve not had the emotional or mental bandwidth for it. In hindsight, I should have had a therapy plan upon returning to Canada.

Photo: Shopkeeper in Tirana, Albania. A country on the rise, average income is under $500 USD a month. It would suffer a major quake just a year later, and given how derelict so much of the construction was, I was devastated as I witnessed the pain and loss from afar. I’d lived in the city for four months in four neighbourhoods over two visits two years apart. It has a place in me now. By Steffani Cameron

I still need therapy. Hell, we all do after a year of a pandemic.

Until just the last two months, I was in an emotional whirlwind. Some writers thrive under such emotional chaos, but not me.

I'm a "when the dust settles" kinda gal.

And now, well, I guess the dust is settling. I'm twitchy and wanting to write again. For me, not clients. And for you too.

I want to tell my stories. It’s therapy I can afford.

I’ll do that here and it will be a subscription model because writers gotta eat too. My words have value.

But I haven’t been a steady blogger, so I hope to earn your support as time goes on.

My caveat, though? This place will not strictly be about my lived travel experiences.

My travel has become me now. It’s dramatically shaped my worldview. Resultingly, I’ll share political, cultural, and existential content here in addition to the years of mental snapshots and the tens of thousands of photos to revisit. Maybe videos too.

Let’s see where this part of my journey leads. Thanks for joining me.