You Can't Get There From Here - Coming Home

Maybe one reason I love Gale Forman's book about her year of traveling around the world is the recognition of another misfit: "I am a member of the tribe of the odd. Have been since, as a little girl, I came to realize that I was not like a Amy or a Jenny. I was a Weird Girl."

I was a weird girl, too, but not for the same reasons. Gale embraced her weirdness by dying her hair unnatural colors and doing interpretive dances to the Velvet Underground at talent shows -- in elementary school! I was bewildered by mine. It wasn't until I was grown up that I understood why the popularity I obliviously enjoyed in second grade was replaced by a polite distance from the third graders who didn't want the misfortune of my dad's untimely death in a car accident to rub off on them.

When I moved to Japan, I discovered a bunch of other weird people. When Gale lived in England for a year as an exchange student at an avante garde boarding school, she edited a literary journal and marched against apartheid. "I became enmeshed in the biggest, coolest group of weirdos I'd ever met. Consequently, I fell in love -- with travel, with the thrill of plunging myself into the unknown, and with the joy of coming up connected."

It may seem counter-intuitive, but when I was in Japan, I felt a greater sense of belonging than I ever did in the U.S. The very fact that every westerner I met automatically was an outsider forged a bond between us. I still feel that bond with people who've lived abroad. It's OK to be weird in a foreign land. People expect it.

Living abroad made me feel I was a child of the world, someone who could sit on the steps of Bangkok's World Trade Center on Christmas Day, speaking Japanese with my Thai guide (who didn't speak English). That was the apex of my years in Asia. It was the single coolest moment of my life and I felt I was a part of something big.

Coming home is an emotional experience and I was struck by Gale's description: "An hour after the plane took off from London, I started to cry. This was surprising considering that for the past several weeks I had been thinking of nothing but home . . . Home, where I could meet friends and not have the conversation start with some variation of, 'So, have you ever been to Lake Titicaca?' Home, where I could get a cup of coffee without having to get dressed first. . . And yet, here I was crying on the plane because I was going home."

Me, too -- even though the stress of living in Japan had driven me nearly to a nervous breakdown. "A funny contradiction," Gale writes. "But if I had learned anything this year it was that contradictions are complementary, that a truth and its opposite exist in harmony. It's how the shrinking world was destroying cultures just as it was creating new ones."

And now the incredible experience -- being a part of something as big as the whole world -- was over. "Standing in the terminal [after arriving home] I had the sense not just that the adventure was over, but that it had never even happened," Gale writes. "Was I the person who had taught crazy Doctor Bi Chinglish [Chinese/English]? Who learned to joust? Who had prayed with the Lemba?"

Coming home, you worry that life will never be so big ever again. But it can and it will. An experience like living in Japan for seven years, or traveling to obscure parts of the globe and living there for months at a time has a deep impact. You can never go back to the way you were before. Gale understands that, too. The last line of her book reads: "Life, it turns out, is a big as you're willing to make it."

If you would like to purchase Gale's book, "You Can't Get There From Here," scroll through the carousel on the right, click on the book's icon and you will be taken to the book's page on Amazon.com.