The Big Right Turn
By: Annie Blasberg
Tags: Travel, Vanlife, Body Image, Hiking, Solo Female Travel

After the sun sets and darkness sweeps over whatever landscape I am inhabiting for the night, I layer on another sweatshirt, slide into my slippers, and start winding down from the day. I prepare, then eat some sort of dinner, journal, read, and configure a plan for the following day. Unlocking my phone, my thumb now instinctively taps the Maps app instead of Instagram. I zoom in to my little blue dot, drop a pin, title it “Holly Springs National Forest Camp Spot”, and save it to my “Ody Advanture” list. Pinching the map with my fingers to zoom out reveals a bread crumb trail of dots resembling a lumpy, backwards L beginning in Rhode Island and ending in Mississippi. I swipe back and forth between Maps and Safari plotting a few bread-crumb pins to follow the next morning.

At different stops along the way I’ve had to explain what I’m doing, traveling solo in a van meandering cross-country with my dog, to countless people. Whether it’s strangers I meet in grocery store parking lots or friends on FaceTime, the most common reactions I get are “How do you go to the bathroom?” and “Is it hard being alone?”

Going to the bathroom isn’t all that difficult to figure out. I go to the bathroom like all of you… it’s just not always in a glamorous porcelain bowl. But, if you gotta go, you gotta go.

Is it hard being alone?

I like to describe myself as an introverted extrovert or would I be an extroverted introvert? I’m not sure. Anyways, I love spending time with friends and socializing, but have always needed to balance it out with adequate amounts of “Annie time.” On the road, my days are packed. Work, drive, adventure, sleep, repeat. I often have a playlist bumping, an audio book or podcast playing, or am singing- no longer self-conscious of being tone-deaf, off-key, or messing up lyrics. I don’t mind being alone. In fact, I love the freedom that comes with it. The freedom to be myself with abandon.

I do what I want when I want. I wear whatever. I’m unshaven and un-showered. And, I feel amazing.

While watching the sun slip behind the Smoky Mountains over Lake Santeetlah on a Saturday evening, I thought about what I might be doing if I were with my friends in a parallel universe. Upbeat, poppy, pregame music would be playing. Outfits would be changed and new ones tried on, only to put back on the first. Final makeup touches applied while the night’s first shots would be poured and passed around. The sensation of nausea produced by the idea of taking a shot lurches me out of this brief fantasy. I think back to months ago when I’d put on an outfit, apply makeup, and then analyze myself in the mirror before going out wondering how I’d be perceived by others. Do I look pretty? Skinny? Is this hot enough? Does this make me look fat? Is that pimple noticeable? Will the guy I like text me tonight because I look good in this shirt?

…absurd. Absurd on so many levels.

Makeup is now a foreign substance I don’t touch, not that I was an excessive makeup person to begin with. My routine was pretty simple: recklessly smudge eye shadow on with a pointer finger, generously dust bronzer across my entire face, and try to apply some eyeliner and mascara without poking an eye out. If my makeup ever looked nice, it was because my best friend, Julia, did it for me. For my birthday one year, Julia got me a makeup bag that said “Face Shit” containing all the products she typically used on me: highlighter, blush, bronzer, contour brushes, the cute silver eyeliner to apply in the corner of your eye for a “pop”… the works. I have my “Face Shit” with me, but the only time I look in the minuscule mirror in my van is to hurriedly brush my oily hair into a ponytail in the morning. Well, sometimes I give myself finger guns and a smile in it later in the day, but that’s about all. The rattan, sun-shaped mirror serves more of an aesthetic purpose rather than functional.

Makeup, mirrors, and clothing can be empowering and used as forms of self-expression. However, they can also lend themselves easily to unhealthy relationships. It’s so common, especially for women, to become consumed by physical appearance, compare ourselves to others and fixate on how we are perceived. Through high school and college, I tried my hardest not to entertain this mindset. Constantly bombarded by images of perfect, skinny, toned, thigh-gapped women in the media, being in places where disordered eating and eating disorders were more common than not, and surrounded by friends struggling to find their own way through it, peers that could be models, and peers that actually did become models, it was hard not to sometimes slip into this body-obsessed and appearance-centric mindset.

This spring during a session with a Medium/Intuitive Healer (my therapy of choice), she told me that she was having a vision of me wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers and asked if this was my ‘uniform.’ Sitting there in a t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, I thought to myself, “Damn, she’s good.” I like being comfortable. 95% of the time comfiness will take priority when I’m choosing an outfit. I’d rather be comfortable in a t-shirt than be wearing one of those tight, strappy, bodysuit shirts that gives you wedgies. The other 5% of the time, I’m wearing something silly.

At the end of last fall, I was lamenting over the lack of male attention I was receiving to a friend. Laughing, she reminded me that the past two consecutive weekends I had gone out in a large, gold fat suit followed by dressing up as the bearded, male, drug dealer, Fez from the show Euphoria (very convincingly might I add), for Halloween. She suggested I might have better luck if I put in a little more effort to look hot or at least wore something normal the following weekend. Though her advice might have worked, in my eyes, those outfits were iconic. While they certainly did not showcase my boobs or butt, they exemplified my personality (which in my unbiased opinion is pretty great) and if a guy wasn’t into that, then I was not into them.

Though it’s still a work in progress, detaching my self-worth and body image from male attention, likes on Instagram, and how I look in the mirror, has been liberating. I love my body for what it can do. As an athlete, I’ve always wanted to be strong. In those moments that I do find myself self-conscious about or critical of my body, my attention is focused on my legs. But, I remind myself of everything these legs have done. These legs have out lunged and out lasted opponents in squash matches. These legs have done triathlons. These legs biked 100 miles. These legs (though they were mad about it after) ran a half-marathon with no training. These legs have carried both me and Churro on hikes and up countless mountains the past six weeks. They are strong from years of sports, adventures, and doing things that make me happy. And, I love that.

December 7, 2020 — Ozark National Forest

Feeling completely confident in yourself, your body, and your ideas is a lifelong effort. There’s bound to be ups and downs along the way. This past year, I felt like I was making strides on this front partially due to feeling comfortable in my environment as a senior on campus. Now, with COVID and the van essentially removing all aspects of a social life and the feelings of external judgment that comes with it, I’ve had the opportunity to get even more comfortable with me.

I used to have a constant reel of negative self-talk circulating in my head. A sports psychologist once described it to me as the voice of my “inner gremlin.” Since being in the van, that voice has evaporated. Thank god. Traveling alone would be no fun if I was constantly telling myself how dumb I am and how much I suck. This experience has taught me to be my own best friend, biggest cheerleader, and hype girl. I’m no longer reliant on outside positive reinforcement or lean on others to help make decisions. I’m loving this bad-ass, confident, empowered, I can do anything, idgaf version of myself that I’ve found from spending so much time alone.

Sometimes I find myself opening up Maps and typing in my home address in Boston to see how long of a drive it would be. Over the past six weeks, it grew from a mere four hours to a formidable fifteen. Because I haven’t been traveling a direct route, zig and zagging down the East Coast, my conception of how far I’ve come, geographically speaking, often gets muddled. While I wish there was a simple app that could map the journey that’s taking place within me, my thoughts, and my changing perspectives, I’ve been enjoying the struggle of trying to articulate it in my journal and on here.

The triangle extruding from my blue dot on the map, indicating my direction, now points west. I finally made the big right turn. The Maps app now suggests flights home instead of automatically offering driving directions. Each day my blue dot, which I know my mom is tracking just as closely as I am on Find My Friends on her own phone, moves a little farther across the map dropping bread crumbs along the way.