Many of us struggle to find our calling. What are we meant to do with our lives? The Elemental Journey Series is a set of four literary novels, Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Each follows protagonist Pearl Swinton as she goes on a heroine’s journey in search of self in a world rocked by climate change and global violence. Pearl’s journey parallels my own experience of finding my path as artist and novelist. In this blog, I’ll explore my process in hopes that both my novels and this blog inspire others on their journey.
I hated Seattle. Despised it. It was 1993, and I’d just left London, my jet-setting lifestyle as a journalist and wife to a musician to return to the States. A therapist suggested I go back to America, to find the lost parts of myself, and she was right. But by God, nobody told me it was going to be this hard.
I was living in a studio apartment in Seattle’s Wallingford District, a block from where the hookers hung out on Aurora. I couldn’t find a journalism job. Seattle was dull and rainy, and seemed like a backwater to me after the excitement of London.Man, I hated that city. Small, provincial, isolated — I had no idea why I was there. I only knew one other person, my younger brother.
I told anyone who listened how much I hated Seattle. It didn’t make me popular. Because I hadn’t followed the American track as a journalist — from local to regional to big city paper — no one would hire me. I had to do a series of dumb jobs to survive, key cutter, boat deck swabber, lumberyard data entry moron. I just stopped explaining to people that I’d just come from Tokyo, Asia and London where I’d covered all of these exciting stories as a reporter and editor. I just stopped talking about myself altogether. It was useless.
It was brutal.
And then there was the reverse culture shock. I’d had so little contact with America for the decade I was gone that I had no points of reference. No one and nothing made sense. British understatement did not work in America. Americans seemed loud, brash and stupid to me. No one seemed to know much about any other culture — except for what they read in the news. I’d gone from an important person as a journalist to a nobody. When I telephoned people before, they ALWAYS called me back. Now, they seldom did. I realized it hadn’t been “me” who was important, but the newspapers I’d worked for.
It became clear to me that all my life I’d been paid handsomely for my brain, scholarships and jobs and quick promotions. Now, my brain didn’t matter. Now I was just some American like all the other Americans. now I wasn’t special. A part of me could see, when the clouds parted and my depression lifted for moments here and there, that this might be an interesting thing to explore, this need to be seen as smart, this need to be seen as special. But mostly I was in a state of shock and severe depression. I’d lost everything I’d loved. For what? To find myself? Was this hell really worth going through?
Who was I if I wasn’t an expat, a journalist, a woman with a brain and a wild musician for a husband? Who was I?
I was a nobody.
It was true. Without all the structures I’d built to define myself — my expat life, my career, my husband — I really wasn’t anybody. I’d never evolved or developed myself, not really. Not truly. (Two decades later as a coach, I cannot tell you how many people have come to me
I was being forced to go way back to the beginning, to start over, to rebuild myself. I would have to go backwards to go forwards. But how?
How?
Read more about my novels at www.carolineallen.com.