Pilot Post

Hi my friends and family,

Just to set you up from the start, if you only care about how the places I'm visiting look, well you should just follow my Flickr (here). No I'm not gonna make this all sappy the entire time but at times this blog may get personal and maybe a better title would have been "Today I Felt..." because I'm gonna try to give a pretty uncensored account of the feelings I have during my trip. Good or bad it'll go here.

Why all the feelings talk? Well as many of you who are close to me know, I've been on this emotional self discovery binge the last few months after separating from my girlfriend of three years. I didn't grow up in an environment that encouraged or taught me about the importance of my feelings and was in many ways felt discouraged to share those feelings. Much of it comes from the fact that as a 9 year old immigrant to the US I had to deal with a lot of tough moments being picked on and bullied and feeling like an outcast even with those I considered my closest friends. And, my Iranian culture and family dynamic were not very conducive to sharing feelings, particularly negative ones, so that didn't help. So for much of my life I bottled up most my negative emotions even with those closest to me, unintentionally building a wall which kept me from enjoying the amazing support available to me from my incredible family and friends.

Well I'm deciding to change. I want to become more in tune with my feelings and comfortable sharing them with those around me. For me just as much as this trip is about me traveling, seeing, and learning about some amazing places in South America over the next three weeks, it's about me using the world as my backdrop as I explore and learn about myself. I know all that sounds really corny and mushy but just six months ago all I knew about my feelings was that my feelings were either good or bad and that for a long while I hadn't been feeling good. I couldn't really identify how I felt and why I felt it and as a scientist (and having the history I mentioned above) it was hard for me to share something I was so uncertain about and was so negative, so I bottled it up for over a year, hoping it would solve itself.

Now I'm learning to identify the type of feelings I have and to share them with my friends and family. In this short time of sharing I have realized the majority of the uncertainties and anxieties I've had lately about growing up, my career, and my future are shared amongst all my friends. I've also learned that the vulnerability you feel when sharing your feelings is a great opportunity to really discover who your real friends are and how much they are willing to do to help you. This has been an amazing discovery for me akin to feeling like the proverbial alone on a boat only for dawn to break and realizing you're in a mass of people. However, I still have a lot of work left to do on myself with three weeks to get started!

Anywho, from this point on this blog will have a less explanatory tone like above and be more travel oriented. Which is peeeeerfect timing actually because I'm juuuust about to take off from San Diego on the first leg of my trip to LAX.

Love you all!
This is really happening....eeeeeep.

-Z