Just go, he said

So she did. A look at a new memoir by Judy Reeves

Before we begin…

Have you ever traveled by yourself, or wanted to? How has traveling at all - whether a few miles from home or thousands – surprised you or changed you? If someone gave you a round-the-world ticket with the proviso that you had to use it in the year or lose it, what would you choose and why? Describe the feelings or expectations that run through you when you think about leaving home or, if you are a frequent traveler, what drives your desire to “just go?”

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A blind seeker, a long journey, and a transition

When Judy Reeves was 49, she sold her San Diego home, her business, and her car and bought a round-the-world ticket. For nine months, she traveled solo in Europe and then India carrying her notebooks, pens, and dragging a roller bag that was often heavy with books she’d found along the way. 

“What I wanted escaped definition or category or even language – an ineffable yearning of the kind I imagine has set many blind seekers on a path to they know not where.” - Judy wrote in the opening pages of her newly-released memoir, When Your Heart Says Go: My Year of Traveling Beyond Loss and Loneliness.

As I read this book, I found myself thinking of how travel has been many things for me: escape, entertainment, education, exploration. A trip, even one that takes me only hours away, has the power to remind me of my relative smallness in a vast world. This can be blissful. It can be exciting. It can be agonizing or, at the very least, very uncomfortable and not just because planes are small and cramped, cars break down, motels or tents are tiny and hot and gritty; I have found that when I am severed from the familiar, I come face to face with the unsettling thoughts, desires, and limitations that are usually buried under the routines and noise of my day-to-day life. 

This is one of the things that happened to Judy Reeves as she made her way from London to Copenhagen to Budapest, Paris, Russia, Mykonos and more. For the first time in her life, she was alone with herself. With a few exceptions, no one was waiting to meet her at any of her stops. No one was directing the route except for her. At times, the burden felt heavy, particularly for someone who has “never been one to let things be.” Controlling details or examining her thoughts and memories so closely they may appear more complicated than they are, is one of the traits she confronted on her journey and again, when she looked through the journals that held her accounts of it. “I do make things complicated,” she writes. “This is one way of trying to grasp control when the whole thing – existence itself – is just a free fall into the void and I’m afraid to let go.” 

That resonated with me.

As the story progresses, we come to understand that the destinations and stops along the way are not the key elements of this particular journey. We are following a woman in transition. A woman who has not lived alone since she left her own parents home with her first husband. A woman who has earned money writing for businesses but has not squarely faced the kind of writing she yearns to do but wonders if she can. A woman who lost the love of her life three years earlier and has never fully processed the loss. A woman who has worked hard for her sobriety and was on call for many other women who were struggling with theirs. 

Time and again she is presented with opportunities for companionship or sex and each time she surprises by opting to remain alone even if it also means being, on occasion, lonely. At one point, in Budapest, Kati Mati, her landlady of the moment asks her point blank to explain herself: why is she traveling around the world by herself? 

Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash...

She gropes for an answer: “It has to do with taking away the familiar so I can’t lean upon props. Go through life without consciously making choices. It has to do with risking,” I say, making it up as I go, testing ideas, searching her face for reaction.”

She makes her way awkwardly until she finds herself saying it was also about leaving. And letting go of the demands that came with sponsoring women in AA. About withdrawing for a while to see where she was and what it would be that she would do with her life when she returned. She defines herself as an extrovert and comes alive in community but, until this trip, had never achieved the balance she needed. 

This memoir captures the origin story of the Judy Reeves I met almost twenty years ago when I left the East Coast and started my own next chapter as a writer here in San Diego. It was on this trip that she decided not only to continue her own path towards writing but, dipping into her natural extroversion and love of community, formed groups and organizations so others like her practice and develop together. Her previous books have all been nonfiction aimed at spurring writers no matter where they are on their own writing journeys. 

These days, she told me in a recent conversation, she has found that balance between solitude and companionship, community and individual. We talked about how this story came to be written nearly thirty years after she returned from this trip, how memory works, the “coming of age” that happens for people, especially women, in their late forties, and the interplay between her work as a teacher and her development as a writer. I’m excited to share our conversation with you. To listen, just click below.  For highlights and more about Judy, read on.

Judy Reeves: looking back at the trip that changed everything

About Judy

Judy Reeves is an award-winning writer and teacher whose books include A Writer’s Book of Days, Writing Alone/Writing Together, The Writer’s Retreat Kit, and Wild Women, Wild Voices. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies. A long-time teacher of creative writing, she previously taught at UCSD Extension and has led community-based writing practice groups for thirty years. She teaches at writing conferences internationally and at San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit literary center she cofounded. Her work within the San Diego community has been recognized widely by those within and outside the city’s writing community and July 24, 2010 was declared “Judy Reeves Day.” Judy lives and writes in San Diego, amid bulging bookshelves and an ancient Underwood typewriter that claims its own social media fan base. You can find Judy (and her Underwood) at her website or by following her on Facebook and Instagram. 

Her other books

Guides for every writer: A Writer’s Book of Days, Writing Alone/Writing Together, The Writer’s Retreat Kit, and Wild Women, Wild Voices.

Interview highlights

Why this story now, thirty years later? 

“It had been knocking at my door for all of those years and I knew I wanted to write that story, but I didn't know that the story I wrote would be the one I wanted to write. I thought it would be more of a You know, single woman travels the world alone you know, solo journal, solo trip around the world. I had no idea that it would be so much about grief and about losing Tom. I know some people talk about that tincture of time. You know, that when the story's ready, the writer will. It's a mystery. We don't know anything.”

What led to the decision to “just go” on this journey?

“I could not articulate what I was seeking. There were some inner needs I couldn't even acknowledge and just that solitude. I needed that so desperately. That, coupled with the impulsive part of myself. I heard (her husband) Tom’s voice. He said, “Just go. Just go.” 

That quote that I used from Sue Monk Kidd in the opening of the book made such sense to me too “Is there an odyssey the female soul longs to make at the approach at fifty– one that has been blurred and lost within a culture awesomely alienated from the soul? If so, what sort of journey would that be? Where would it take me?  And I think so. This was soul work. That was leading me on. That and some kind of a false bravado.”

How helping others write serves her own craft

“Each time I do a new class, something that I, I'm interested in learning myself. So I say, I'm going to create a class around this. And so then I start studying and I read books by people who do that kind of thing. And, you know, go to workshops online and study with people. So I'm learning at the same time that I'm teaching.  Then I'm taking it into my own work. So it's all connected.”

On the mutability of memories

“Every time you tell a memory or rewrite that memory, it changes. , it's never the same as it was originally. And so  you have to trust the emotion that's underneath. My sister will say, that's not how that happened, you know, but we also each have our own story. And so, the way I enter, the way I experience something in the emotional state that I'm at, at that time, it goes in one way.” 

Solitude and extroversion

“I think that's one of the reasons that I live alone. Mm hmm. But I will tell you, during COVID and during the lockdown, I had such a hard time and was so depressed and had so much anxiety because I couldn't interact with people. So for me, it's that balance. Of being public and and being having the solitude to take it in.

I know I'm an extrovert. I'm not an introvert. And so I think and so that's what my balance is now is that I can, I can be here. Amy Wallen used to say she could feel her husband standing in the hallway breathing.  I think  because I'm more settled in my life and with who I am, I don't need that, that kind of long depth of solitude…I think I've become more, I don't want to say more extroverted, but more able to hold my own self in community than I was before I went away.”

Coming of age at midlife

“I have a theory about this. I have always believed that when young girls are eleven or twelve, before you reach puberty, that's when you're the most powerful. You can do anything. And then, once again, after menopause, we're not bleeding anymore. There's a certain freedom of not being fertile, of not being of childbearing age, of not...maybe we have reached a point where we're, we've worked long enough at our job, whatever our career is, that we're ready to leave that and do something else. I think we are more encouraged to do that now than we were in my mother's time. I'm eighty years old. I'll be eighty-one when this book comes out, and we're more vital now.”

My daughter was a detective with Fremont Police Department. She retired, and now she's gone back to what she loved all those years ago, and what she was born to do, which is perform, entertain. She's doing acting. She's doing voiceover. She's creating films. She's doing all of this stuff and she's not the only one, you know, all the time women are saying maybe what they used to call men, the midlife crisis. For women, it's midlife opportunity.”

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P.S. And now…your moment of Zen: can you see her?

A rare moment from a rare and special trip to Afrida shared by another solo traveler, Sam M.

Photo by Spark subscriber Sam M.

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