163. Novelty Junkie – Jennifer Steil
Living in between, belonging nowhere, has been fertile for me and my work as a writer. Yet it has also nearly wrecked our lives.
All my life, I’ve been drawn to novelty. I yearn to move into new spaces, to travel to new countries, to explore new neighborhoods. I walk different routes every day, perpetually crave something new for breakfast, prefer to buy groceries from shops I’ve never been to, and switch toothpaste and shampoo brands every month. Any kind of routine makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
For most of my twenties and thirties, I dreamed of living abroad, but couldn’t figure out how to do this while paying off monstrous student loans. Living abroad seemed to require family money or a rich benefactor. Finally in 2006, I was offered the chance to leave the United States to run a newspaper in Yemen. Yemen had not been in my plans, but Yemen would rescue me from returning to the same office every morning. Yemen was sure to shake up my life and offer me something new, something I had never imagined. How could I resist?
Yemen was utterly unlike anywhere I had ever been. Living there challenged all of my assumptions about the world and prompted me to examine how the US had shaped me. My work consumed me, my reporters taught me more than I taught them. I learned Arabic and made irreplaceable friends. Eventually, I also met my husband. His work as a diplomat allows us to move to a new country and learn new languages, cultures, and mythologies every few years. After four years in Yemen, we lived in Jordan, England, Bolivia, France. We’re now in Uzbekistan. Home for me is not a place, but simply Tim and our daughter Theadora.
Living in between, belonging nowhere, has been fertile for me and my work as a writer. Yet it has also nearly wrecked our lives. I live in a permanent state of nostalgia for people and places I love. My daughter is old enough to suffer when friends leave, or she does. I cannot always access the medical care I need. We have also endured the unthinkable: I’ve been kidnapped, my husband has been attacked by a suicide bomber, we’ve survived a catastrophic automobile accident. In 2020, because of the pandemic, the UK evacuated me and Theadora from Tashkent and kept us apart from Tim for nearly a year.
I wonder sometimes what I could find if I were to plant roots down instead of out. My joy has always been in movement, but maybe there is a joy to be had in stillness. Maybe someday I will find out.
– Jennifer Steil
