The Wandering Librarian

Part of a Memoir Series

February 2013, I was scrambling.  A huge life change meant giving less than two weeks notice at my first “grown up” job and taking a 7,000 mile trip for “house hunting”.  It would be my first time to cross the Pacific.  My first time really leaving.

The first eighteen years of my life were geographically stable and stagnant.  While my parents strived to give us an array of travel experiences, I lived in the same house in the suburbs of Chicago for eighteen years.  For sure I saw other parts of North America, going as far off as Cozumel, Mexico, but I never moved out of the split-level home in Homer Glen.  And then a major shift happened, my parents moved out of state to Michigan.  A reasonable drive away, and in a sweet little town accessible from Chicago by Amtrak, my parents were still available with a place to lay my head.  

But this change in my first semester at Loyola University made me come unmoored in a way.  I did not have my home to go to anymore.  Nowhere to stay as family and friends gathered for the regular holidays. A series of college housing situations (dorms, apartments, stints with my sister, back to my parents’ new home) were followed by graduate school housing situations (a dorm, an apartment my father thinks was a crack house, and then a loft with my now ex-husband).  My mother nicknamed me “gypsy” because I seemingly never stayed put for more than nine months within a five year period.

In October 2011, I moved into a loft in the Islandview neighborhood of Detroit (after a stint in Midtown, followed by Downtown living).  I was finishing up my second and final year of graduate school at Wayne State University.  I managed to live in that two bedroom condo for an entire fifteen months! I eventually graduated and had my first faculty librarian position at Davenport University where I was a campus library manager.  Life was good but I was restless.  At the time I truly thought it was just my wanderlust.  Now, thirteen years later, I know I was struggling with undiagnosed bipolar type 1 and ADHD, unmanaged conditions which made it very difficult for me to remain happy in one setting for very long.  I was miserable at work and bored with Detroit.

I married my now ex-husband in December 2012.  By February 2013,  we were on our way to Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands.  My wanderlust/undiagnosed mental illness pushed me out of Detroit and sent me forward on a whirlwind trip around the globe with an Italian Mastiff named Uli in tow.  This misadventure would be my first trip outside of North America, and my first time living outside of the Midwest.  Soon, I would learn that books (and the Internet) cannot fully prepare you for a place.