On the Road with Julie

On January 2nd of this year, the day I left on my 6 month trip around the globe, as I was piecing together the final bits of packing and logistics before an early evening departure, I found myself surfing a wave of nostalgic reflection. All of the swirling memories and motivations that had led me to this moment and what had fueled me to put in all of these efforts to get myself to this point all rushed through me and demanded attention away from all of the last minute to do’s. Standing at the precipice of a an adventure that had, for so many years, been only an idea and a dream, I took a moment to jot down the whirl of thoughts and before I knew it, I was a few pages in and fully in touch with the reasons I was so ready to get on that plane. I am now just over a month into the journey and, so far, it has been all that I had hoped it would be. This is a story about the fuel that got me this far and will carry me the rest of the way through.

January 2nd, 2026

“I don’t understand anything!” 

Over 25 years ago, during my junior year in college, I burst out in this fit of total and utter fresh-out-of-my teenage years, frustration. Absent an ounce of inhibition, this phrase erupted out of me with unbridled angst in front of my whole class. Though I am not timid by any means, I am also typically not one to throw such fits as a matter of public presentation. So this was an uncharacteristic moment. And it shocked the room – not just because it was atypical and not just because it was unnecessarily dramatic, even though I was in a drama class when I did it. 

No. The thing that left the room stunned in a collective silence was that I had said it in Russian. 

In this particular moment in my young life, when the kettle had reached a boiling point, the alerting whistle of the untenable internal pressure building up inside of me actually came out as,

“Я ничего не понимаю!”

The theater class that I was in was a theater class that was in Moscow, Russia, where I studied abroad my junior year in college, and, up until that moment, the only people speaking any Russian were our teachers and the English interpreter there to bridge the gap for the rest of us students. Nobody expected any of us American students to even want to bridge the gap ourselves, let alone have the capacity to do so.

At the time, I did not fully comprehend the significance of that moment, nor the layers of meaning and irony inside my statement, “I don’t understand anything.” Clearly, there was something I understood. It was a moment only of pure feeling in a sea of disorientation. And it is a moment that remains sharp in my memory as an impactful one. 25+ years later, as I am about to embark on a grand voyage of language learning and international discovery, it is a moment that has tremendous relevance. It was, among those many other things, my first true linguistic breakthrough. 

If you were to strip away all of the 20-year-old angst and confusion that had fueled the explosion, underneath all of that unpleasantness, for me, that moment was also an elated one where I discovered the absolute thrill of communication in another language. 

It was a thrill that I already suspected existed – and one that I had already been striving to find. When I first showed up to college a few years prior, I knew very few things for sure. Certitude is a precious commodity in life at any point, and even more rare at the fresh and wide-eyed age of 18. One thing, though, that I knew for sure, was that, someday, I wanted to be a polyglot. 

The idea of being able to communicate in so many languages absolutely thrilled me. I was then and I continue to be now, so completely intoxicated by language and language learning. 

Even the word, itself, “polyglot” delights me. I find words, themselves, enchanting. More than just mechanical couriers of meaning, words, to me, are more like delectable morsels upon which you can chew, each with a different flavor and texture to excite the palate. 

But, what intoxicates me most goes beyond my delight in the taste of a new word. Rather, it has always been a feeling of absolute and total awe at the phenomena of language itself. That awe lives in me like an effervescent brew and a constant gasp. There is this ocean of words floating around us in the air, an expansive sea of linguistic sound waves that encircle the globe, vast in size, but intricately connected in a grand and unfathomable ecosystem. For me, that ocean is palpable and bright and, like any clear, blue water, I find myself so eager to dive into it. All of those sounds swaying in the breeze that stretch across the miles are music to my ears and I find myself wanting to tune into every frequency and dance. 

How exciting to be able to decipher all of these complex codes that have been stewing and brewing in some living language soup since the dawn of man. What a miracle that anyone, at any time, ever, found a way to take a thought or idea in their own mind and form it into something that could dance, unbound to the ground, through the air and right into the ears of another being. And in that leap across thin air, that these sounds could somehow courier meaning and information somewhere over there, well, it just astounds me. 

And, every language is another riddle, another set of secret and hidden codes, collectively formed by the minds and mouths of millions of people through hundreds of generations – people that would never meet in most cases, but who have unwittingly shared in the stewardship and continuous creation and evolution of this collective magic carpet that can transport invisible thoughts from one person to another through the chasms of quiet between us. 

And, you may not realize it, but, whoever you are, you are part of it too. 

You don’t need a fancy degree. You don’t need to pass a test. You don’t need to have any particular beliefs or particular amount of money in your pocket. Whatever you look like, sound like, act like – you are all automatically accepted into humanity’s largest collaboration. Most people don’t wake up each morning and think, today, I am going to participate in an epic miracle that encompasses centuries and eons of human history in concert with thousands and millions and billions of other people I’ve never met. But, in fact, you are carrying a baton through time. You have received the language passed down to you and you are part of co-creating it throughout every day of your life, including passing it down to the generations to come. 

And, you might not realize it, but that language has been changed because of you. Maybe in small ways, maybe in large ways, but because of how you embodied it, how you used it, how you stewarded it and who you shared it with and how you did, it has a little bit of you in it that wasn’t there before it passed through you. We are all caretakers of this massive creation – we are all architects, engineers, builders and stewards of the largest building ever constructed by man. It is invisible and awesome in the truest sense of the word if you can find a way to stand back far enough to see it in its entirety. To truly do so is a task that is as impossible to accomplish as it would be to see the whole Universe itself. But, it is within your reach to step back far enough to at least get a grasp of its massiveness. 

And all of that linguistic creation is happening right here on our little blue dot in all of the most mundane nooks and crannies of everyday conversation, thought, argument and exchange of information. Whether it is a moment of casual chit-chat, a thoughtless comment flung out in a moment of unkempt emotion, a dry-as-hell instruction manual, or a tremendous work of poetry or literature, it is all equal parts contributor to the ongoing phenomenon of human language. It’s a miracle of an unfathomably huge process that every single one of us holds in our hands and stewards with such natural ease, that, for the most part, most of us don’t ever even think about it at all.

That is, until you try to learn a language you don’t natively speak. Only then might you begin to realize how absolutely amazing it is that you speak any language at all. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are doing, if you speak any language at all, you have already mastered something remarkable. And when you try to learn another language, this invisible miracle you’ve been carrying with you all day, everyday, becomes a little easier to see. 

So, yea, I like learning languages.

I could go on and on about all of the ways languages fascinate me and why I love learning them. But, perhaps the most compelling motivation that has fueled this trip that I have hurled myself so unreservedly into is the simplest among them.

I just really like doing it.

I think that’s enough – enough of a reason to do something. Life is short. And “I just really like it.” is a good enough reason to put a lot of life into something for the short time we each have on this planet – at least in my philosophy of living.

So, that is what I’m doing. And, I can still feel the sensation of that first linguistic breakthrough and my first real hit of linguistic dopamine – the thrill of being able to communicate in a foreign tongue, of running into a wall and busting through it with a set of interesting sounds laid out in a particular order prescribed by all the interactions of generations of people over so much time and so much space and so much human striving to make sense of life and trying to live it with each other. And, in uttering those sounds, I was, somehow, bridging what had been, just seconds before, an impossible distance.

And the scene continued. After my initial outburst, standing in front of a slightly jaw-dropped room of 13 American college students, 2 Russian theater professors and one humble translator, having just proclaimed the depths of my lack of understanding, I carried on. My Russian rant had only just begun.

Я понимаю ваши слова, но я не понимаю чтo вы хотите, чтобы я сделала!

“I understand your words, but I don’t understand what you want me to do!”

I remember the look of the translator as he stared, blank-faced at this strange creature that had just changed the rules of the game. He looked at the teachers with wide eyes and a mild shrug, not sure what his role was in this unplanned-for-scenario. No need to translate for them and he seemed to have lost his allegiance to providing English for the rest of the students that all sat there dumbstruck and lost in a room now empty of English. 

This moment was for Russian speakers only. 

He stood in silence, now an audience member for the show and eager to see what would happen next with this comically unhinged, only mildly bilingual young lady. All of my fellow students had now found themselves in a position of linguistic isolation, looking, at least for a moment, as dumbstruck and lost as I had previously been feeling about everything OTHER than the language around me.

I remember the angst of that moment, but more so, I remember it as a thrill – a thrill of being able to bridge what had, moments before, felt like an infinite gap. The 10 feet of distance between me and my teachers, only minutes before, had felt like light years. And in that moment, I was an astronaut that had just broken the laws of physics, traversing a distance of light years in the space of mere seconds. 

And, 25 years later, the thrill of that feeling, minus the angst, still compels me forward. It has helped me build an itinerary that will push me out of my comfort zone in 7 different languages,10 different countries, 3 different continents and have me pinballing eastward across a strip of latitude from 20 degrees at the southernmost point (except a quick dip down to 3 degrees north for an overnight layover) to 56 at the top until I make my way home to the familiar world of good old 43.15° N,77.61° W.

As for that goal I grabbed a hold of at 18, to become fluent in 7 languages, well, I’m not there yet – not even close. I’m still working on mastering English for that matter. And I am under no illusion that this trip will deliver me to my ultimate goal of polyglot status. But it will inch me down the road a few steps further.  To get a chance to immerse myself from head to toe in the sea of language that I love so much – to get a chance to give myself over to this pursuit with nothing else to pull me away from it – not for my whole life – but just to be my whole life for a short time – well, that is a dream I have long held – and here I stand on the precipice of living it. 

One of my other passions is swimming in nature’s wide open waters. And my love of language comes from the same place – a love of being immersed in a vast, colorful world where I am a foreigner – not built to live there, but that I still, somehow, have the capacity to make my way through it and peer beneath the surface into a whole other world. And the sea of liquid language is every bit as wide and vast. It takes every bit as much fitness and focus and consistent forward motion to navigate it. And there are never any guarantees when you are facing its vastness. And, there is simply no feeling like it as you carve your way with each stroke through the seemingly infinite waters of it. You will see so much life when you put your head in it that you can see no other way. It is, to me, magic.

Learning a language is hard. It is frustrating. It is discouraging. It is intimidating. But if you’ve got the fire for it, if you get the dopamine from it, if you feel the magic in it, it is more than worth all that. So, here I am, ready to go, ready to swim. I’ve got my swimsuit. I’ve got my goggles. And I’m ready to dive in.