"Travel to me means a new start. Travel offers me a chance to live a new life and become a new person.”
Hello Meaningful travelers,
It’s Trisha Sacramone from Travel With Meaning Fall 2021 Intern team. This blog post will be my official introduction to the travel community! I’ll be giving a little background to why travel means so much to me and how it played a huge role in my life.
“Where are you from?” has always been a loaded question for me. I’ve moved on average every 3 years since I was a baby because I was born into a military family. With each move, I felt like I was leaving something behind, there would always be a fresh start ahead of me. New friends, new house, new neighborhood, new school. I looked forward to it after the first couple of moves because I liked the idea of being able to start over and become someone I wasn’t before. My home was with my immediate family so leaving a familiar area to an unfamiliar one wasn’t a big deal. I enjoyed seeing new places and meeting new people. This was my new normal.
It wasn’t until I met my best friend in the 8th grade that I started to become annoyed with moving. We both went to the same middle school in Belgium and met through a science class. I was only friends with her a little less than a year before I had to move. This wasn’t the first time I had to leave a close friend but it was the first time I wasn’t excited to relocate. After 8th grade, I stayed four years in Germany for high school. This time flew by and suddenly I was moving to Boston for college while my parents moved twice in between my freshman and junior year. College was another point in my life where my way of thinking about moving changed.
While in college I began to realize that all those years of restarting my life were all connected. Each time I thought I became a new version of myself, I was just building upon my previous experiences. I’m grateful I was able to travel so often and find who I really am and for giving me the chance to experience so many different perspectives in life through the people I met, the cultures I encountered, and the areas I lived in.
Growing up with the mindset that I’d be somewhere new in a couple years has made me a little restless when I’ve spent too much time in one place. It has also turned me into sort of a hoarder, surprisingly. I’ve kept many trinkets or “souvenirs” from my travels and I carry them wherever I move. I’ve definitely had to cut my collections of random objects down over the years but I still have a good box full of little knick knacks at my parent’s current house. These assortment of objects have acted like glue for me throughout the years so that I'm not leaving everything behind when I have to leave since I have these souvenirs.
So where am I now? Los Angeles, California. I’ll only be here for a semester but I’m trying to be more reflective about where I am and how I got here than I have during my previous moves. There are many more moves ahead of me but I’m grateful for this opportunity to explore more about what travel means to me and how it has shaped me. I am grateful to be a part of the TWM™ community.
- Trisha Sacramone
TWM Fall Intern 2021
* top image is Park van Tervuren in the fall near my childhood home in Belgium.
