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The First Chapter of My Memoir—Not That Anyone Asked: A Travel Memoir about Sex, Love, Drugs, and Finding Purpose
You can download my book, which has a 4.8-star rating on Amazon, for free for the next two days.
Note #1: Not That Anyone Asked opens with The Preamble in Three Parts: The Dedication, How to Approach This Book, and This Book's Hope. All three are short mood-setting sections to lay the foundation before I launch into the body of the memoir, which you’ll find the start of below…
Note #2: The memoir itself includes a photo section at each of the four continent breaks. I decided to add some new photos here that aren’t in the book, just to spice things up a bit.
Note #3: November 4th is my birthday, so consider grabbing a copy, writing a review, or telling a friend about the book as your gift to this almost 41-year old. I would very much appreciate it.
Continent 1: South America
Chapter 1: Wisconsin & Aruba
Grad School was finishing and I started telling people I was leaving. My placement at the neighborhood center through school was wrapping up, the lease on my house had a few months left, and I didn’t have a girlfriend, dog, or goldfish; I saw the world’s window open, and so I just started telling people I was leaving.
I was back in the place of my childhood, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wrapping up a master’s degree in nonprofit management at Marquette University as a Trinity Fellow. The Trinity Fellowship is a selective graduate program, admitting about ten fellows a year, full of do-gooders and future U.S. Consulates. I’m not entirely sure why, but that’s what a surprisingly high percentage of my classmates would become.
When you get close to finishing any sort of degree, people around you will start asking, “How’s the job hunt?” “Any jobs lined up?” and “You want me to put you in touch with Fred?” I was 28 and had made every major next-step decision based on what seemed to make the most sense for my career, but one day I thought, “When do I get to make a big decision for my life — for me, for my happiness, and not for my career?” Once that seed had been planted, I…
