Being broke

I have 85.14 Australian dollars to my name. $85.14 to get me to New Zealand tomorrow and be able to hang out and you know eat and live until I can eventually find work. $85.14 and a beer is $10 and I stopped being able to afford those a while ago. $85.14 in all the world, and yet,

and yet.. I’ve never felt less broke.

It’s not like I’ve been living it up in Australia and Asia, I’ve been budgeting hard. I just didn’t start with enough money to begin with. I worked several jobs for a the year I spent at home but I couldn’t afford to travel the world. There wasn’t enough. But here I am, writing to you on my 30 minute turn on the hostel computer in Melbourne. I remember someone asking me once how Stevie (my travelling buddy) and I were always able to afford to travel everywhere. WE WEREN’T ABLE. We went to Puerto Rico once for a week and I can’t recall now how little money we had but I do recall the week we spent camped out on a beach underneath some coconut trees surviving on tins of tuna and pineapples. We were two kids from working class estates in Belfast, with never the means or the opportunity to travel and yet, there we were

So how exactly do you travel with no money. You wwoof! (Willing workers on organic farms), you work on peoples farms and they allow you to stay in their homes and give you food. You couchsurf! You stay on a strangers sofa that you’ve met on the internet. (It’s safer that it sounds, and totally free). You camp out on a beach in Puerto Rico and hope you don’t get shanked in the middle of the night. You meet friends at camp and hope they live somewhere cool in America. And most importantly, you adapt. You have to.

And people are so good! In all the places I’ve been, alone or with my travel buddy, staying on sofas or allowing people to stay on mine, trusting people I didn’t know, nothing weird or creepy has ever happened. I once left a canadian guy the keys to my house in England over Christmas and then I flew home to Ireland. I told him to just lock up and post the keys through the letter box when he was leaving. And you know what he did…

He locked up and posted the keys through the letterbox but not before he cleaned the house and left a sweet note.

A guy asked me yesterday in the hostel while I was eating dinner “Do you think people are mostly good or mostly bad?” and the truth is I believe people are just good. period. People have done some fucked up things lately but over all as a race we are good.

And the more the money drains,the more I’m forced to trust and live in this community. The more I’m forced to call on traits I didn’t know I had like being pragmatic and easy to live with (That was a hard one) and low maintenance. The more I’m forced to just be grateful and keep saying thank you to the people who keep making it possible for me to be here, and to be welcome here. The more crazy and real and mind-blowing the experiences get. The more good I see in the world and in the people making it, and in myself. I have travelled the world a lot in the last four years but it was the world that made it possible.

And the more I realise that I am not broke. I’m whole.