Episode 40: Kate Marlene

Kate Marlene: So him and I would just sit and like basically trade drugs and drink and like we were kind of in this weird space basically where we were both addicts just sitting there trying to recover.

Josh Caldwell: Hello my atypical daydreamers. Welcome to the show. My guest today is Kate Marlene, a therapist, mediator, and fellow podcaster. Kate's story is a cautionary tale, and a familiar one to me as we both suffer from the same disease of perception, also known as addiction. You could travel the whole wide world looking for freedom, but wherever you go, there you are. And I'm sure you'll have brought all of your baggage with you.

Kate Marlene: I was living in New York around 2010, 2011. It was an interesting time for freelancers and people interested in living on the road or in an unconventional way, being able to work off of your laptop. I was paying so much rent in Manhattan that I was like, my gosh, I can actually live cheaper out of a suitcase. And I was kind of looking for ways out of my life, though I wouldn't have described it that way.

During that time I'd actually gotten engaged. When we were planning the wedding, my dad had given me some money to pay for the wedding and to start our life together. But I remember looking at the amount in my bank account and thinking, I can't imagine spending this all on a wedding when I had all these dreams of traveling and really getting out of my life and exploring. I remember saying to my fiance at the time, look, we have all this money, let's go to Italy, let's travel the world. And he looked at me like I was crazy. He even said, what are you, a teenager? You're just gonna run away. And I was like, actually, yeah, if you don't wanna come, then I'm gonna go. And there were other problems. I had found out he was addicted to oxy. We both had been living in addictive patterns. And so in some ways that was also something I wanted to escape, but I didn't have the solution for that at the time.

It was like, what can I do to get out of my life and change things? And travel was that answer for me. If I can get out of this situation, out of this feeling of being stuck, then I can find a new way of living and really relating to myself. At the time I was 29 and turning 30. Everyone around me was getting married. My sister already had two kids. My brother had two kids. That was kind of my only options. Either get married and start that life or blow it all up.

Kate Marlene: I took the money. I did ask my dad. It was the most money I'd ever had in my bank account so I said, can I just take this and go traveling? And he said, yeah, that's fine, but I'm not paying for another wedding. I was like, okay, cool.

So I did have to break off the engagement. Looking back, I didn't really know him that well. I think I had a fantasy of who we would be and who we could be together. And so I knew I wanted to make it around the world, but I had no precise destinations. I just let myself be led by basically who was in my life and who was inviting me to be with them. A friend from college said, let's go to Costa Rica. So we flew down there, had a Jeep, drove across the country. I was still trying to figure out a path. I remember telling him, I'm really scared. I don't know how to do this by myself.

Eat Pray Love had also come out during this time. There was so much romanticization around female travel and solo travel. It was this cultural movement, but it was also coming up against my own personal need to figure out another way that felt counter to all these normative things. And as I said, there was also this undercurrent of my own addictions and my own issues that I think I was probably running from, but I couldn't have really seen it that way at the time. It was just like, as long as I can move forward, then I'm also moving forward.

So from Costa Rica I went to Australia. I was in East Asia for a while. The thing that became really profound to me over the first months was I felt like I really wanted to bond with people. I would basically fall in love with people wherever I was. When I was in Bali, I met this surfer guy, probably ten years younger. We would just ride around on his motorcycle and go to weird clubs. When I got to Bangkok, he followed me there. It was this short but very intense period where it feels like love because you don't really have anything else to hold on to.

Kate Marlene: I remember crying to someone, being like, I hate saying goodbye to people. And yet that's kind of what traveling is. It's this way of being in the world where you're not attached and you don't have any real connection, not only to place, but you don't really have connection to people either. I had also kind of cut myself off from family at the time.

I had been sexually assaulted by my uncle the year before. This was not something that consciously was driving me. But when I look back, I've noticed this with a lot of travelers and expats. So many people are running from something. And in that way, travel took on a different meaning for me. We all want a new experience, and there's something profound about that, wanting to explore the world and find yourself. But there's a tension in that too. As much as you're propelling yourself forward, there are also things you're leaving behind, or things you're failing to mend or recover from in your past.

When I got to Bangkok, because I had this extra money in my bank account, I was like, I think you can get cheap plastic surgery here. So I Googled breast implants Bangkok and found this hospital. They were doing all kinds of plastic surgery for really cheap compared to US prices. I had been emailing with this sort of androgynous personality, it might have even been a bot, telling them what you wanted, what size of implants. And it was just like, show up. So I get to the hospital in Bangkok. The nurses were on roller skates flying around. They had intake papers but everything was supposed to be fun. All the people lined up on a bench. It was a bit like an assembly line, just calling people in. The doctors don't speak English that well. But I was really in a place of like, fuck it.

Kate Marlene: It really was so reckless because I just didn't care. I had no sense of what the risk was going into it. They take everyone really quickly, get their numbers, get their measurements, and slot you in for surgery. Even when they're putting you under, it looks like a runway with all these gurneys. You just wait till you get closer and then they put the mask on and you go under and the surgeon's waiting to take people quickly in the lineup. The thing was, I was all by myself. I didn't even tell anyone in my family that I was having surgery. And I was thinking, my god, I really hope nothing happens.

Kate Marlene: You know you're about to get cut open and they have complete control over your body, but you also know that it's gonna feel like a split second. So then you wake up. All of a sudden I woke up. I couldn't feel my arms because they had done the incisions through my armpit and had cut some major nerves in my arm. So I was freaking out because I couldn't move and the nurses are just trying to calm me down. It was strange because it was almost like a spa setting. They wanted you to feel like you were having this peaceful, calm experience, but really you're having major surgery. Everything was fine, but they gave me tons of drugs and then just kind of sent me on my way.

Josh Caldwell: Hey, it's Josh. Hope you're enjoying the podcast. And if so, are you wanting more road stories? Well, good news. I've got you covered. Consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories that there just wasn't time for. And you'll be supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the link in the show notes and thanks. Now back to the show.

Kate Marlene: So I got out of the hospital and I still had the bandages and I was just like, okay, where to? So I took a train up to Chiang Mai and I met another guy who had just been hit by a truck. He was from Canada, his arm was all messed up, his legs were broken. He had these crazy flesh wounds. But he also couldn't go back to Canada because he had a warrant out. He was trying to recover from his truck accident.

So him and I would just sit and basically trade drugs and drink. We were both addicts just sitting there trying to recover from our injuries. Looking back, he was one of the people that I really bonded with. And again, it's like this weird toxic situation where we didn't have anybody else. It was this really intense relationship, purely based on us being stuck in a foreign country and trying to make sense of this really bizarre situation. It was like one of many relationships I had with people while traveling where it would have never made sense anywhere else.

I remember taking him to the hospital and having to get involved in his recovery too, because I was the only person he had. And in the meantime, him and I, as I said, were drinking a lot. We went out one night and my purse and passport got stolen. So I had no money and no credit cards. And we had actually gotten kicked out of the hotel for just being drunks. So they kicked us out of the hotel. And so we were driving around in a tuk-tuk trying to find a place to sleep that night. I think this guy felt sorry for us. So he took us to this abandoned apartment in Chiang Mai. He said, I think you guys can probably sleep here for the night.

Kate Marlene: We woke up in the morning just in some dude's apartment. I have no idea if he had broken in and just let us sleep there. And we came out, we had no stuff. I remember being like, what are we doing? Why are we even here? I think other people travel differently. Back then it was because of my own stuff and my own chaotic life. I definitely brought that with me everywhere I went. Wherever you go, there you are. Someone used to say this expression like flotsam and jetsam behind the ship. You're just leaving a trail of chaos everywhere you're going.

So I had to get away from this guy. He was having a psychotic break and started accusing me of working for the government, being some kind of alien spy. And I was like, I really didn't know him, even though we spent some pretty intense time together. So I remember having to really quickly think, okay, where's my passport, where's my money? Trying to get away from this guy. And again, it was more just like, what's my next move? It wasn't how did you get into this or is this safe? It was just, okay, what's the next place on my destination list?

I had been in this series of really chaotic situations. And what I wanted to be this forward movement of exploration was really just getting out of situations. How do I get out of this? How do I get away from this person? How do I try to solve something that I had caused? Always trying to move forward. And the way I wanted to feel while traveling, this independence, this freedom, the further I went, the more that feeling went away. It stopped feeling like excitement. It stopped feeling like discovery. It started feeling like fear. And that surprised me because I had not been a fearful person.

Kate Marlene: There was this point of burnout where it wasn't just the drinking and the drugs catching up to me. It was the feeling that there's nowhere else to go. When you've run in every direction you can imagine, you run out of places to go. And that's kind of how I felt when I went back to California. What would it take to be okay where I am? What would it take to choose to stay in a place and have community or something stable?

So this friend invited me to Berlin and within three days I felt that same feeling come back of, gosh, I'm just now in another country having the same feelings. And I called a friend, he said, just eat some currywurst and go home. And I thought, okay. But in the meantime I got on a dating app just to see if I could meet some people who speak English while I'm here. And a few days later I met who would become my husband.

It's funny because the day I met him, I called my dad. I said, okay, I met my husband. And my dad was just like, slow down. But the thing was, I think it kind of reversed itself. After all this escapism and travel, it's like, no, no, no, now I just need that other solution that didn't work the first time. So we got engaged. I moved to Berlin. And because I was doing it in a foreign country, it felt okay for me. I was like, well, I'm still traveling. And getting pregnant and having a kid in Berlin, then you're really in it. It was a commitment I had to make that I could not run away from. And for the first time in my life, there was no out, even if I daydreamed about it.

Even after going through recovery and learning these things about myself, my tendencies towards escapism, even though I'm sober, that stuff is still there for me. That desire to check out. The mythology of running and this idea that you can just give things up and start over with no consequences. For me, travel was also a fantasy of transformation and starting over without having to really do work. I still consider myself somebody who likes to travel. There's still a romance in it for me. But even now, I have to really ask myself before I book a trip, am I escaping something or do I want this?

Kate Marlene: It's a fine line. And sometimes hard to know the difference.

Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Kate for sharing her experience. Be sure to check out her podcast, Falling in Love is Easy, a podcast about what happens when love doesn't go as planned. Links in the show notes. This podcast is created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next time.