The Trouble with Wings

By Jillian Bright

Jillian Bright has lived and loved the world over, wild and free, her soul awakened and destroyed, mended and strengthened. From empowering women through custom-made bikinis in Costa Rica to listening to a Bulgarian astrologer predict her son's unplanned birth, her journey took her from country-to-country, unveiling passion and purpose. But it was the various crossroads along the way that taught her the most meaningful lesson: It's never the first step off the cliff that's the most terrifying. It isn't even the free fall that happens afterward. The scariest part is the crash landing when self-doubt makes you think that maybe you can't actually fly. That's when you begin to understand that you have to grow your own wings.

 

That's why when Jillian found herself in South America, robbed of everything that mattered most and facing the biggest crossroads of her life, she went all in—and dived off the cliff.

 

The Trouble with Wings is a deeply honest and stirring memoir about living life from your heart and trusting yourself to say yes—even when it means you have to risk it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burning Soul Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950476251

Book preview

Dedication

For my mom, who taught me to read, to love books, and to write. I always knew my first book would be for you.

And for my family, the ones given to me and the ones I chose for myself. This wild and beautiful journey of mine would not be possible without you.

A Note to Readers

There are so many places in this book that I had the privilege of visiting or calling home for a time. Places that are what they are because of the people who have shaped them, and I will be the first to recognize that this book does not do these people justice. There are deep issues that were beyond the scope of this book, like the Maldives whose literal existence is threatened by climate change, or Italy and Greece who are on the front lines of Europe’s refugee crisis, or Nepal and its post-earthquake humanitarian crisis... I don’t get much into it in this book but truly not a single place I traveled to is unaffected by environmental issues, political instability, or social injustice.

In addition, as I traveled, not only did I carry with me the privilege of identifying as a heterosexual cis-gender white woman, but I’m also an American passport holder. These privileges grant me leniency in gray areas and an ease of movement billions of people on this planet will never know and I would be remiss not to acknowledge that.

You’ll notice that of course, this is a memoir, a travelogue, and my experience of the places in the following pages is simply that: my experience and mine alone. While I hope my words transport you to the tropics and the redwood forests, the Himalaya and the Mediterranean, please remember that these places are so much more than the words I’ve used to describe them. The town in Costa Rica is so much richer than its parties and expat community, though that’s primarily what gets ink in these pages. And there were many people along the road, particularly in the cannabis community in Northern California, who aren’t mentioned in this book because while they became family to me, their stories are not mine to tell.

Finally, this book was written over the course of about ten years but I finally put it together in a year that the entire globe essentially closed its borders due to a pandemic. As the book is released into a world that is beginning to open back up, I hope that my words do inspire you to see more, experience more, to spread your own wings and fly into your unknown despite the trouble you will inevitably encounter. But I also encourage you to remember that no matter where you go or how long you stay, it’s the people, plants, and wildlife who call these places home that absorb the footprints you leave behind. Be the best human you can be and tread with compassion and respectful curiosity.

Contents

Dedication

A Note to Readers

PART 1: Awakening

PART 2: Listening

PART 3: Seeking

PART 4: Becoming

About the Author

Part 1

Awakening

The giant blue morpho butterfly inhabits the jungles of Central and South America and is one of the largest, most beautiful butterflies on the planet with its blue iridescent wings and impressive eight-inch wingspan.

A morpho butterfly in flight is mesmerizing: slowly, audibly flapping its massive wings as it dances through the jungle canopy. Its cobalt wings shimmer against the sky when they open and seemingly disappear when they close, concealing itself in the brown color of its underwing.

You watch it float by as if you were in a trance, not saying a word, not even breathing. Every instinct you feel is to follow it. The slow hypnotic flapping of its wings, appearing and disappearing, gives you the sensation that you’re witnessing something entirely outside the human realm, a moment of flickering beauty and transitory magic.

Some legends say that if you see one, you’ll be granted a wish. Others warn that it’s a dangerous omen. If you fix your eyes on the dazzling flashes of blue and give chase, pushing past dense jungle foliage and vines not wanting to let the butterfly out of your sight, it would only take a few minutes to find yourself utterly lost. Getting caught too deep in the morpho’s spell and following it into the jungle has a price.

If you can’t let it go, you might never find your way back out…

Chapter 1

The midsummer sun glowed orange and pink through the clouds and reflected off the rain-slicked tarmac. I sat in the Ezeiza airport cafe in Buenos Aires with an untouched pizza in front of me, squinting out the floor-to-ceiling windows into the setting sun and willing the nausea away.

I’d been in dozens of airports all over the world over the last year—from Sri Lanka to Scandinavia and now South America. But waiting for all those other flights, I had been diving deeper into adventure and the unknown. This time, I was flying home. And I wasn’t alone—I was pregnant.

I wasn’t supposed to be flying home, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to be pregnant. I was supposed to be writing my book and then hiking Patagonia. But that story line was long gone now, lost somewhere between a rekindled love affair in Italy and a grimy bus station in Chile.

I watched the people bustling around me, annoyed, wondering what their stories were, wondering where the hell my story was headed now. I felt a particular animosity for the woman two tables over, thoughtlessly sipping her cool glass of white wine and typing away on her laptop, while I, on the other hand, cautiously sipped my mineral water and scribbled my frustrated, disjointed thoughts in a kid’s school notebook.

I had no idea when this new, hijacked version of my story really started because it wasn’t in that airport. It didn’t start when I found out I was pregnant last week or when everything that mattered to me was stolen the month before either. Where on this wild and wonderful journey did I choose the fork in the road that led me here?

I closed my eyes and let the memories wash over me:

The tickle of saltwater drying on my skin under the hot sun. The smell of coconut oil, hash, and humidity.

The blinding, brilliant blue of the Mediterranean. The briny taste of sea urchin and rich cannoli.

The cool edge of late fall in the woods. Soft, decaying leaves silent under my feet. The thrum of my bowstring; the thunk of the arrow into dead wood.

Diesel fumes mixed with frying street food and the unintelligible humming of market chatter. Grimy sweat on my skin and signs written in looping languages I couldn’t read.

Staircases carved into rock, climbing into the snowy whiteness. Sweet hot chai tea drunk in tight, dim rooms with damp socks steaming over the fire.

The Roman Colosseum lit up late at night. Zipping around Rome on a motorcycle; kissing familiar lips above ancient ruins.

A bus station at dawn, the sensation of my heart sinking into my hollow stomach, and an absolute knowledge that my belongings and irreplaceable words and photos were gone forever.

Those unmistakable pink lines on a little plastic pregnancy test…

Instead of shoving the memories away, I let them linger in my mind and soon saw them enveloped by a thick mist, rolling and breathing as if it were some hungry, primordial thing. The dark and shapeless mass became foliage, palm trees, and vines. I saw iridescent rainbows dance over dewdrops as the sun rose over a jungle canopy.

I heard monkeys—the deep, heart-stopping roar of howler monkeys—through the mist. Beyond the monkeys, I heard millions of birds chirping, singing, squawking, shrieking, cawing, and twittering as the jungle came alive in my mind.

For a brief and blissful moment, I was no longer nauseated, annoyed, and pregnant sitting in a stale airport on an adventure interrupted. I was in my old bedroom in Costa Rica, watching the rose gold sun rise over the Pacific Ocean and peep through the palm fronds into my window.

I felt the distant rumble of waves crashing into the sand and rumbling up through the cliffs. A light breeze, cool from the overnight rains, tickled my skin, and I felt the vibrant pulse of life from those sun-streaked mornings echo across the years into the new life growing in my belly.

And just as the vision began, it faded away back into the mist, and the commotion of the airport and my new reality came alive around me.

The story I was living now wasn’t the book I ever thought I would write. But it was still my story. My life. Maybe I didn’t know how it would end, but I knew now where my story started. In Montezuma, where the jungle meets the sea…

Central America, 2007

Iplanned my first solo international backpacking trip flawlessly, which was my first mistake. Two things led me into a series of crises almost immediately after landing in Central America all by myself. First, I’d assumed that my plan was a good one and that I’d want to stick with it no matter what. Which I absolutely did not. And second, I assumed that everything would go as planned. Which of course it didn’t.

I’d traveled internationally before—to Ireland with my boyfriend a few years before and to West Africa on a mission trip after that—but never on my own. Traveling—and life—was never a wild, self-determined adventure. I was always following someone else’s footsteps or rules.

I grew up just outside the city limits of a small rural town in Northern California, in a traditional Christian family where more than a handful of my relatives and ancestors were preachers and missionaries. From church and the Christian joint elementary and middle school I attended, I learned a lot about whose footsteps I should follow and the rules of being a good Christian and a good wife. But there was nothing and no one to show me how to become a strong independent woman and the scientist I thought I wanted to be.

I’d been protected and sheltered, taught how to keep myself apart from the real world, not how to exist or thrive in it. The answers to my questions were filtered through what the Bible, my parents, or Christian school taught me was true. The only way to heaven was to believe in Jesus. Women were supposed to be submissive to men, and men were supposed to have dominion over nature.

I accepted it all as Truth, as children do. And I liked the idea that I could have a personal connection with God. It felt as natural as breathing to sit outside, hidden in the tall stalks of wild oats on a warm spring day with a science book and a magnifying glass, talking to myself or God or my imaginary friends and hearing them answer. As I grew older, I still felt connected with God, even though I stopped considering myself a Christian.

Nature enthralled me as a child and was the strongest formative force of my childhood, but in high school I was introduced to something that captivated me just as surely and would become the strongest transformative force of my adult life.

One day my freshman year of high school, I was sitting in French class, and our teacher, known for his somewhat unorthodox teaching techniques, was showing the class photo after photo of the year he and his wife pulled their three daughters out of school for the year to sail around French Polynesia.

I was enamored with the vivid swirls of green and turquoise and azure of the South Pacific, the smiles plastered on the girls’ faces, the wild freedom of sailing the open ocean. But most of all, I was captivated by the idea that life could be different. I didn’t have to do it the way anyone else did or told me I had to. I could live my life in a way that was entirely my own, and it didn’t matter what anyone else had to say about it.

It was also in high school that I tossed aside my science dreams after hating every science class that I took, and in college, I found the International Relations department instead. I studied the politics of terrorism and the economics of developing nations. I studied French, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and even dabbled in Mandarin. I wanted to work in women’s empowerment and development, but I had only a vague idea of what I actually wanted to do.

By the time I was twenty-three, I was ready to forge my own way and test every rule I’d ever been given. I was living a normal life, hanging out with friends, going to college, and dating. I liked my life, but I wasn’t passionately living it either. I was young but I already knew, feared even, that if I didn’t go out and do something about changing it now, I risked staying trapped in a mediocre life of my own making forever.

I yearned for the wild, uncensored adventure that set me apart from the traditional acquiescent life I grew up in. I wanted independence and unbridled adventure. I needed a change, an experience that would catapult me out of the ordinary life I was living into something extraordinary. I wanted to be special. A semester off and a solo backpacking trip felt like the perfect answer.

The plan started as an idea to travel awhile and then volunteer somewhere so I could extend my trip on a tight budget. I searched online volunteer sites and job boards for months but couldn’t find anything I could do. Just about every remotely interesting job out there required either a degree that I didn’t have yet or thousands of dollars that I definitely didn’t have yet.

Finally, I found a position teaching English at a little village school in northern Peru. And even though I wasn’t exactly passionate about teaching English, or kids for that matter, it didn’t require a degree or a down payment, so I signed up to teach for three months. I booked a month of Spanish language and surfing school in neighboring Ecuador where I would take surf lessons in the morning and Spanish in the afternoon for a month prior to teaching. I also planned for a month traveling Central America before school started.

Of course, I was excited. But I was also scared, and I didn’t want to admit it. If you admit you’re scared, people who will never have the guts to do what you’re doing take it upon themselves to address your fears in a way that just makes them feel better. It’s ok, you don’t have to do this, they say. Of course, you’re scared, it’s dangerous. Maybe you shouldn’t go … I didn’t want to hear any of that. That was their fears talking, not mine, and their fears made me angry and all the more determined to go.

At that point in my life, I thought fear was bad. It meant not being sure or confident enough. It meant not enough desire or commitment. It meant if I listened, I might not do something that had the potential to change my life. I didn’t see the value in it, only that other people might use it to keep me safe where they felt comfortable, to try and talk me out of my dreams. Or that I might listen and never pursue them. Having that flawless plan helped me ignore my fear before I left, but it didn’t do me a bit of good once I landed.

I’d been in Belize only two days when I received an email informing me that the school in Peru was closing. Nothing changes faster than a plan, other travelers told me, and we laughed as we lounged on the beachfront hostel deck, sipping warm rum from plastic cups and staring out over the moonlit Caribbean.

You’ll find something else no problem, they said with the casual confidence gleaned from countless setbacks and potholes on the road of backpacker life. And so, I didn’t let even a whisper of fear creep in. I let the unsettling news slide off my back like the sparkling drops of the pale turquoise sea that I swam in every afternoon, and I trusted that I would indeed find something else before time—or money—ran out.

But after just a couple weeks of rum-soaked, blissed-out island life, the money did in fact run out. I had been waiting for money to come in from selling my car, but I hadn’t checked my bank account in about a week. I knew it was getting low, but the day I sat down at the internet cafe to check in on things, it contained a shocking $17.82, not even enough to pull out a last emergency twenty bucks from the ATM. And no update from my friend who was in charge of selling my car.

I fished out my wallet and frantically counted my cash. I had only five dollars. I sent a quick email to check in with my friend and another to the school in Ecuador to inquire about getting a refund for a nonrefundable program, then I logged out as fast as I could. I was paying for the internet by the minute, and today’s enlightening session had already cost me nearly half of what I had in my wallet.

I walked down the sandy path back to my hostel to mentally berate myself and to figure out a new plan. I couldn’t leave the island I was on or even buy myself food to eat until there was money in my account again. Until my car sold or the school agreed to refund me, I was good and screwed.

After a few stomach-gnawing days of doing literally nothing but writing in my journal, swimming in the sea, and sleeping, the school told me I could attend for two weeks instead of four and refunded me half my tuition. The day after that my friend messaged me that he was able to hurry up and sell my car, but considering the rush, he got only a quarter of what we were hoping for it. I was far tighter on cash than I would have liked, but I was free to feed myself, pay my hostel debts, and technically, get back to my plan.

The only problem was, to get from where I was at to where I was supposed to go, I would need to take a ferry off the island followed by a long series of bus journeys from the capital of Belize, south through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and finally arrive in San José, Costa Rica to catch my flight to Quito, Ecuador. And I only had a week to do it.

I was looking at a trip that would require almost a dozen separate bus journeys and more than a handful of overnight layovers. And all those ferries, buses, taxis, and hotels would cost money. I had less than a thousand dollars for the remaining four months of my trip or until I found a job. Or until I had to admit I failed on my big solo adventure and went home early. And that, I vowed, was not going to happen.

I cancelled all my flights and changed the plan entirely. Instead of heading south to Costa Rica, I went north with a couple of Australians to the Yucatán region of Mexico to camp in the jungle outside Tulum. I used flight credit to take off from nearby Cancún instead and spent an awful night laid over in Mexico City because of it, sleeping on a bus bench by myself outside the airport because the entire airport closed during the predawn hours for cleaning.

I landed in Quito right on schedule to start Spanish school the following week, but my backpack didn’t. When it finally showed up three days later, one of the straps was ripped off and my favorite bikini top was missing. Despite what I saved by changing my flights and itinerary, I was too short on money to buy a new backpack, and the idea of