By: Paulina Sicius
The streets of Spain, to where the author moved five years ago.
I read the book Into the Wild right after I graduated college and moved impulsively to Spain, as far away as possible from the life that awaited me in the United States. A brilliant choice: I could hit pause on getting a nine-to-five job, climbing the corporate ladder, saving for a 401k, and filing insurance claims. I grew up in America and was taught that that’s just what life was—but I sought meaning outside these norms.
In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer narrates the true story of how California native and 22-year-old main character Chris McCandless graduates from Emory University, donates all of his savings to Oxfam, sells his car, and wanders throughout the United States and into nature. In many ways, my escape to Spain was similar to Chris’s story.
Many people thought I was out of my mind for giving up the future my shiny Economics degree could provide me—a job in finance, a modern studio in Brooklyn, weekend getaways to the Bahamas. Instead, I decided to teach English in a small town outside of Madrid, where I would have to take up extra work as a private English tutor to help pay rent and groceries. My classmates were moving to New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. for associate consultant positions and medical school. My LinkedIn feed was full of “I’m delighted to announce that I will begin as an Associate at this and this consultancy” posts. At the time, I knew that there had to be more to life than a fancy job title, so I accepted a job position as an assistant English teacher, sold most of my things, and booked a one-way ticket to Madrid. This act of shedding so many of my possessions (a barely-played electric guitar, unread books, and forgotten clothes) and booking the ten-hour flight was liberating. For so long, I had done everything expected of me—gotten excellent grades, been active on my college campus, and volunteered on weekends. This was the first time I did something different.
Moving across the Atlantic Ocean was also a quest for independence. I finally had my own studio apartment—no longer did I live in a college dorm where my every move was monitored. I could buy my own food and not answer to an RA, professor, or advisor. I also believed moving as far away from my family as possible would enable me to become the person that I really wanted to be. I would not be weighed down by my mother’s dream of me becoming a successful lawyer or my family’s constant disapproval of my nose piercing and green hair.
Chris McCandless, however, decided to cut ties with his family. I didn’t go to this extreme, yet I created physical—and therefore emotional—distance, something that at first was liberating, but quickly became devastating. I got teary eyed when I saw pictures in the family group chat of my mom and sister enjoying a beach day or when I FaceTimed my friends and saw that they were all having brunch together.
Outside of how I felt, the controversy at the heart of Chris’s story—individualism versus responsibility—is very similar to the internal conflict that I’ve now had for years. I’ve questioned if it was selfish to escape my family and community, and in many ways, it was. I didn’t consider the real-life consequences of leaving my family—including missing my sister’s college graduation, my mom packing up our apartment, and Thanksgiving dinners.
However, at the time, when I read Into the Wild while alone in my studio in Madrid, Chris McCandless’s story reassured me that I had made the right decision—even if it meant being alone and having abandoned my family and friends. My copy of the book had a reserved spot on my nightstand. Chris was a hero to some young people, and he was for me. I was inspired by his perseverance to be self-reliant. I convinced myself that I didn’t need to be part of my family’s dinners, that I was perfectly fine eating by myself as I watched Youtube on a Saturday night. If Chris could survive rafting the Colorado River on an old kayak, hitchhiking to South Dakota, and living in abandoned cabins in the Sierra Nevada, I could handle being alone in a cosmopolitan city.
But the book is critiqued for good reason. As a 22-year-old with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, I defended it against all criticism. Years later, I now understand why people said that Chris’s rejection of society was naive and his abandonment of his family cruel. I understand the consequences of moving across the world and leaving my life behind. I try to make up for this now—spending more time with family when I can, traveling to meet friends, and messaging my cousins constantly. But I can never make up for the missed birthdays or reunions.
Into the Wild serves as a reminder of my privilege to have had such an experience—the legal and economic ability to move to another country, the financial support of a job and savings—and to have lived to tell the tale. Chris was not able to both experience his flight and then make up for the consequences, as he passed away in the midst of his journey. I like to think that if he was able to survive that last Alaskan summer, he might have come to a similar conclusion as I have years later.
Into the Wild tells a story that we all know too well: the search for meaning and purpose beyond the boundaries of societal norms—stories of the likes of Thoreau and Kerouac. It is a right of passage for many young people who contemplate dropping out of society to find themselves. In fact, it seems that now, more than ever, young people are giving up the glamorous post-graduation job and moving abroad, rejecting the American Dream and abandoning families for a more meaningful life in the Canary Islands, Bali, or Lago Atitlan.
I was romanticizing living in Spain, much like Chris romanticized the backcountry of the United States. I thought that I could find myself as I drank café con leches at the bar downstairs, while I took the bus to my school, or when I embarked on solo day trips to neighboring medieval towns.
I realize now that moving to Spain did not gift me a more meaningful life. What it did do was that it forced me to face myself in a different context than the one I had grown up in—without any family, friends, or a community around—and think about what I really wanted from life. Ironically, my past five years in Spain have been marked by my search for a family and a community, something that Chris also does throughout the book, in different parts of the United States. I’ve come to realize that what I ran away from—my community—is actually the most important part of my life.
Now, Into the Wild inspires me to pursue a continuous, intentional deeper search for meaning, not from hiking the Alaskan bush, a yoga retreat in Thailand, or a bar in Madrid—but one that I can find within myself and my community, wherever and whatever it might be.
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