The Book I Never Meant to Write
- Jul 2
- 5 min read
And How to Gallivant Like a Boss
In my fourth year of Architecture School, my entire class spent nearly five months travelling Europe together. We moved through cities, argued about buildings, ate badly, danced or talked till dawn and generally had the kind of experience that people spend the rest of their lives talking about.
I remember the smell of the Paris Métro at rush hour...
That's it. That's most of what survived.
When we got back to Toronto, my friends would dissolve into laughter recounting moments I had apparently been present for. I was there. I do remember going to that nightclub. The rest though? Gone. Filed somewhere my brain decided wasn't worth keeping. And what did it choose to preserve instead, intact and perfect? The ripe, renk and nasty smell of an underground train station in late August. And that says everything about how unreliable your memory actually is.
That experience made me determined that the next significant chapter of my life would not disappear the same way.
Why we lose more than we think
Memory is not a recording device. It doesn't store our lives neatly away like files on a drive, waiting patiently to be retrieved. Every time we recall an event, we reconstruct it from fragments; a few vivid images, a lingering emotion, a smell, something someone said, plus whatever meaning we have attached to it since.
The brain is constantly editing for efficiency. Discarding what seems unimportant. Compressing what is repetitive. Quietly rewriting yesterday's experiences in light of today's understanding... or that version of the story your friend told that made you look like a hero.
Our brains are not trying to deceive us. They are trying to keep up. Life comes at us far too quickly to remember everything, so our minds become ruthless editors. The result is that moments we are certain we will never forget are often the first to fade. While random, seemingly insignificant details — a smell, a colour, the sound of rain on a zinc roof — endure for decades.
What I did differently
When I decided to leave Jamaica and spend a year travelling solo with no set itinerary, no safety net and just a journal and a bagga curiosity, I was determined that this time would be different. I was going to write it all down. Not because I wanted to publish a book. Not because I thought anyone would ever read it. But because I wanted to trust the account.
So I wrote. On buses and in cafés and on the verandas of bamboo bungalows in Laos. At restaurant tables in Hong Kong and Siem Reap and Vientiane, waiting for food, filling pages while other solo travellers read books or stared at their hands. I wrote letters and postcards home to my mother that were so vivid they woke up memories I didn't know I still had. I wrote when things were funny, which was often. I wrote when things were hard, which was also often. I wrote when absolutely nothing had happened and I had no idea what to say.
And somewhere in that process, something started to blossom. I wasn't just recording a journey. I was watching myself become someone new.
What the science says
Social psychologist James Pennebaker spent more than four decades studying what happens when people write about their experiences. What he found was striking. The benefits of expressive writing didn't come from venting emotion or keeping a diary. They accumulated when people began organizing their experiences into something coherent. When scattered thoughts gradually became connected, when isolated moments found context and when confusion gave way to understanding.
Writing wasn't just preserving experiences. It was helping people make sense of them.
But that transformation doesn't happen automatically. The moment you decide what belongs on the page, you are making choices. Which detail matters? Which feeling best describes this moment? Which word comes closest to what you actually experienced? It is in those choices that meaning begins to take shape.
That is why journaling is not really about memory.
We assume we journal so we won't forget. In fact, we journal so we can eventually understand.
What Gallivant became
Those two journals became Gallivant: A Travelogue. Not because I set out to write a book. I didn't. But because the writing was too alive to stay private. It captured a transformation in real time, across Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Hong Kong and beyond. The architecture of strange places. The food. The people. The arguments, the laughter, the moments of quiet or chaos in the middle of somewhere strange and beautiful.
The book is a memoir, told in journals, postcards, poems, sketches and recipes. But it is also, underneath all of that, a long argument for paying attention to your own life. Because the value of a journal isn't determined only by how honestly you write. It's determined by how attentively you live.
Where to start if you've never journaled before
Most people who tell me they want to journal also tell me they don't know how to begin. They sit down, face a blank page, and the blankness wins. I initially made the same mistaken assumption everyone makes. I thought you needed something important to say before you could start writing. You don't. You just need to start describing where you are.
Here are five prompts drawn from my How to Gallivant Like a Boss workbook — a free companion guide I created for exactly this situation:
1. Where am I right now? Describe the room, the street, the light. What can you hear? What can you smell?
2. What's different today?
Not dramatically different. Just slightly. Something that changed slightly since yesterday.
3. What is the smallest thing that stayed with me today?
Write about that. Then ask yourself: why that thing?
4. What surprised me?
Surprises are data. They tell you where your expectations and reality diverged.
5. What about today is worth remembering?
Not what should be worth remembering. What actually is.
These are not grand questions, and that is the whole point. Attention starts small. It starts with noticing what is already in front of you.
The bell that cannot be un-rung
Learning to pay attention is not a skill you can un-learn. Once you start noticing, really noticing, the colour of the light at a particular time of day, the way a conversation shifted sideways when someone said the wrong thing, the small physical feeling of a decision settling in your chest... you cannot go back to moving through your life without seeing.
Your journal may never leave your bedside. It may never become a book. And that is perfectly fine. Because every meaningful life deserves a witness, and sometimes that witness is simply a notebook.
Gallivant: A Travelogue is available now in full-colour hardcover or paperback and ebook on Amazon.
And if you're not ready for the book yet, start with the free workbook. It's waiting for you here:
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