Roam Your Home: a Timeline
Everyone is panicking about what Roam Your Home even is! “Blythe, oh my god, the most important thing in my life right now is making your website make sense to my brain!” I know you guys are anxious and scared because I’m posting a thing on the internet. I, on the other hand, am being completely calm and normal about it. I haven’t sat on this idea for a solid 7 years just because I couldn’t quite put it into words. I didn’t literally move to three different cities, start and end a tourism career, redo an entire old house, go to law school, and practice law for two years just to procrastinate because I was worried about potentially being embarrassed on the internet. I would NEVER.
Anyway, here’s the tale of whatever this is.
Let’s just bury the lead: I planned to be a Christian missionary and then ended up leaving religion while in Bible college, so I’ve mostly just been making it up as I go since I was 22. Now, I have a bunch of weird experiences- most relevantly, an undying love of the Midwest, years of teaching, a lot of travel, working in tourism development, a law degree, turning a cool old house into a hobbit hole for me and my cats, and working in Detroit as an eviction defense attorney- and this whole website is me just mixing those together and seeing what happens. For reference, here’s me as a missionary in training:
To explain everything that got me here would take too many words for a blog post, so I will be skipping over large bits of it and bolding the fonts that will one day be hyperlinks to other stories so that you can really do the deep dive on my history that you’ve been craving. To summarize, I grew up in a mainstream cult[1] and studied to be a missionary.[2] In my junior year of college, I was on the periphery of several situations that caused me to say, “wait a minute… I feel like this religion… might… hate women?” and thus, my deconversion began.[3]
Once the deconversion cracks were in the glass, all I needed to seal the deal was a few experiences from beyond the church. I decided to work a bunch of odd jobs in Chicago[4] to save money until I could afford to go backpacking around the world for 9 months.[5] I did this and was flummoxed when it didn’t solve any of my problems.[6] The audacity. Below: my version of rumspringa.
After a brief stint back in Chicago, I went abroad again to teach English in Korea[7] for a very fun two years before returning home to Michigan to apply for grad school. I knew at that point that I wanted to further study tourism because it was the thing I credited with changing my life.[8] I was also, however, interested in law because of a lot of rough observations I had made around tourist behavior[9] while I was abroad. In the back of my mind, I thought that the intersection of the two disciplines must be interesting (foreshadowing!). Below: me turning teaching in Korea into a competitive sport.
A bunch of shit happened between 2016-2019:
Got a master’s degree in responsible tourism management[10] in the UK
Wrote my master’s dissertation in Dearborn, Michigan on the use of cultural tourism to dispel misconceptions about Arab culture
Taught a lot of SAT prep in South Korea and Kuwait
Moved to Montana for a stint as an environmental educator with Americorps
Bought a Subaru that kind of ruined my life a little bit[11] (see that bastard pictured below)
Moved back to Chicago to work in tourism development with National Geographic
Throughout all of this, I knew that I wanted to work my way towards developing my own travel content that was focused on two things: (1) teaching people to apply the principles of responsible tourism to exploring their own hometowns and (2) manipulating people into loving and wanting to visit the Midwest by applying principles of responsible tourism to explore it myself and oversharing about it on the internet.
My first big step towards this goal was the Chicago 77 Project[12] in which I attempted to visit each of Chicago’s 77 community areas and explore their unique history and amenities. Working on this project was objectively the most fun I’ve ever had in America, and it led me to start pursuing work on inbound travel to the American Midwest instead of outbound international travel. Eventually, I bothered my friend Andy on the internet enough to get him to offer me a job in tourism development with his company in Detroit. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I left my Nat Geo job and moved to Detroit in what absolutely felt like the next right step in my dream of teaching people how to explore while tricking them into loving the Midwest. Below: back in Chicago, she felt it.
But that was in January 2020, friends, which, as it happened, was a terrible time to move anywhere for a tourism job. I lost my job basically right away, but don’t worry, because I always have a side quest or two up my sleeve just in case! And that’s how I ended up in law school.
I loved going to law school. I was able to focus most of my studies on the thing I was most interested in: the intersection of law and tourism.[13] I researched and wrote on things like the parallel development of space tourism and Antarctic tourism,[14] the quiet implementation of the NATIVE Act,[15]the impact of AirBnb on housing in Detroit,[16] the illegality of housing restrictions at Christian resort communities in Michigan,[17] and tourism narratives surrounding genocide sites.[18] I was invited to present on two of these subjects at conferences and overall was just having a really good time doing this research. Below: me on my last day of law school. Pretend the poorly cropped image is artistic, because everything about including images in blog posts on Squarespace sucks, and I am about to throw my computer at a wall.
And then I honestly just got kind of caught in a rat race. I love the work I do- I’m a right to counsel eviction defense attorney[19] in Detroit, and I believe that my work is very connected to tourism.[20] However, I knew that I didn’t want to practice law when I went to law school, and I think I accidentally just got a little too comfy on the side quest.
Ultimately, I feel like I just completed a fun little 5.5 year loop of a hike that I really enjoyed. Now, I’m staring into the woods, knowing I need to just start walking through ‘em to see what’s in there, but there’s not really a path to follow. Fortunately, I am gifted at making things up as I go, so into the forest it is.
I hope you’ll check back occasionally to see if I’ve moved at all. In exchange for your attention, I hope to offer:
Encouragement to get out and explore, whether that’s across the street or across a border,
Tips for exploring your world responsibly,
Lessons on responsible travel and how tourism impacts communities,
Musings on the intersection of tourism and law,
Thoughts on how you can protect fair housing in your community, tricks to make your home feel like the perfect base from which to live your life, and last and most importantly,
Open and flagrant manipulation into loving/visiting/moving to the Midwest. (me loving the Midwest below)
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[1] It was conservative, fundamentalist evangelicalism, and that pipeline runs straight to white Christian nationalism.
[2] This one will be like “wtf even was moody bible institute”
[3] Honestly, this one will probably be a little sad, but hopefully I’ll bring it back and the end and we can all laugh at the trauma? Who can say!
[4] This one will probably be called “An Evangelical Christian Walks into a Bar” or something cute like that.
[5] This will be about how and why to quit your life for a minute.
[6] This will be about how and why to not quit your life for a minute.
[7] This will be about how I liked Korea before any of you hoes.
[8] Okay, this one will be about how “travel” is really just getting out of your comfort zone and how you don’t have to go very far to do that.
[9] This will probably be a mix of stories and research from smarter people than me about the negative impacts of tourism and you will beg for death before I am done talking about it.
[10] I’ll explain what “responsible” tourism is.
[11] This is just a story about how fate disfavored me.
[12] Will make you want to move to Chicago.
[13] A post that might be a list.
[14] I’ll talk all of you out of going to space.
[15] I’ll talk about how we can use laws to create better tourism systems.
[16] This is my pet project. My sweet angel baby. The thing that made me want to go to law school in the first place.
[17] This one will feel weirdly personal for ReAsOnS.
[18] It’ll be like that show “Dark Tourist,” but good.
[19] This will be me begging you to care about housing as a human right.
[20] This will be about community-based tourism.