About

First, this is not just a travel blog. However, the idea for this came from travel. It began in 2013 when my family visited continental Europe for the first time. The photo, taken in Florence, is from that trip. I was a “guest blogger” for one of my sons and found it invigorating. Since that time I have provided photos and brief narratives from my trips through social media.

After that trip, I was at a business dinner and after a few drinks, we begin telling stories. After some humorous tales, we open up and begin to share stories that expose some of our pain.  We are now leaving “Facebook World” and entering “The Real World.”  Unlike Facebook World, The Real World is where vulnerability surfaces and true connection is made.  This is the place where we be can strive to be our true and authentic selves. This is the place where we build true community.  Journeys with Johnny is an attempt to create an authentic place where we can be our true selves and build community. As the psychologist and author Brene Brown states, this is where we can “brave the wilderness.”  At that same dinner, I share one of the many unbelievable stories from my childhood and one of my dinner partners exclaims, “You need to write a book!”  It was not the first time someone has told me that. So, after many of these encounters over the past 10 years, I have decided to do exactly that.

Instead of isolating myself for 10 months in a dark room and hammering out a book, I have decided to write a bunch of short stories that I will put on “Journeys with Johnny.”  When I have enough of them written, I will string these stories together to construct a book.  It took many years for me to feel comfortable sharing my stories with others. In fact, early in my life I did everything I could to either ignore or hide my past.

My hope is that by eventually stringing these short stories together in the form of a book, I can create a narrative that will encourage the reader to seek self-awareness, and in doing so, love and accept who you are, making it easier to accept and love others.  Seeking self-awareness is not easy and is a lifelong journey, and it continues to be a struggle for me. However, the rewards for attempting that journey – the road less travelled – are truly great.

So, “Journeys with Johnny” will take you to some funny places, some beautiful places, but also some painful places.  The stories in this blog that will eventually form the basis for a book are an attempt to share a narrative about growing up in poverty in rural Virginia and how that narrative impacted not only my early life but continues to influence my life today.  They are about abuse, addiction, and other obstacles that stood in the way of my pursuit to live a “normal life.” Many of these obstacles – poverty and a very dysfunctional family were external, but many, such as anger, a distrust of others, and shame were internal.  The reader realizes quickly that these internal and external factors are intertwined.  

As a kid, I dreamed of creating a “normal life” for myself as an adult.  I wanted to be a solid husband, devoted father, and a good worker, and to be able to pursue those things while achieving some financial security.  But the past cannot be ignored, and it will always find you. However, as someone once said, “It’s not what happens to you that defines you. It is your response to those events that define you.”

So, living in poverty brought shame. That shame and embarrassment stayed with me for a long time and it had an impact on all of my relationships, mostly in negative ways. I still carry that baggage.  I always will, but I no longer hide it.  That shame brought with it the feeling of always being an outsider, and with it, distrust and anger. Because I had so much emotional scar tissue, I rarely let my guard down and did not emotionally engage – with anyone. 

So, most of the time I was emotionally numb, like a barren dirt road leading nowhere, but layered with emotional road bombs just beneath the surface ready to explode and disperse emotional shrapnel on anyone who happened to get close enough to step on one.  I eventually diffused most of the road bombs so that my road is no longer a barren road leading to pain and sorrow.

That road is now paved – mostly – and full of travelers of all types who do not have to worry about getting their emotional legs blown off and sometimes, just sometimes, my road takes those I encounter to places of unimaginable insight, joy and love. These stories and the book they will eventually be a part of is an attempt at that. Through Grace I have been able to find the courage to own my own background, my highly dysfunctional family, and therefore, my shame and my pain.

The Grace I speak of came from others in my life. That is why I am so certain that my journey was not a journey made alone, even though I wanted to do it alone, and at times, I may have even thought I was alone. But in looking back I was never alone.  I had others looking out for me even when I did not know they were doing so. 

One overarching theme that I will emphasize is “being in relationship.”  I do not want to minimize the importance of hard work, perseverance, some basic intelligence, and even luck to be successful, but anyone who insists that he or she is a self-made man or woman is delusional and is lying to themselves and to others. A longitudinal study that is still being run by Harvard found that the number one factor to living a long and happy life is being in relationships.  I now believe that anyone who claims to have a successful and happy life did not do it alone.

In attempting to achieve the “American Dream”, I believe there are some key ingredients to living not just a normal life, but a good life. All of these ingredients are not required to live a good life, but the more of these that are present in your life, the greater your chance of living a long and happy life.   So, I will write about marriage, parenthood, friendship and community, as well as our relationship with addiction, work, money, church, and even death. And I will do so in the context of “being in relationship.” It is impossible to have success in any of these areas alone.  Again, there is no such thing as a self-made man. 

My life has been a life lived much in the wilderness, which is not bad nor is it good.  It’s what you do in the wilderness that makes it either bad or good.  It’s in the wilderness that you can find yourself and discover who you are.  David Brooks expands upon this theme in his book “The Second Mountain.” Once you have properly navigated some hardship in your life – and it’s always with the help of some person or some group – you reach the second mountain, which looks very different than that first mountain. The process of groping in the wilderness to find that second mountain includes both pain and joy, both failure and triumph, and both fear and love. All of us have experienced these things in our own lives. The self-awareness that can be created by navigating the wilderness is crucial to happiness and living a full life. 

I hope that as you read these short stories, most of which will be the basis for a book, that you feel some of my pain and joy, that you experience some of the failure and triumphs, and that you feel my fear and love.  But most of all, I hope a few pearls of wisdom escape from these pages into your consciousness so that you can enter the wilderness better equipped and realize that you are not alone, and come out of it with more self-awareness, finding more peace and more joy.  

Occasionally, a friend would tell me I needed to create a travel blog. Seven years later, during COVID-19, I finally did it. 2020 has made it clear that relationships and social connections are what makes us truly human. So this blog is about finding connection through travel narrative, photos, poetry, musings, curated information, but most of all, through my short stories.

Thanks for joining me on a journey of discovery to find connection, joy and purpose. I hope you enjoy the content as much as I will in providing it.

Happy Journeys!

Johnny