A life out of the newsroom – and into the news

Sipping tea with babushkas ... and other scenes from a freelancer's life.

By Patti McCracken

from the May 21, 2007 edition

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VIENNA - On a wickedly cold Chicago day eight years ago, I walked to work, made my way through the newsroom cubicles, entered my editor's office, gave her three weeks' notice, and then sat down at my desk.

I had stunned myself.

Less than two years before, I'd moved 1,000 miles to take this job as an assistant editor, and suddenly I was about to move several thousand miles more to get away from it.

Getting that Chicago job was the opportunity I had, for so long, envisioned for myself. The sudden offer to go there, and the money that came with it, seemed to be the "law of attraction" that had come into my life and set itself up as a constitution.

But the same quickened energy that propelled me to Chicago stirred up later to propel me out. My editor showed personal behaviors that were bullying and deceitful. My boyfriend appeared full of angst and pain that I simply could not will away. My resplendent downtown loft was quietly poisoning me with a gas leak that took the life of my joyful dog. And for a final bruising, my landlord's divorce-minded wife was forging my signature on documents, trying her own deceitful means to take my home away from me.

In this typhoon of grief and confusion, I allowed violent forces to slam my life shut and propel me onward. It was time to go.

But where? And how?

Years before, I had taken a leave of absence to be a journalism trainer in Eastern Europe, working alongside local reporters in ramshackle newsrooms, trying to help them help themselves. It was that vivid experience, an awakening to the world around me, that I wanted to hold again.

So I quit my job; quit my cool, downtown loft apartment; quit my cool boyfriend; sold my car; put my furniture in storage; hugged my friends; packed a duffel bag as tight and as full as I could; and moved to Europe with little money and fewer job prospects.

Since then I have wandered through and worked in 20 countries across Europe, Asia, and North Africa, acquiring, along the way, a London Black Cab in England; a Jack Russell terrier in Tbilisi, Georgia; and a home within myself that I cannot explain.

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