who is alison?
you know, that's a great question. the answer to that is always changing but let's start with the basics below.
Alison Barlow
Traveler
My freshman year of college we had to take a peculiar inventory, the results of which told me that one of my greatest strengths is my tendency to collect things. strange, right? Turns out, now that I’m aware of it I see the strength in it every time I do it. I can trace this back to the days of toddling along on walks with my parents, weighing my pockets down with rocks, to the opulent desire of my teenage years to collect a ring that would fit perfectly on each and every finger. Nowadays I’ve honed in on this and try to actively use it to my advantage. It comes most often in the collection of experiences, which might have you asking, isn’t that just memory? And yeah, maybe, but to me it’s like having a book of highlights I can leaf through at any given moment. I collect all of the details that glow, I seek out things I think will be worthy of adding to my collection, and I try to live my life with the mindset that every moment has potential to be grand.
My name is Alison Barlow, and I would much rather be telling you about the trips I’ve been on, the experiences I’ve collected, and the people who fill my life with brightness on a daily basis, but I guess you deserve to know a little about me too (although I would like to argue that these things will tell you more about me than my major or year in school ever could). I love this Queen City, and my soul has a summer home out on Cape Cod, but the Gem City holds my heart eternally about an hour north of here. I even think growing up next to Dayton International is what sparked a perpetuating sense of curiosity in my tiny young heart. “Where do you think that plane is going?” I’d ask my mom. “What about that one?!” I’d point for my dad from the back porch on a sticky July day. I’d become immune to the name Wright by the time I was 6, and I can give you a better description of a Navy Blue Angel due to the hours they spend every other summer zooming overhead than I could my own face. Planes are just a big part of my connection to home, I guess, and I always wanted to be on one of those planes. I vowed to make it happen, and I still immensely look forward to the day when I can return home from overhead.
Currently though, my return home is not so magnificent and involves a crisp drive straight up 75, which only drains a little bit of my sanity each time. I’ve been at the University of Cincinnati for three years now and in that time I have managed to learn about Sigmund Freud at least 5 separate times, and I can almost tell you how a synapse works. Psychology—specifically mental illness and suicide prevention as they affect adolescents—is something I have always been passionate about, but I’ve also been a very big fan of fiction writing, travel agent-ing, photography, art therapy, interior design, social work, and speech and language pathology at some point or another, so my plan at this point is to let the universe spin me around a little bit and I’ll see where I end up. That’s my fancy way of saying “oh my god I still have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my major or my career and I’m definitely just gonna die,” but I think that’s just a characteristic of my generation at this point so there’s no need to be too concerned. I do have a pretty long history with cataclysmic thinking though; it comes complementary with the mental illness. To combat this, and to find joy in living again, I’ve tried really hard to learn about and take up hobbies, but imagine if you tried to explain human hobbies, as a concept, to your new outer-space-alien pal and every time he tries to do one, like maybe chess, or water polo, there’s something extremely off-putting about the whole experience and it doesn’t really seem natural even a little bit. That’s me. I don’t have a lot to tell you about because I spend most of my free time trying and failing to engage in things. That being said, the one true success of my life is live music. Concerts are the things I live for, that I feel entirely natural being involved in and that make me happy beyond what I ever believed was possible. I will travel almost anywhere if I want to see a band badly enough, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet a couple people along the way who share this energy. Something I think is really beautiful is that at a concert you can shout as loud as you want without ever fearing the sound of your own voice. You’re one with the lyrics and the beats and the crowd and you can feel it all buzzing in your chest and I think if every hobby made me feel like that then maybe I’d be good at a couple.
Anyway, on a budget and a schedule I just aim to do my best to wrap my trips—for concerts or just for the destination—and experiences into life as it is. I have not gone many exotic places or experienced cultures very different from my own. I have, however, had an entire Journey in an overnight drive home from Milwaukee. I’ve danced in the colored lights and electric bass in the presence of my favorite artists. I’ve wrapped myself and my friends up in blankets and watched a ~super blood wolf moon~ from the top of a parking garage in a city with ironically little parking, then spent the entire night afterwards just laughing with people I love until my stomach physically hurt (definitely should have gotten abs from that). I guess my point is that you have to work with what you’ve got, and while I haven’t always had a lot to work with, I go as hard as I can when I can. Every concert within a 14 hour driving range, every road trip from one Midwestern city to another, all of it is stuff that I will not hesitate to find time for because it is what I love doing. Every life-saving lyric I get to scream and every laugh I get to share with my best friends means more to me than any game of chess or water polo ever could. I collect these glimmers of intense moments and brilliant seconds because for me there is nothing else (and I really wouldn’t have it any other way).
So, in the spirit of collecting things, I’m going to share some of my favorites here, and you’re going to really meet me. you know what’s important: I love music and road trips and laughing to the point of tears with my friends. I want to maybe help people in the future too, probably adopt a couple cats, possibly even document a real UFO sighting. But what you’re really going to see are the moments that piece together to create a person. You’ll see the most beautiful and thrilling extensions of my life, and how they all weave together to just be me. Welcome, I'm glad to have you here.