ジャッキーの これ、やってみよう  What if I ...

オスカー・ワイルドからの引用句はジャッキーの座右の銘の一つ　JACKIE HOFFART PHOTO

I haven't had the same address for an entire calendar year since 1997. I guess you could say I move around a lot. I'm 30 years old and I've lived in four Canadian cities, three German cities, two Japanese cities, and at the moment I live in London.

I always identified with the character Ariel from The Little Mermaid. When she was in her cave, singing about wanting to be part of some other world she knew existed but had never been to, I understood exactly what she meant.

Perhaps because I'm gay, I have always felt like an outsider. (Though in truth, I think most kids, gay or straight, feel like outsiders at some point in their lives.)

But instead of feeling sad about not fitting in, I felt driven to find the place where I would.

Some of that childhood fantasy lives on in me, but — ironically — I think I've cultivated the outsider in myself so much that I no longer want to be "part of your world," as Ariel would say.

I quite like being on the outside looking in. It's just who I am.

My mom says wanderlust runs in our family. Wanderlust, which is a borrowed word from German, means a desire to travel, to roam the world (in German, the verb "wandern" means to hike or walk and "lust" means desire). Even so, I don't consider myself to be very well traveled. I've never backpacked around Europe and during the four years I lived in Japan, the only other Asian country I visited was South Korea — and only for a weekend. So I don't really travel that much, but I do seem to have a desire to keep moving.

Most people hate moving, but not me. I like gathering up all my stuff, literally, and deciding what's worth keeping and what's not.

Moving forces me to ask myself: What is it you want out of life and why aren't you doing it?

I want to find whatever it is that I can do best and do it. I agree with the famous Oscar Wilde quote, "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."

With that as my guiding philosophy, I feel driven to improve myself — to learn new things, to expose myself to different points of view, to push myself to be more artistic or creatively productive — and that's what has inspired me to start this column.

Each week I will endeavor to try something new, learn something new, or improve my health or well-being in some way. I will describe what I did and why I chose to do it, and then report back on it. Maybe it will be something I'd like to continue, maybe not.

I don't want to set too many limits for the kinds of things I might try. In order to stay motivated, I'll probably have a mix of more and less demanding challenges, but the sky's the limit.

I welcome you to join with me in "What if I ..." (これ、やってみよう). We can try new things together. You can suggest things for me to try, write me about your personal triumphs, and hopefully we can interact through the column and learn from each other!

Next time: What if I ... quit smoking