(female narrator #3) Everywhere you turn, people try to tell you who to be and what to do.

But what about deciding for yourself?

Roadtrip Nation is a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life.

Every summer, we bring together three people from different backgrounds.

Together, they explore the country, interviewing inspiring individuals from all walks of life.

They hit the road in search of wisdom and guidance, to find what it actually takes to build a life around doing what you love.

This is what they found.

This is Roadtrip Nation.

[raining] (Tele'jon) Ed got the, the genius idea to jump into the Atlantic Ocean while it was raining.

And me, I'm thinkin', "Aw, these people are crazy.

Like, Ed really?

You're going?"

"Yeah."

I was like, "Okay, I'll go."

And we took a dip.

We dipped through that thing and it was actually really fun.

It was really nice.

I was reluctant to do it, and there's been a lot of things on this trip that I've been reluctant to do, and like once you guys ask me more than once, I pretty much give into the peer pressure.

Pretty much stoked every time I say yeah to some crazy thing you guys are trying to do.

(Olivia) The water is like that.

It's cleansing and it's coming over to the next step and you can just like jump into the water and cleanse these four weeks that you've completed.

(Ed) It felt significant, yeah, like coming out and you're like, "I feel fresh, I feel ready."

And then to go from that, like suddenly coming out from the ocean to going to an interview.

Should I park here, or how far towards the end of the road?

(Ed) We're doing an interview here with a woman called Beverly, who's a writer.

(Beverly) If you look up Beverly Donofrio on Facebook, Drew Barrymore's picture comes up.

That's too weird.

[laughing] (Beverly) You know, I was a teenage mother, and I didn't get to go to college until I was 24 years old, and I, my parents were working class.

And senior year, I missed 60 classes before I got pregnant.

I went to community college eventually and heard early on that if I got straight A's, I could get a scholarship.

You know, I was on welfare, I was a single mother, it was, I didn't have a car, I couldn't get a job without a car, there was no daycare.

It was a real, real scary trap.

So I did get straight A's and I got the scholarship, and by then, "I-I'm gonna be a writer."

You know, "I-I, this is what I wanna be."

And I write my first paper and the teacher asks if he can talk to me afterwards, and he says, "I think you'd really benefit from remedial English."

(Olivia) Wow.

Yeah.

And I, well yeah, 'cause I didn't, I'd never studied it!

I didn't know how to make, you know, connectives.

I couldn't say "therefore" and "moreover," so I took remedial English and got all those skills, but when I graduated, I quit writing, oh!

'Cause my thesis got failed.

[laughing] I guess that remedial writing didn't work!

That's amazing.

I know.

So-- (Olivia) What was the title of your thesis?

(Beverly) I forget what it was called, but it was Riding in Cars with Boys!

It was the beginning of Riding in Cars with Boys.

It was 150 pages, probably written horribly, under-underdramatized.

I thought, "Who am I kidding?

I can't write.

I quit."

Your heart must have-- It was devastating.

My heart was broken.

So I quit and I got a job at Manhattan Inc., and it was not a pretty picture.

They fired me.

[everyone laughing] Obviously, you were devastated at the time-- (Beverly) Yes.

Now you're not at all devastated about it or seem to be-- (Beverly) You gotta laugh.

You gotta laugh.

Yeah, what's the reasoning behind that?

(Beverly) Well, I think I thrive from it; because it has happened so often, I thrive from adversity.

It's like, "All right, I'll show you!"

Um, that's not gonna get me down!

So you know, collapse, cry, "Oh I'm a failure," and then think, "Oh well, I bet I can get freelance, and then I can write more, and now I have all these connections."

(Tele'jon) When did, when did it start to pick up?

When did things start to get good?

(Beverly) Well, so I'm freelance writing, and a friend had a front page piece in the Village Voice, which was, Village Voice was a big deal then.

And so I thought of writing something about being an Italian-American feminist hippie with a father who's a cop.

And I called up the editor and her father was a cop, too, and she said, "Cool, go ahead."

So I wrote it and they printed it, and my mentor, Richard Price, from graduate school calls up and says, "Bev, you can get a book contract with this."

And I said, "How do I do that?"

And he says, "Call my agent."

And she submitted it and we sold it.

And, uh, in those days, Hollywood agents would go to book agents and say, "You have anything for me?

You have anything for me?"

And that was Friday morning, and by that evening, there was a preemptive offer from Disney: $100,000 on signing, $400,000 when the movie is made, but the deal is you sign all rights away and you let them know by midnight tonight.

And that felt to me an awful lot like bullying, and I said no.

And then I thought, "Oh my god, what did I do?

I just threw away more money than I'd made in my entire life."

Like, the most I'd made in one year was $10,000 up to that time.

Um, but on Monday morning, uh, what was it?

Fox came in with exactly the same money, saying, "We wanna fly you out, we wanna meet you, we want you involved, and so-- (Olivia) Wow.

My life changed just like [snaps] that.

(Olivia) That's always the thing, is "Doesn't money equal happiness?

Does success equal happiness?"

(Beverly) No, it does not.

No.

I've always struggled with depression, so it revisited, you know.

It revisited really until I got God, to tell you the truth.

And that was when I was 40.

Uh, so I was in therapy constantly-- probably 20 years, different therapists.

(Olivia) What led you to the monastery?

Well, I was raped in my house in Mexico in my own bed.

It was horrible.

It was‚ I don't know‚ you know in spiritual terms, it was like a dark night of the soul, and I‚ then had a even stronger mandate, like, "I've gotta get out, I've gotta go heal.

How can this happen?

How can this God that I was so sure was all love, um, allow things like this to happen?

How can there be evil in a world that I think was created all in love?

I wanna go contemplate this.

How am I going to live with this?

How am I going to digest this?

How am I going to go on?"

I thought, "I will never be the same person again."

But then after a while, I came to realize, "Why would I wanna be the same person?"

You know, I was so great; it's like, change is good!

You know?

Like a friend recently said to me, "I used to feel so sorry for you.

You were always crying and always depressed."

And it was true, it was hard.

You know, I don't wanna diminish the horror of rape because, I mean, it was horrible.

But--I just recently said this in a radio interview and I'm gonna repeat it here--I was um, I found a spider in a-a dishbin and walked outside with it and dumped the spider onto the grass and thought, "Wow, that spider had been trapped in the bin, had lived all its little spider life in a house, and now suddenly, it's lifted out of it and is in the grass!"

And it was like that with the rape; it was like it lifted me out of my life and put me somewhere else.

And go into the monasteries and the prayer life and, you know, reading the mystics and just being in that contemplative mode, it turned into a good thing.

Life is difficult, bad happens.

What're you gonna do?

You just have to make the best of everything!

Trust that the universe is leading you along.

It's all a process, and you don't know how one thing is gonna lead to another.

Before I got fired, when I was in my MFA program, I thought, "I'm never writing journalism, I'm not gonna write for magazines.

I don't wanna be that kind of writer."

And then a little opportunity to write a little thing in the beginning of a magazine that led to then a longer thing in a magazine, then a memoiristic piece in a magazine, and then my book, and I wouldn't have known that and I wouldn't have gone that way had I been rigid about "No, this is what I am, this is how I'm gonna do it."

You don't know how it's gonna happen.

So when opportunities come, take a real look at 'em and say yes as often as you can.

Just say yes and know you are loved.

(Olivia) Aw!

(Beverly) I love you.

So, good luck, good luck.

(Tele'jon) I think "Just say yes" is actually‚ amazing advice.

Yeah, personally I've been trying to do it a lot.

(Ed) Yeah, I'm glad you have.

(Olivia) Feels good though, doesn't it?

(Tele'jon) Yeah, it does.

♪ (Tele'jon) We are en route to Detroit.

Michigan, right?

(cameraman) Right.

Good.

My geography's gettin' a little better.

(Olivia) My father was a factory worker for GM.

So my family and hundreds of thousands of other people are affected by what happened in Detroit and in those companies at the time and what it meant to America, like, this huge revolution of "This is America and we build things and this is industry" and it's nothing anymore.

I mean, like literally nothing.

It's taken over by renegade artists.

(leader #3) As artists, we don't see necessarily decay; we see possibility, you know?

You can't know dark but by knowing light; you can't know decay but by knowing growth.

You know, and so we see that and we try to reconcile the unity of opposites.

(Olivia) We uh, got in touch with a friend of ours here and did the whole breaking- and-entering experience.

(Airea) Oh good!

You've gotta do that, totally trespass.

(Airea) Totally trespass.

I mean, there's beautiful buildings, amazing architecture still inside.

Like, people just left how they left.

Yeah, just left suddenly.

I mean, you can look at it and say, "Oh my god, it's not safe", or you can say "I can forge a way there", you know?

"I can make a way there".

I can make my own rules there, you know?

Um, I think I'm gonna do‚ an older performance piece.

I wrote this about what happened in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and the people that were left behind.

There's something in her spirit that I want you guys to hear.

[Southern accent] "My daddy built this house in 1917.

"Callused, gloved hands, sweat-softened dirt dug "foundation deep.

"Said he wanted me and mama to live in a castle "hundred rooms shy, he never did finish.

"All revolted against his body.

"Papa dropped dead on the basement floe'-- "trenched his own grave.

"We Wisdoms always use our hands.

"Sometimes, against ourselves.

"I ain't never been much in this world.

"I didn't clean more cracked toilets to shine, "more broken mirrors than my fair share.

"I heard ghosts in the halls of moneyed mansions "with more heart than flesh and bone touched.

"There was no blood in them houses' veins.

"Everything was dead.

"But this house?

"Oh, this house right here has souls between the walls, "and if you listen real close under the "clouded moon, you can hear 'em laughing.

"And this here patch of dirt belonged to me.

"Crying New Orleans clouds over my raggedy roof, "my own d'comfort.

"And I'll inhale a moonshine flood through my "flat black nose before I set one foot off my land.

"And you too young to understand.

"But when you ain't ever had nothing, "a little something alway' betta.

"And though this don't look like home to you, it's mine.

"These are my cardboard windows.

That's my house.

"That's my front door.

"So I'm ready.

"I'ma ride.

"I said I'm ready.

"I'ma ride.

'Cause I sure ain't finna go‚ nowhere."

(Ed) In about an hour, we're gonna leave for Chicago.

Detroit has treated us well.

It's interesting to see all these kind of vacant buildings.

Ah, it's got a kind of sense of freedom.

Um, and the people we've met--all the people who live here --really wanna‚ get it up and running again.

There's a lot of energy here, I feel‚ to regenerate Detroit.

♪ (Tele'jon) Right now, like I'm 18 and a lotta people think that I should become a professor.

So it was like one of those things where I was like, "Huh, maybe, maybe I do wanna be a professor."

But then, where I'm kinda at in my life right now is I'm at a place where I don't feel like school's for me at the moment, so I'm for sure gonna take a year off.

(Tele'jon) So yeah, I reached out to a mentor and then she reached out to her friend.

David Stovall was there.

Just Google'd him, you know, watched like an interview with him on YouTube and I was like, "This guy's amazing.

And he looks like me.

You know, this is incredible."

I even put that in my e-mail.

I was like, "You know, I just think it would be amazing to talk to somebody who has like similar experiences as me doin' like, in this field of work."

You know, that's huge.

(David) Chicago's one of the most segregated cities in the world.

So when people talk about gang issues or what have you, you can't talk about that without talking about hyper-segregation, marginalization, and disinvestment.

For me, the driving force is "What is that story that we don't talk about?

What are those things that have gone missing and now, what is the responsibility to work with others in bringing those things back?"

(Tele'jon) To get to that level of like critical thinking, I mean, you gotta start asking questions first.

What was the moment when you started asking those questions?

You know-- Kindergarten.

Kindergarten?

(David) You know, once I got the bogus Columbus story, you know, 1492, sailed the ocean blue‚ and my father told me entirely different stories.

He said, "Look, he was trying to find India but landed in the Bahamas and called folks the wrong name."

And in my mind, in my five-year-old mind, I was just like, "Well how do you discover something where people already are?

People already there--how do you discover that?"

You know, wh-, so in my five-year-old mind, I was like, "Ah, the teacher is lying."

[roadtrippers laughing] (David) So we-we I'm done, I'm done with this school.

This school is just ridiculous.

I mean, why are we doing this?

And then fourth grade, I had a teacher who was really‚ stern with us in saying, "Look, the rest of the world is saying all these things about you and have these particular negative expectations of you.

What are you going to do to prove them wrong?"

Right?

So for me, it was like, "Oh, oh, okay.

Now, this is making sense."

Any type of tangible, critical analysis, forthright change is directed by people who have found those conditions intolerable and are working to change those conditions.

Right?

So that, that‚ piece I think really accounted for my education.

And I can say quite a bit of that came outside of traditional school space.

Education doesn't always happen in schools.

It can, but that's not necessarily the norm.

(Tele'jon) Even with that perception of education, 'cause I'm feeling like we got like the same kinda, you know, feelings about like the educational institution itself.

Um, and I've had a bunch of mentors tell me like, "T, you should think about being a professor.

I think you'd enjoy it, I think it's for you."

Um, and for a minute, like my senior year in high school, I was like, "You know what?

I might be a professor."

Um, but then that changed for me.

So I'm wondering, when did you make that decision?

Like when did you think, even with these views on the educational institution, that you wanna be a part of that educational institution?

(David) So my classes meet twice a week.

So my "official teaching assignment" is Monday and Tuesday.

Right?

So a lotta professors can use, you know use that for their research time the rest of the, the rest of the time or what have you.

But for me, I always thought about that, "Well there's freedom of schedule here.

So if I'm working with community organizations, young folks, schools, then I can actually use that time to be in schools."

Right?

To actually work with folks as opposed to just pontificating about what I think is happening with these folks.

Right?

But actually working with folks.

And then, as part of the research, writing about what I do in those spaces, so you never have to worry about being confined to the institution because the institution has very little to do with influencing how you interact in that work.

So that's-that's, uh, that's a thing that you don't have to, you don't have to worry about as much.

(Tele'jon) How do you find happiness amidst all of that?

I once talked to a man who's uh, who's been working with gang-involved youth, and so I asked 'em, I was like, "How do you"--same question--like, "are you, are you happy, are you content?"

And he was just straight-up with me, he's like "I don't even know how I can be content.

When I see the same things that ruin my life" --'cause he spent most of his life in prison-- "is still happening to the uh, to the kids in the community that I work in."

So where do you find contentment?

(David) Happiness is in the little things, right?

You know, an ability to wake up‚ halfway decent day, weather-wise, this ability to actually build with others, be in a space of others who are also doing this work.

Because if we don't appreciate those small things, then it becomes toxic, and we do start to engage in these bad habits.

That's where addictions come in, that's where, um, this, these feelings of angst and anxiety come in.

So we have to be able to perpetually ask questions and build community with the folks who-who answer them, right?

So think and create, and find a community of folks that you can think and create with.

I think that's critical in this day and age.

(Tele'jon) Yeah that was huge!

He's taking the privilege of the‚ the higher educational institution and bringing it to those who don't have access.

He's going to the social justice high school and bringing all that knowledge of being a professor into this whole other space.

I can definitely see myself doing that.

So I mean, shoot.

I don't know.

Professor's looking good right now.

[laughs] College was like this huge question.

Um, I have my own like politics around the educational institution itself.

But after talking to David Stovall, I'm more confident now that I'm gonna go back to school.

I see like so many other things beginning, and I feel like all these other doors just opened up.

We're on the road about seven-and-a-half weeks now.

And it's almost over.

Which feels really weird 'cause it's kind of been my life the last two months.

[laughs] We have one interview left, and that is right now.

(Will) I'm not afraid of work because I was brought up to really work hard.

So hard work doesn't scare me.

(Ed) Man, that was the last one.

It's crazy!

(Olivia) We have another week of traveling home.

(Tele'jon) A time to like really absorb everything that we've experienced and that we've learned.

(female narrator #4) Roadtrip Nation extends beyond the program you just watched.

It's a movement that empowers people to define their own roads in life.

Here's a quick snapshot at the Roadtrip Nation experience at the Social Innovation Summit.

(student #1) So, I'm Jazmin.

I am 17.

(student #2) My name's Sandra.

Um, I'm 18.

(student #3) I'm Jonathan Ayala, and I go to Willow Glen High School, and I'm a senior.

Tomorrow, we're going to a conference in Stanford.

(Jazmin) I'm gonna be around a whole bunch of, um, business people.

(Jonathan) A couple questions I wanna ask is how did, like, what were they doing when they were my age.

(Sandra) What kinds of obstacles did they endure when they were our age?

(Jazmin) What were, um, some of the obstacles you had to face?

(Sandra) What's a typical day in your job?

(Jonathan) I was just wondering, like, what were you doing when you were our age?

(woman #1) You know, one thing I've learned is not to be afraid to fail.

And sometimes it's better to make a decision and be definitive about it even if you don't have perfect information because that's going to be a better outcome than if you sit and do nothing.

(Jazmin) I didn't really expect for them to be that open, but they actually like made a connection with us.

(Jonathan) It makes me feel pretty cool 'cause, like, they're actually appreciating me asking how like their life story.

(Sandra) It gave me more‚ confidence in speaking to people.

(Jazmin) With this, I learned that after failure, there's success.

(girl #1) No matter what you do-- (boy #1) Or where you come from-- (boy #2) You've got wisdom to pass down.

(male narrator #3) Help young people find their way by sharing the lessons you've learned.

Take 15 minutes to tell us what you love to do.

(boy #1) The door is open-- [boy #2] We're all ears.

(girl #1) Become a leader at ShareYourRoad.com ♪