How Travel Saved My Life

2020 has had a rough start. While Australia burned, a virus began to ravage its way through China. By the end of Q1, the world was at a standstill as countries began to grapple with the prospect of a public health crisis. People are quarantined, nations have closed their borders and no one knows when it will be ok to travel again. For most people, these travel bans are an inconvenience but don’t have a huge impact on their day to day life. However, there are those of us that operate a little differently. We are the people who find it hard to stay in one place. For me, being mobile has become one of the defining characteristics of my life and traveling has made me the person that I am today. Not only that, it is probably the one thing that still allows me to even be here today.

Despite the fact that I consider myself an open book, there is something that most people don’t know about me.  While most people know that I love to travel, they don’t know that traveling saved my life. While many people loosely claim that they are “dying for a vacation”, many years ago I actually was.  My father had died suddenly, my marriage was collapsing, my professional life was a disaster and my mental health was clinging on by a thread. I was suffering from debilitating depression and anxiety and even found myself wishing that I would never have to wake up again.

I was living in Hong Kong at the time and through this turmoil, I began to have a profound need to just run away from it all, to take off with a one way ticket and no set schedule.  Run away from the pain, sadness and (even worse) numbness and begin to try to feel alive again.  A few times a week, I would hike up to Victoria Peak in Hong Kong and stare down at the city around me.   I knew that I needed a break if I was going to come out of this and I would contemplate whether or not I could really afford to quit my job and travel. At one point, I finally realized that mentally, I couldn’t afford not to.

So, I finally did it!  I quit my job and booked a one-way plane ticket to New Zealand where I had lived for 3 wonderful years.  I imagined it as a place where I could sit on my friends’ couches and lick my wounds a bit while I began to pull myself back together.  To stop myself from sliding downhill even further and to start rebuilding my sense of self, I set a goal for myself where I would do something every single day that scared me.  Whether it be something crazy like paragliding (I am scared of heights), snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef (I am certain that I will get eaten by a shark one day) or just getting a bikini wax (I still don’t understand why we do this to ourselves!) , I needed to do something that pushed me out of my comfort zone.  Anyone who has gone through a period like this can agree that your “comfort zone” can be one of the absolute worst places that you can be.

And this is how it began.  I spent two months in New Zealand and Australia pushing myself each day.  I overcame some of my worst fears and slowly began to remember my old self.  As my confidence began to grow, so did my appetite for exploration. I spent most of that summer bouncing around Europe meeting up with old friends that I had lost touch with and falling in love with new parts of the continent (I am still so incredibly grateful that Kyiv and the Balkans came into my life!).   While I still suffered “bad” days where I felt so much anxiety that I thought I would vomit and struggled to get out of bed, the bad days became fewer and fewer. My lethargy and constant heartburn began to go away and my body began to feel like a 30 year old’s rather than an old woman.

Throughout this time, I still clung to the idea that I would go back to New York and diligently applied to jobs working with hotels, airlines, OTAs, marketing firms, etc.  I never got any responses besides rejections and I began to question my value more and more. To counterbalance this feeling of worthlessness, I began to travel to even more far-flung destinations in some ways to prove that I could.   I spent months traveling around the Horn of Africa, the Caucasus and Central Asia. As I began seeing my 100th country coming closer and closer, I began to feel a sense of purpose again. I began to see myself as a bit more badass, as a woman who could actually do things, as someone with value.  I recognized the skills that it takes to travel long-term, especially to destinations where virtually no other travellers go to. (Side note: how messed up is it that my whole sense of self was wrapped up in my career and marriage? Why didn’t I see myself as something more than a job and the man that loved me?)

So, I began to create a new image for myself.  I began to concentrate on all of the things that I wanted to do with my life but never had the time or the money.   I decided to finally go to grad school…..and to teach English…..and to do a massive overland trip of South America…….and to finalize my divorce from a man that I finally realized I never really loved.   So in the winter of 2016, I began applying for grad schools. I hired a paralegal to file my divorce papers. I booked a flight to Argentina and a cruise to Antarctica. I made it all happen.

During my trip through South America, I even met the love of my life.  While we have no future together, he loved me for what I am, not what he expected me to be. Even more, I loved him for everything that he was, not because I had a checklist in my mind that he fulfilled.  That encounter taught me a lot about what I COULD expect from a relationship. Four years later, I am still single and that is ok with me.  I would rather wait for the right man than to spend any more of my life with the wrong one.

Even more than that, I have now been able to achieve more than I ever thought I could.  I spent two years working for a sustainable travel company in India. I got my Master’s degree in a field that fascinates me, I even ran a half-marathon in Mumbai.  As I write this, I am sitting in a cafe in Stone Town, Zanzibar where I am about to start a volunteer position as a teacher in an NGO school. My goal of 100 countries is well-behind me and I have a new goal of 140 countries by the time I am 40.  If you would have told the broken version of me in 2014/2015 that this was possible, I would never have believed it.   

While my future is completely uncertain, I know without a doubt that traveling saved my life.   If I would have stayed in my current situation five years ago, I most likely wouldn’t be here today.  I would have continued down a path of self-destruction until there was nothing left of me.  

Finally, people usually have the same types of questions when asking me about travelling.  Do you feel safe? Aren’t you scared? How can you afford it? The best answer that I can give is that I do sometimes feel scared but it usually isn’t because of the places that I travel to.  I feel scared sometimes that I will begin to slip away again. People also tell me how brave I am for doing what I have. Yet, I think it is the opposite. Being brave is doing something even though you are scared.  I was more scared of being in a bad marriage in a dead end job and that being my entire life than I am of going to Afghanistan. Does that still make me brave? Does that make me foolish? I like to think of it as a little bit of both combined with a deep need for self-preservation.   

I started this post saying that travelling saved my life and this is the absolute truth.  If anyone finds themselves in a similar situation, please know that there are many of us floating around out here.  You are not alone and when you do finally venture out, you will find many like-minded men and women out there. They will be your support group.