Post-Travel Warps Your Everyday 'Normal' Life and Causes Heartache. (It's Good for You)

When you travel internationally a ton, your sense of reality when you get 'home' is forever warped. Forever.  You can't escape it.  Sensory-triggered memories from your past adventures interject themselves into the most unexpected moments of your present day, and you find yourself doing double-takes into the present and past.

It kind of feels like when you think you've seen a loved one who has long since passed away, which sounds super depressing, but I find that all these 'time travels,' actually make you feel pretty tripped out -- then pretty sad because you miss traveling so much.

When you prepare for a trip, everyone gives you tips on what to do, what to see, and all the stuff to prepare for.  The pre-travel.  But no one really tells you how to deal with what will happen after -- then again, you can't prepare for the memories you haven't yet made; you can only be prepared to know you'll hurt, which is, in my opinion, the best part of traveling: the embrace of being fully, completely, utterly vulnerable.  

The face of vulnerability: you, your backpacks, and a smile.
What you need (eh, for the most part) to take on the world.

All of this is, of course, if you're an introspective, individual traveler like I try to be, not some "I stay at the Ritz only" traveler.  Take that as you may.

If you're a backpacker, for example, or some rendition of it, here's what will likely happen after you return home after a long, 3+ month trip abroad.  The more dissimilar in culture and language to your own country, the more these will ring true:

1. You will experience heartache. You won't know where to even pinpoint that constant desolation because the mix of people met, things seen, memories made, are all to blame.

2. You won't be able to see landscapes at home the same way.  I've always grown up near the ocean, for example, and when I moved to SF and would take walks along the Embarcadero, I would immediately think of my afternoons at the Opera House in Sydney, Australia.  And then when I was recently in Buenos Aires, running along the river at Puerto Madero, I felt like I was back at that same Opera House.

My pics below.  See what I mean?

Sydney Opera House | Sydney, Australia

Embarcadero | San Francisco, California

Puerto Madero | Buenos Aires, Argentina

After you travel, you can be anywhere, close your eyes, and go through your mental rolodex of similar experiences that will zoom you to another time, another land, another period of life, another emotion, even.  I'm telling you -- it's a trip.  (Awful pun not intended)

3.  You will miss the friends you made abroad so, so much.  I've never been in the army, but I am sure the bond I have with the friends I've made abroad resembles the notion of 'band of brothers/sisters.'  I mean, some of us - complete strangers who met in hostels, by the way - went through Carnaval 2014 in Rio together - the environment of which is similar to a battlefield, I am positive (truly, the city looked like it got blown up with confetti and costumes and colors, but that's another story).

Carnaval 2014 in Rio: I met up a friend, who is from Sweden but we met in Buenos Aires, then formed a group of friends from Brazil, France, UK, Norway!

All joking aside, when you travel, you meet like-minded people who are all vulnerable but happy to be raw, open with each other.  No one has their walls up like they do back at home: what unites us is our willingness to using our differences as the bridges of commonality.  Read that again: we use our differences as a unifier.  Back at home, our differences usually divide us.  When you're around people who are, for the most part, all incredibly accepting and seeking to learn more about differences, or to find a unification in a differences, the result is beautiful.

You realize we as humans are all the same. We share humor and we all want to be loved and included. Then you start hashtagging all your photos #oneworld like I did.

At a hostel in Buenos Aires with new friends from (left to right): Brazil, USA, Angola, Peru.  We could only speak broken Spanish-Portuguese to communicate, but we did it.  We'd go out dancing together, cook together, everything.

The most international and fun crowd - truly, we were like a family - on our last night in Rio.  People here are from EVERYWHERE.  

On my last day in Rio with my sweet friend from Finland, who is an acrobat (no joke - it's her profession).  We bonded over our intense love for food, specifically ice cream.  A Finnish acrobat who loves ice cream?  Of course we'd be friends.  That's amazing.

4.  If you can be proactive about it, you'll catch yourself paying attention to the people at home that you used to ignore, because you pay attention to them abroad.  I've volunteered in a favela in Rio, trekked through a slum in Nairobi, and throughout those experiences gave more of my attention and heart to the people I met there than I have cumulatively back at home.  They were actual people, and I was amazed at their struggle through adversity.  Then I came back to SF and found myself walking past the homeless who sleep in their own feces everyday on the street and realized how immune I have been to them.  (That's a whole other problem of SF, but I won't get into that now)  I now start paying more attention to them and giving to them in responsible ways, as much as I can. People ALL around the world need helping hearts and hands.

5. Generally speaking, your values will change due to more perspective.  Especially after you visit Africa, and I don't mean an Abercrombie+Kent safari visit to Africa.  I mean a visit to a slum in Africa, or whatever politically correct term I should be using for "slum."  You'll stop complaining more, because damn it, you will realize you were freaking lucky to have won the genetic lottery and to have been born into a country of power and privilege.

Some very young kids I met in the slum in Nairobi.  When I am with kids here in the USA who complain about nonsensical or material things, faces with huge smiles like these always flash in my mind.  

**

Lately, memories of South America have seeped into my everyday life, causing mental detours from work or conversations I'm having with people:

It's a Monday and I think about how I need some coffee to get through the day.  And then I immediately stop myself and think about the miners I met in Potosi, Bolivia, who don't need coffee to just make it through a day -- they need to chew coca leaves to give them energy and suppress their hunger for the whole day so they can work in the underground dangerous mines their whole lives.

Basilio, who started working in the mines at age 13 and is now 22.  He's featured in this documentary, "The Devil's Miner": http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/devilsminer/

I eat a piece of chicken, then remember the time someone made me chicken at his home in Buenos Aires and wonder: how is his shop doing?  Did he finish school like he said he would?

I listen to a song on Spotify and remember the time I was in a car on a bumpy, dusty road in Kenya when the same song came on the radio, and how I was incredulous yet tickled at how music transcends cultures.

I could go on.  The main point is that a lot of people experience what is called "Post Travel Depression" -- but when you travel a ton, this sentiment lasts forever.  Meh, it's not depression, but it's certainly a heartache that will lace itself into the everyday actions that create your subsequent life.  This I why I am such an ardent supporter of the Gap Year: the earlier you travel and are exposed to REAL people/culture/life-outside-your-bubble, the more those experiences can take part into shaping the DNA of who you become.  (Global Citizen Year is the Gap Year org I've recently really been digging, BTW)

Travel will also make you more emotionally open and resilient.  Each trip you go on, you know you may later be hit with pain and heartache, but you go ahead anyway: and you love it.  Moreover, the more you do it, the more you start finding solace in that once uncomfortable feeling of being vulnerable.  

The feeling is different.  It's raw.  It's empowering.  And every time your 'reality' is reminded of a past travel memory,  you crave to travel once more.  It never ends.  

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers.  The mind can never break off from the journey."
- Pat Conroy

Thoughts on Fairness & Moral Responsibility from a Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya

In the past 5 months I have traveled for work&play through Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, now Kenya, and in the next week, Tanzania.  The most consistent lesson that keeps astounding me, WAY more than any sightseeing, comes from my conversations with all these different types of people.  Humans, regardless of race, are so smart and have the capability to do most anything: they just need the resources, the opportunity, and a culture of DRIVE to scoot them along.

I sat today for hours alongside Kenyans, some (not all) of whom work in the slums of Nairobi & have dedicated their lives to improving literacy for young girls/single moms/children in dangerous, brothel/crime/etc. ridden areas, and their energy was profoundly humbling.  These people were all educated, spoke PERFECT English and used SAT-worthy vocabulary words that admittedly I don't even use, and most importantly have this crazy thirst to seek better resources/opportunities for their lives.

"It's hard for us with everything to understand what it's like to have nothing."

If we could all live with an ounce of this urgency/need to be better.  Doesn't mean we have to go & save the world, just dude - be better.  Be useful.  Take your education seriously.  Do something with the brain/opportunities/life you've been given.  I am sad for those who I've seen throw their opportunities - especially in the Western World, where they are so, so fruitful - away.

It's also not fair.  If anything, do it for the other people who don't have what we have.

From South America back to San Francisco: the Next Chapter

Tomorrow I start a new job back in the city that I left six months ago.  It's not just any new job though; it represents the mark of when I started leading life with my heart.  (I like this phrase better than "following my heart")  Let me explain.

Since college, I wanted to accomplish but two things:

1. Travel and volunteer "for an extended period of time" in South America
2. Work in the cause-related field, preferably international in scope

We all have our dreams, reasons private to ourselves, and those were mine.  Simple.  And kind of vague, but hey.

Well, college was about five years ago, and in those five years I either ignored those dreams or catered to their half-ass counterparts, compromising these desires for more conventional, safer options.  

Don't get me wrong -- the "compromises" I made turned out to be some of the best experiences I've had and many people would just die to have them.  This is what I did instead:

1. Taught English in Thailand and consequently backpacked around SE Asia for six months. My heart really wanted me to go to Chile though, but I was too scared to go somewhere no one I knew had never been.   
2. Worked in the for-profit marketing world, where I worked with some of the world's most recognized brands and got to throw huge parties at shwank events like Super Bowl and Coachella and other painfully LA-cool things like that.  Staying in this industry, I then moved around from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where I thought moving cities might calm my travel jitterbug down.  (It didn't)

Of course I learned so much from these experiences and would never, ever take them back.

During these years, those primary two goals of mine grew from whispers to shouts in my ears, and I just couldn't ignore them anymore.    

To fulfill Dream #1, I up-and-quit my corporate job in San Francisco last October, packed my stuff into a backpack and backpacked/volunteered/traveled through Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina for three months. Quitting was only itty bitty scary because at that point, stepping into the unknown in pursuit of a dream felt 100x more right than forcing myself into submission.

I hadn't booked a return flight, but I just figured I would lead with my heart, see how I felt, and trust the process. 

Trust the process I did. The trip changed my life, but I knew exactly when to come home -- all signs pointed to my return, including a health-related one! -- and when I did, Dream #2 seriously fell into my lap.

Well, I should rather say: opportunities fell into my lap due to previous seeds that I had sowed.  So really, hard work + luck + preparation made Dream #2 fall gracefully into my lap.  Everything figured itself out within two weeks of my return home.  It was incredible and almost unbelievable, except not, because by that point I had started believing that anything could happen.

****

So, tomorrow marks the beginning of a new chapter and a new mindset that I hope I will always remember to follow and will pass along to my children.  

• Always remember to lead with your heart, no matter how uncertain it might feel.  Push through the uncertainty and know that each step is a dot that will eventually connect to the next dot.
• Always question what is "normal" and live your most authentic life.  Never settle.  We are individuals and are meant to stand out.
• Allow yourself the freedom to dream.  Even if you can't pinpoint what it is that you want, keep following the voice that keeps calling out to you.  Like the Sirens in mythology (except not dangerous), just follow their voices and then dive right in.  It's your life.  Get sucked into it.
• Believe and visualize where you want to be and don't let anything take that image away.  As Roald Dahl once said, "Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."  So believe.

What is amazing too is that I will get to witness this organization's work on-the-ground in Africa within a few days of me starting this job.  I never thought I would be here, but I am.  I am finally at the Chapter that deep down, I always knew would be written.   

"What a shame": is that your life? Why you need to adopt a "change-or-die" mentality

I woke up on a Sunday in early August 2013 and laid in bed for two hours, tangled in the sheets, staring at the ceiling while the fog of San Francisco rolled by my bay window, asking myself for the millionth time, "can I really do it?"  That's how life felt at the time, actually: I felt my life was just steadily passing by and all my goals in life were becoming clouded.  I was drifting away from my authentic self and saw that person -- soon to be a ghost -- peering at the real me through that window, shaking her head, shaking her head.

What a shame.

Throughout the next few weeks, I felt the presence of that person in every situation of my, truth-be-told, charmed life: steady and challenging corporate job, awesome apartment in San Francisco, an abundance of the best friends anyone could ask for, good health.

But as I moved through the motions of everyday life -- getting coffee to 'break up my day' in that cubicle life, happy hour, exercising -- I knew I was feigning happiness and well, running from the gnawing feeling inside me.

That person kept whispering to me as I conversed with coworkers, with friends: "This isn't you.  Not yet.  You haven't lived out the next chapter of your story yet."


Maya Angelou once said, "there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you", and that untold story in my life was a burning desire to travel long-term to South America and to work in a cause-related field.  I'd wanted to do this for six years (six years!) -- I can even go back to journals in college where I documented this -- but had chosen to suppress them as I chose to live out a more conventional, safe life (which I am not not-grateful for!).  I still took what others might see as risks, but looking back, I realized I had settled to make decisions that were, to me, 'the next best compromise.'

All of those compromises finally caught up to me: little fragments that had accumulated and snowballed into a cancer I could no longer ignore.  That hypothetical person's voice grew from a whisper to a shout; she dominated my conversations with others and overpowered the old thoughts in my head.  I became obsessed, really obsessed, with the idea of quitting my job to travel and to make the plunge to another field.

I talked about it so much that it became real.   "I want to go to South America" became "I need to go to South America" became "I am going to South America."

There was no other option but to make it happen.

I became sick of hearing myself talk through this hypothetical person than be the person.  This reminds me of when people say, "I am living vicariously through you."  Yay, but no.  We need to live vicariously through ourselves.  

I knew I had to start being about it rather than just talking about it.  Seriously, the feeling was so strong that I was positive I had never been more sure of anything in my entire life.

I had a moment where I snapped, and in a span of a very quick few weeks, I quit my job, soon moved out, and used the money that I had been saving -- yes, I had been saving for years for this -- to embark on a three month solo journey in South America.  No job secured after, but I didn't care. 

To not fulfill this dream of mine was the equivalent of shutting the door in the face of a loved one who came to me, asking for help.  The dream was a part of me.  I had poured my heart's blood, nights waking up in a sweat, and tears into it.  If I denied it, I would have killed a part of my soul.

"Killed your soul."  Cut the drama, right?  Whatever.  Life, for people who are passionate to live it, is "either a daring adventure or nothing at all", as Helen Keller put it.  Life IS a drama.  Our lives are stories that we have to write ourselves.


So I went on my solo trip.  December 2013 - March 2014.  It was the trip of a lifetime, and I have always hesitated to use such a grandiose statement.  Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina.  Memories, people, places that will forever be woven into every ounce of the soul that was once at danger of being lost.  It really changed my life.

Do you know what happened when I came back?

I was rejuvenated, enamored with humanity, and curious yet again, yes, but amazingly, everything else lined up in perfect, perfect timing.  Job offers in the field I wanted all along, within days of each other.  I promise, when you decide on something, the universe WILL conspire to make it happen.  It has happened to me.

Change is no longer on the horizon; it has passed and it is here to stay.

"Embrace the Fall."  Me at Iguassu Falls (Brazil), January 2014.

******

"Change-or-die" is the mentality I had to pull myself out of a situation that I was content with, but not full-on enamored with.  And you should be enamored with the life you're living, because why not?  You deserve to live out your dreams.  Fear is what holds us back -- I had a fear of this unknown for six years -- but once you break through it, confront it, and let the door hit it on its way out, I am telling you, you will open up so much more room for confidence and ideas and excitement to manifest within you.

Is there something you've always wanted to do?  Take the step now, even if it's just a small one, to do it.  Heck, the last thing I wanted to do was to look back on my past and label it a wasted youth: "what a shame" that I didn't live up to my potential.  Hell no.  Too many people let life happen to them; you have to take control and make things happen for yourself.

Who wants to just exist?  If you want to truly live but feel like you're just floating, waiting for the next best compromise, snap out of it.

Change or let your soul die.  It's your choice.  When all your cards are on the table like that, you best bet you will light the fire and make it happen.