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