For most of my twenties, the travel was all my personality.
I was not just someone who loved holidays, I was traveler – From the type who lived from a backpack, he gave priority to destinations through the path they were, and said yes about anything he feels like an adventure.
So, when I started feeling a little stumbling last summer at the age of 29, I did what he always had been working before: I fill a bag, booked a ticket in one direction, and left.
The first few weeks in Costa Rica were perfect. The fog of the wasting forest. Beach cafes. This special type of freedom that comes from not knowing what may be the next day, or even an hour.
But one afternoon, walking long distances across the forest, and watching Macaws was flashing across the sky, I felt it: nothing.
There is no awe, no wonder, just a boring awareness, creeping that I saw him in everything before, that I could be anywhere, and that none of them did not touch me the way he used to.
I didn’t enjoy. Worse than that, I didn’t feel anything at all.
Travel stopped feeling discovery and began to feel escape
The travel was feeling an adventure for me, but it seemed to have escaped now after I was older.
Katie lemon
In my early twenties, travel was alone. He forced me to do so at the present time.
Every day was a self -reliance cycle: discovering bus schedules, trying to the most adventurous streets that I can find, and meeting strangers who felt older friends by sunset.
Now, I felt traveling as if I was running away. I did not discover new things about myself. I was not growing. I was not particularly interested in the place where I was.
I have spent years convincing myself that the next place would carry all the answers. But here I was, in another breathtaking destination, I feel completely numb.
I started missing the things that I never thought about: familiar faces, the favorite cafe where Paristas knows your request, and plans to run after the next trip.
For the first time, I wondered whether this way of living had an expiration date, whether what I felt was expanding one day now I felt empty.
It turns out that the most difficult thing is to leave – it resides
By traveling, I realized that it might not be very bad to stay in one place.
Katie lemon
When I went back to the United States, I expected to feel comfortable. Instead, I was anxious in a way that she could not travel.
Although my flight was not satisfied, I still find myself refreshing flight deals in the middle of the night and itching for the next destination.
For years, the movement gave me condolences. As long as I was in a movement, I have never had to sit with the most difficult questions: What do I really want? What kind of life I try to build?
The travel gave me a lot, but it also became distraction.
The most difficult investigation was that what I really needed – the thing that feared me more – was to stay in one place for a long time to build something real.
A deep meaningful life has not been found in a continuous movement, as it is built over time. In friendships that deepen over the years, not days. Feeling of belonging to appearing over and over again. The purpose that comes from commitment to something, even when it is not exciting at every moment.
Travel will always be part of my life, but I no longer see him as an answer to everything.
The next real challenge is to learn how to stay, and sometimes this requires more courage than a ticket in one direction.
