Travel Is a Challenge We Choose

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”

― Anita Desai

I spent much of my 20s learning emotional regulation and coping skills. I was a little late to the game when it came to learning these skills. I was homeschooled for 11 years and escaped my enmeshed family when I was 21. I’ve been living on my own ever since.

My father forced me to lie to relatives, pretending I went to school. My father kept such iron control over my mother and me that even the smallest errand needed to be planned in advance with him.

We were expected to check in when we arrived and left work every day, even when we worked jobs that were scarcely a ten-minute drive from home. We couldn’t even stop to get gas for the car unless we vetted it with him first.

One of the many reasons I was so desperate for my freedom was to travel.

Growing up, life was about making enough money to survive. I lived in a tourist area where the goal was to extract as much money as possible from vacationers. My family took two vacations in all the years I lived with them; one was to stay with a relative in Florida and the other was just for a weekend.

But I’ve wanted to see the world since before I had the arrogance to admit it was something I wanted. I read library books like the Stravaganza series by Mary Hoffman and dreamed about Venice. I would read endless fantasy novels like The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce and imagine seeing a castle in person.

Once I had some stability in my career, I dove into the wonderful world of budget travel. I could go on about the strange socioeconomics of going from poverty to the privilege of comfortably middle class, but I want to focus on the growth opportunities travel opened up for me.

The problems we face on travel are, to some extent, ones we’ve chosen for ourselves.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

Some of my worst travel mishaps — like getting stranded in Portugal overnight because of a canceled flight when I had a hotel paid for in Italy — were indeed out of my control. But I did choose to travel. Some people might call them champagne problems. That might be a little too glossy since some travel problems are horrible. But better or for worse, travel always has mishaps at some point.

Many people in the family I left behind choose to stay at home, hardly ever leaving their small town. In the most extreme cases, like my father, he barely ventures out of his house. The world is full of risks and problems that he doesn’t want to expose himself to.

And maybe that kind of hermit life is good for some people, but it isn’t for me. And if you’re reading this, I imagine you have some wanderlust, too.

Travel teaches us to roll with the punches, especially when we’re alone.

One of the hardest emotional regulation lessons I’ve had to learn is that my mercurial moods hurt me. And when I’m alone, if I let myself dwell too long, I’m just hurting myself more. I’m making a bad situation even worse by being miserable through it.

We are the arbiters of our own experience. We grow up on cliches like, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." But it takes a lot of self-awareness and focused practice to turn around our moods when things go wrong. It’s hard work, but important work.

Let’s look back at the Portugal mishap. It was out of my hands, yes. But my reaction was in my hands. And my reaction was to cry in the airport, drink too much wine, and feel quite sick by the point I got the airline to put me up at a hotel for the night. They really did not want to. Took a lot of crying.

We’re forced to learn better ways to cope.

“You can’t control the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

In retrospect, hats off to EU airlines, because I’ve since been in this situation with US airlines and ended up sleeping at the airport. The second time I ended up stranded overnight in a foreign city, I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t let my emotions make the situation worse than it had to be. I found the most comfortable chair to sleep in, used my clothes to make a pillow, and got as much sleep as I could before work the next day. Skipped the wine and the crying.

Because if we don’t, we might just turn into those home hermit people. And deep down, if you have the wanderlust bug, we know we can’t be happy that way.

We learn to make the best of things.

Even if things are quite terrible for a while, when we travel, we learn to make the best of things. Otherwise, if we stay moping, we’ve lost so much of our vacation.

I haven’t found silver linings in regular life problems the way I find them in travel. When landlords charged more for things than the lease agreement outlined, and I couldn’t afford a lawyer to fight them, well… I just felt very put out. The only silver linings I can extract from that situation — and I’m really pulling deep here — would be that it’s a lesson to invest in lawyer insurance if your job offers it.

But with travel, even when things go wrong, it’s a little easier to find the silver linings.

“In between every action and reaction, there is a space. Usually the space is extremely small because we react so quickly, but take notice of that space and expand it. Be aware in that space that you have a choice to make. You can choose how to respond, and choose wisely”…

― Rebecca Eanes

Did I have great gastric distress and some food poisoning in Thailand? Yes. Did I see lots of beautiful places and still have a wonderful time? Hard yes!

Problems in life are harder to separate and contextualize in the grand scheme of things. But when we’re traveling, we can more easily juxtapose the good with the bad and remember how incredible the good experiences were, and how they do outmatch the bad.

And who knows… maybe learning to reframe and rebalance our experiences in the context of travel can teach us a thing or two about doing it in real life, too.