No Small Wander

I took a break from blogging last week, and I felt guilty about that. Recently, I realised too late that I’d ignored a lot of advice that I try to live by, and it completely backfired. I forgot the most basic rule of slow travel—to travel thoughtfully and intentionally. I spent the rest of the week trying to recooperate from it.

Until this week, I’d been keeping up a schedule of blog posts on Wednesdays and Sundays for a few months. But that changed last week, when I went on my hen do (British for “bachelorette party”). This trip was a beach weekend with three good friends. We walked, we laughed; we ate fish and chips on the beach; we watched the sun set from a rooftop. It was awesome.

It was also exhausting in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The weather was hot, and I’d only brought one non-sweater top; we racked up 40k steps in two days; we went to a fairground and I nearly had a panic attack coming off a roller coaster. There always seemed to be something else to do or see. I had the time of my life, but on the train ride home, I found myself almost falling asleep. I went to bed that night at 8:30pm, instead of staying up a little later to write about my travels.

In the week that followed, I struggled to get my mental space back to a place of equilibrium. Between wedding planning, tube strikes, and a dinner party I hosted, life suddenly felt too busy to write about travel.

In short—I’ve had a lot of things competing for brain space. I don’t list them all as an apology for not posting. But I do sometimes need a reminder to myself that this is what this blog is about.

Travel thrills me. It gives me new sights, sounds, smells, and tastes; it gives me some of my most treasured memories. But part of why travel thrills me is because it challenges me. When I’m travelling, I ask more of myself. I try to walk further into the woods, to be more adventurous with food, to say yes to everything somewhere new might offer. That excitement leads to enthusiasm—it makes me say yes to everything I can.

The dark side of saying yes to everything is that I say yes to things without thinking deeply. When this happens, I think of it like a road trip. Rather than driving, and having “Excitement” as my passenger, suddenly it’s driving the car. And Excitement can turn into Anxiety in a millisecond; like when I was on the fairground and thought I haven’t been on a roller coaster in years; no time like the present! Instead of reminding myself the reason why that was true (that I dislike feeling that out-of-control physically). Grounding myself through coping skills is harder in a public space with hundreds of other people. It took me a few hours, a sour slushie, and some breathing exercises to feel like I was on more solid ground.

When I think back on all of this—and when I think of all the work I did last week—it’s easy to see that I wasn’t in a good place to write about travel. But rather than be ashamed of this fact, I wanted to share it, because it’s a good reminder of the following things:

• Even when you know that slow travel works, sometimes you’ll default to rushing through trips when the pressure is on. Despite my best intentions, I can still get caught up in the excitement of a trip!
• I still struggle with anxiety when I travel, and grounding myself is a muscle I need to keep flexing. When you’ve gone a while without an anxious episode, it can be easy to think of yourself as “cured”—that you’ve grown so much that an anxious episode won’t bother you again. I know now, that’s not true (and I need to keep practicing grounding techniques for when I need them).
• That I can love travel, and still find it difficult. This can be a challenge for me, because I like to be good at things (or maybe, I just hate being bad at things?) and I like to think that the more you practice something, the easier it’ll become. And that’s not always true with travel; every trip is a new chance to learn, or grow…or slip and fall, mental-health-wise.

When I jump to anxious travel, I try to see it as a slip, instead of a failure—a moment when I moved from being a thoughtful traveller into a thoughtless one. If you can slip from one to the other, you can definitely slip back!

But this trip showed me clearly: slow travel isn’t a fad, or something I’ve perfected. It’s something I keep choosing as I travel

It’s the difference between coming home exhilarated…or exhausted.