I took a break from blogging last week, and I felt guilty about that. On a trip last weekend, I realised too late that I’d ignored a lot of advice that I try to live by in place of excitement, and it completely backfired. I forgot the most basic rule of slow travel—to travel thoughtfully and intentionally—and 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 bar. 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.

Then there was the week that followed, where I felt like I couldn’t 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. And I don’t list them all as an apology for not posting; but rather, as 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; to walk further into the woods, to be more adventurous with food, to say yes to everything a new place might offer. When I get somewhere new I get excited, and that excitement leads to enthusiasm—it makes me say yes to everything I can.

The dark side of saying yes to everything, though, is getting so caught up in that excitement that I say yes to things without thinking, and that gets me in trouble. 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 that 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). And that the number of coping skills I have to ground myself becomes limited in a physical 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.