Six Months Abroad- What in the World am I Doing Here?

It’s been essentially six months since I left the U.S. to travel abroad for the first time (for real travel, not Cabo or Cancun) and then embark on Remote Year. Currently I am sitting in my two bedroom apartment in Ha Noi, Vietnam with my shades pulled shut over the extremely strange windows in my room that look into my own hallway and someone else’s living room instead of the outdoors.

The constant stream of honks and beeps from outside doesn’t even phase me anymore. What does phase me is the rat that has taken shelter in the walls above my bed, pitter pattering away throughout the night. It’s Sunday, almost 9 pm, and technically I am on the clock, but in the middle of my shift I find myself losing it with an overwhelming sensation of what the hell am I doing here?

In six months I have been to over 15 countries, on three different continents, and I have lived in 5 of these for a month each and some change. My camera roll evokes dread; filled with over 12,000 unbelievable images of beautiful places and events that happened only a few days ago yet feel like an eternity ago. I can’t even begin to sift through them without getting overwhelmed at all the things I’ve seen and done and I’m not even half-way through this year.

My computer keeps letting me know I haven’t updated it in over 170 days. My extremely sensitive, eczema prone skin is constantly red and blotchy due to the foreign products I keep putting on it but trying to use google translate at a pharmacy ends up taking hours I don’t have, so I just hope my body fixes itself. I have so many mosquito bites sometimes I look down and think that red welt growing out of my skin is a tumor. My two pairs of pants have fallen apart, the cork in my Birkenstocks has almost crumbled and I’m unsure where to replace any of these items in Vietnam.

I’m beyond privileged to be living this experience. My instagram is a never ending sea of beautiful backdrops and big smiles. I understand how ridiculous it is to be in a position where I just jet off on a day trip, or to an island, or down the coast on a Monday because I feel like it. My friends and family often message in saying how jealous they are or how beautiful or fun or amazing my latest adventure looked liked. Yes, it’s all true, it was amazing, it was beautiful, it is freaking cool.

Another reality, however, is this: I have never been so tired in my life. Every time my phone goes off with a message from someone that I love only reminds me of how freaking far away I am and how overwhelming that actually is. Most of my inbox is left on read and every time I try to carve out a time to catch up with my loved ones, who are now 15 hours in the past, it without fail falls through because I find myself swept up on another adventure, or once again surrounded with one or ten of the 33 people I’m traveling, working and living with and then days turn into weeks turn into months and I still haven’t called. The guilt is almost as large as the literal distance between us.

For every amazing and beautiful pro to this adventure there is a con. Some are insignificant, and I like to refer to these things as trade offs. Yeah I might miss target, or convenience, or hearing my own language or being able to get beauty products that make sense and won’t bleach my skin, or breathing clean air, or using a toilet where you can actually flush your toilet paper, or being able to drink the water.

But who cares because we’re camping in the Sahara, seeing UNESCO sites every week, seeing corners of the earth we always dreamed of and we can literally walk out of our apartment at any given moment and see something new and mind baffling in a country that is everything and nothing like we dreamed of. But some things are not simple trade offs or perspective shifts- some cons are so painful it’s hard to sit with them.

One of those cons is the overwhelming sensation of the further I get from home, the more and more I feel like I can never return to anything I knew before and that that life and those people that gave me such a sense of security are further away than ever, and I will never just be able to live the same life I lived before after seeing what I’ve been seeing.

The longer I’m away the more I drift from my past reality and the more I can’t understand it. Dramatic? Maybe, but it feels truer than I’d like to admit. The wall between our lives feels enormous. The routine of my past 8-6 job, weekly happy hours and Netflix binges feels unfathomable. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t also sound really appealing sometimes.

Another con is feeling this sense of apathy at the beauty and wonders your seeing. You start to get numb. Things feel ridiculously normal. If you had told me a year ago I’d say that living in Vietnam felt like no big deal at all, or that walking in front of hoards of oncoming traffic multiple times a day because it’s that or never cross a street again, wouldn’t even cause me to blink and that chilling on a beach in Da Nang would feel as comfortable as one in South Florida, I would have called you crazy. But it does. And with that comes this weird sense of apathy that I never wanted to feel.

You want every moment to feel mind blowing, present and special and then suddenly it doesn’t. It just feels like your life. And in your normal life you get tired. You get depressed. You get lonely. You get sick. You work. You sleep. You eat. You love. You isolate. You party. But when you’re living in the literal future from everyone and everything you knew, and no one around you looks like you or talks like you, they even stare at you like you’re an alien, because well, you are, and the lows start to hit-  it can feel that much more heightened.

The danger with this nomadic lifestyle is how glorified it is. It looks beautiful because it obviously is. There are no words to describe the things you can see, and the amount you can accomplish each week. I do more now than I’ve ever done and there is this amazing maximization of time and energy that comes from living in a foreign country. Every day that I’m done with work I’m excited to see something else. But sometimes…I’m not. And when I’m not, the guilt is ten fold. “But you signed up to travel all year…you can’t sit inside, you need to seize the day.” No human can seize the day 24/7, but I still can’t seem to realize that there is a breaking point and I keep ignoring it.

Due to the beauty and the excitement, there is also this unspoken agreement for us to just not acknowledge the hardships. If I say I’m having a bad day, people say, “well at least you’re traveling the world.” Suddenly you’re not allowed to have a human experience in a very humbling reality and you feel that much more alienated from all your trusted confidantes. How do you complain and get sad without feeling like the most spoiled person ever? How does one possibly be negative when their given an opportunity like this? So you don’t.

The reality of language barriers, breathing in burning trash on the sidewalk you’re walking on, food poisoning with no idea how to get to a doctor, chemicals and ingredients you’ve never been exposed to, sitting endlessly on trains, planes, automobiles, and this overwhelming sense of loneliness, don’t translate on social media.

There’s also this underlying current of anxiety when hanging out with your fellow expats. You know they are starting to become overwhelmed but you’re both just trying to stay positive. Or you see some people apparently not struggling at all and think, what am I doing wrong? Most of us don’t know where we’re going after this, which is liberating and exciting. But it’s also the biggest source of my anxiety- what the hell happens after this? I just jumped ship for a year and what will I have to show for it? Where will I go? Who will I be with? Who do I turn to?

How do you stay present on your travels and experiences when the voice in the back of your head is constantly reminding you that the end is inevitable and this “reality” will approach and you have no plan? How about when you realize you have no desire to rejoin “reality” but that would mean leaving your friends and family indefinitely and how do you cope with the loneliness? How do you find a remote job that’s actually fulfilling not something to pay the bills? How do you contribute to society when you’re no longer a part of any particular one?

I try to ignore this, in the name of staying present to my travels, but going non-stop isn’t presence. This week I haven’t been able to write, to sit down without this enormous sense of restlessness. Silence is so foreign to me I’m losing my ability to sit still and think. I did a little reflecting and realized I haven’t had more than two hours by myself in over two weeks. I’m constantly on the go, checking things off as if I’m in some sort of competition of how much one can accomplish in a day, how many people I can see, and how many things I can do.

I had expectations this year of what I would accomplish- how I would blog constantly, finish a novel, freelance, accomplish, accomplish, accomplish. Yet I realized very quickly that I would have to throw all my expectations out of the window.

Traveling in itself is a full time job, it takes over the body, mind, soul and it certainly takes up your time. But the flip side of that is the things this experience has really taught me.

Things have never made more sense to me. I feel this sense of ease navigating through my travels, my days, my connections. My relationship to my body has never been more solid- I’ve discovered a love of food and freedom with it that I was never able to find in the U.S., always struggling with guilt and shame and starvation. The culture around food abroad is so different from home- it’s joyous, and appreciative and meant to be shared and enjoyed with friends.

Long luxorious dinners, stress free lunches filled with conversation. The cafe culture is incredible. I find myself sitting down at the table and too excited and fascinated by the dishes I’m experiencing and the people at my side then to be analyzing calories, and labels. I walk everywhere, with no car and walking being the best form of sight seeing. I appreciate the way I move and see and feel in the world now.

I understand how much community means to me now, how much I love group dynamics and traveling with people from all over the world, with different cultures, and making connections. My current inner circle consists of a South African, an Australia, a Canadian, an LA lady and a New Yorker and many more, and trust me- we NEVER would have met in this life time if we didn’t all embark on this journey. It humbles me to realize how many more people I will meet, love and befriend that staying at home would have never afforded me.

I may not have more than a suitcase to call my home, which I have to repack every 28-35 days. I may not know what the hell I am doing. I may be burnt out right now. I may get sick, I may lose things or get stranded somewhere, get lost or want nothing more than to run home to my parents for a weekend yet knowing that the 30+ hour flight and jet lag would make that impossible- but I’m still so madly in love with life. I still know that whatever happens I’m going to be okay.

I’ve gained this incredible sense of empowerment from navigating 15 foreign countries with different currencies, languages, and geography and actually figuring it out and being just fine. The confidence and peace you get when you realize that you will be ok in any situation is invaluable and has solidified this knowing that no matter where I end up I’ll make it work because I have me and and I am more capable and adaptable than I ever imagined.

Traveling is everything and nothing like it looks and sounds like. It is as beautiful as the images you see. Those people probably are as excited and happy as they look in those photos- at that time. But for every beautiful image and instagram story you see there are a million other moments that are not documented that are hard, and lonely, and scary, and tough.

No matter where you go in the world, people are people. They are living and loving and laughing and working and freaking out just like everybody else. It doesn’t matter if you’re country hopping every week or sitting in a cubicle, or working in the rice fields till sunset in Vietnam, or selling olives in the Medina in Morocco, or making coffee in a cafe in Prague- our fears and struggles are all still there. We’re still there, having the same human experience. And I think that’s beautiful.