Wherever You Go

Sooo, where even to start? I came out the gate several months ago with a promise of publishing two companion pieces within weeks of each other. I published the first part (How it Started…How it’s Going, Part One), and I was working on part two, but then Omicron became a thing, suddenly the world outside of New Zealand seemed to be caring about Covid again, things within New Zealand took on a more disturbing tone, and I had to begin to rework that piece to fit the circumstances. So that piece is still coming, but it’s on hold at the moment, because my life got flipped-turned upside down (is a Will Smith reference appropriate now, even if it does reach back to the Fresh Prince days?), and so much has happened that I barely even know where to start. So, yes, here I am again, apologizing for the delay, again, but maybe when you learn a little more about what I’ve been up to, you’ll think the delay is justified (or maybe not). This post was a beast to write, so maybe cut me a little slack.

Everywhere you go, you take yourself with you. It’s a cliché, sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. I used to believe that it wasn’t, that if you only went far enough, you could escape whatever troubled you, but after almost three years of travel, including almost two years in one of the most remote countries on the globe, I have yet to find this possible.

I discovered pretty early on in my current journey that I have the ability to be devastatingly sad and anxious anywhere. Swinging my feet in the Adige River in Verona, hanging out the huge shuttered window of my b&b above the bustling main street in Bologna, strolling along the Danube Promenade in Budapest with the sun kaleidoscoping off the water, dining under the acropolis in Athens, hiking Rangitoto in New Zealand with the open ocean spread out before me, looking out over the Sydney Harbor as speedboats full of noisy day partiers glide by and the opera house shimmers in the afternoon light—no matter how exotic or beautiful my surroundings (and damn, doesn’t all this sound so ridiculously, obnoxiously glam?), my ability to feel utterly overwhelmed and crushed by my own emotions remains unparalleled, and, somewhat depressingly, not all that dramatically evolved from my early years.

My talent for this is truly remarkable; “emotional puddling,” I call it, and it can be triggered from something as mild as an argument or a misunderstanding or a Facebook post about homeless animals to something as extreme as a separation, and it drains the color and the life out of everything. (It’s like that Skeeter Davis song—“Why do the birds go on singing?” she asks. “Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?”  Right on, sister.)

If you’ve read some of my earlier posts, then this should hardly be a surprise. I’ve been pretty open about a lot of my anxieties and emotional struggles. But I don’t know that I’ve really expressed just how debilitating it can be at times, just how all-encompassing.

I think it’s often considered uncool to share this. Why am I not just posting gorgeous, the-hashtags-write-themselves photos and telling everyone how they, too, can live like a glamorous vagabond? Why am I not trumpeting that the world is my oyster and travel is the cure for what ails me, and why am I not selling it as an elixir for the masses? And hey, I do yoga, and I meditate, and I believe in the value of mindfulness, so why aren’t I expertly captaining my ship and skillfully navigating my emotions and going about my life in a perpetual state of zen-like bliss, being the poised and graceful calm in the center of my own storm? That’s what countless articles and blog posts (not mine) and Instagram captions and dime-a-dozen “life coaches” have promised me would happen. (I should note here that I do think all of these things—yoga, meditation, mindfulness—are powerful tools, but they are only part of a toolbox; you can’t rely only on one or all of these things to deliver the goods, so to speak, though there are plenty of people out there who like to believe otherwise.) Am I doing this nomad thing all wrong?

I went to the bookstore once when I was a teenager (hardly an uncommon occurrence; I’ve been living half my life in books ever since I can remember), browsing for a title or a cover that might catch my eye, and the one that did was The Beach by Alex Garland. This was way before the middling-to-terrible film with a horribly miscast Leonardo DiCaprio (for the love of god, if you haven’t read the book, please don’t think the film is a faithful adaptation), and also way before the internet was really a thing, so I really had no idea what to expect, but the cover was cool and the blurbs on the back seemed promising (“a Lord of the Flies for Generation X,” raved High Fidelity author Nick Hornby), so I took it home and began to read. I was hooked from the first line (“Vietnam, me love you long time,” for anyone who is curious; many who know me would understand why such an opening would ensnare me), and I stayed up all night to finish it. 

I was still in high school, I already had an imagination prone to drama and romance, I felt stifled and claustrophobic in my home and in my town, my emotional world was shambolic and often overwhelming, and I found the idea of backpacking in faraway, exotic locales almost impossibly glamourous and dizzyingly promising. The freedom, the adventure, the more or less constant guarantee of something new around every corner… Sure, the book ends (spoiler alert!) in brutality and disillusionment, and the book itself doesn’t necessarily paint a glowing portrait of “travelers” (as opposed to tourists…if there’s a difference), and you could argue that the entire point is that some tranquil paradise doesn’t exist anywhere out there in the world, but I didn’t want to dwell on that.

No, as I scribbled my feverish post-reading thoughts in my journal, I wanted to dwell instead on the glittering lure of escape through travel. I wanted to believe that you could get on a plane and watch your problems fall away as surely as you watched your plane crawl across its flight path in your in-seat console, that emotional burdens were left on the tarmac at take off, that peace could be found on a white sand beach somewhere, that transporting yourself to a different place meant that you yourself were somehow made different.

I was hardly alone in this kind of thinking; there’s a reason why the concepts of “vacation” and “holiday” are so popular. Umbrella drinks on a lounger by a pool somewhere, that Corona ad with the pristine sand and the sound of the waves, sleeping in and breakfast in bed and swimsuits as daywear—almost everyone, at some point, has some vision of a getaway in which they get to put down their problems and put on some alternate persona. A persona without problems, worries, or responsibilities. The word “vacation” even has its root in the Latin verb that means “to empty.” Turn on and tune in to your new environment; drop out of whatever aspects of your life or your person you find undesirable.

And it works. At first. There are logistics to sort out (who has the time or bandwidth to worry about personal problems when you’re trying to figure out entry requirements for your destination of choice?), there’s the initial shock and awe of something new, the momentary thrill of your world expanding. For some people, their entire vacation really can be an escape, because it doesn’t last long enough for reality to set in. When you’re in it for the long haul, it’s a different story. You will always catch up with yourself; you can’t outrun or escape what’s inside you, because however much you might want to believe that you don’t have to carry it with you, that you can put it down and send it off like baggage at the check-in counter, it’s just not that simple.

I’m writing this post from Ubud, Bali (I told you that a lot has happened; I have a lot to fill you in on in subsequent posts), a place that I first visited in 2019 and to which I’ve longed to return ever since. It’s hot and sunny, and I’m typing this while sitting cross-legged on cushions beneath a bamboo thatched roof. Fans revolve lazily above me, and an occasional breeze wafts in from the sides of the structure, which are open to the air. My view is of palm trees and blue sky and huge broad-leafed tropical plants that rustle and sigh in the breeze, of bright starbursts of flowers and green jungly canopies. I can smell the incense from Canang Sari (the daily offerings) and hear the gentle burbling of a nearby stream, and tropical birds occasionally flit by. I’m sure it sounds idyllic (well, to many people, anyway), and if I were to take a photo, chances are that most people would find it almost custom made for a wanderlust hashtag on Instagram. Like, how could someone be sad here? How could someone be anxious? How could you have any problems, or any pain?

And I can’t lie—I’m still charmed by Ubud. From its picturesque rice fields to its historic carved temples, from its ever-present geckos (I love them so much and am forever talking to them as though we are friends and they understand me; “hey, guy!” I greet each and every one to grace the walls in or outside of my bedroom) to its spectacular sunsets, from its river waters to its lush jungle, from its amazing food to its broken sidewalks, motorbike exhaust, aggressive monkeys, and neon-lit minimarts—it still dazzles. Superficially.

Now, I’m very much aware that there are people that would give a lot to trade places with me, particularly two years into a seemingly never-ending pandemic, when travel is often still complicated and onerous and nowhere near back to normal, and I’m not so oblivious and self-absorbed as to be without gratitude for being here.

A theme that runs through all my posts is that I know how very privileged I am. I so often feel guilty and self-centered when I reference my own struggles, because in a world where people are being bombed, losing their homes, suffering from disease and illness and starvation, and often quite literally facing the end of the world as they know it, then how are my own issues all that dire? Here in Bali, where the pandemic has dealt a devastating economic blow to the Balinese people, where real poverty is often right up in your face, where I feel my heart break every time someone tries to sell me something or pleads for money, such a question feels particularly acute. 

At the same time, I’ve always hated the term “first world problems,” because too often it’s used  to imply that pain has some required threshold, that things like mental health and emotional wellbeing are frivolous, that people just need to suck it up and keep that stiff upper lip and remember that there are people out there who have it a whole lot worse, so buck up, little camper. It’s a phrase that’s often used to shame people who are experiencing a great deal of very real pain and turmoil and distress, and it’s hardly helpful. 

This is not to say that I don’t think that there are frivolous “first world problems;” I feel pretty convinced, for example, that people who are frothing with rage over the infringement on their “freedom” because they’ve been asked to do something like wear a mask have a skewed perception of what qualifies as an actual problem versus an inconvenience. So it’s complicated, and I’m often far less understanding and compassionate towards myself than towards others, but to pretend that that tension isn’t part of my experience would be disingenuous.

So, here I am. For over two years, I’ve wanted to return to Bali, and now I’m here, and I’ve got a lot more going for me than many people in the world, and in many ways it’s an exotic holiday paradise where people come to get away from it all, so shouldn’t it all be fan-fucking-tastic? It turns out, not so much.

I’m not going to go into all of the reasons why my current time in Ubud has been largely spent in the aforementioned emotional puddling (it’s a long story, and one that really deserves multiple posts), but to say that I have been struggling would be a pretty vast understatement. Tears rolling down my face in a yin yoga class (“think less, feel more,” instructs the teacher, who does, in fact, seem to have succeeded in becoming the calm and unflinching center of whatever his own personal storm is, and I want to tell him that feeling more is hardly the challenge for me); wandering down a backstreet in the brilliant white sunshine, temples and rice fields and rich green jungle off to my sides, but not seeing—I mean, really seeing—any of it, all of it instead running together into a blurry muddled mess; returning to my favorite guesthouse and instead of being elated to be back, feeling distressed about the difference between my happy memories there from my first trip vs my current state.

Yes, I have moments of happiness and contentment here, but so far they’ve been pretty fleeting, and mostly I just feel flat and grey at best and, at worst, like I want to claw my heart out because it hurts too damn much (wanting to feel nothing has been a secret desire since I can remember, and I spent a not insignificant amount of time in my early adulthood cultivating the outward appearance of succeeding; I suspect it would actually be awful and I would immediately want to retract my wish if it were granted, but when I’m deep in the throes of some emotional meltdown, damn if it doesn’t sound like the best thing ever—talk about a vacation). 

I understand, objectively, that emotions are not things that just happen to me, that they are not all-powerful gods to whom I must submit. I understand, objectively, that there are many powerful ways to work with your emotions, to work through them, to process them with skill. But (I love a good “but,” don’t you?) that’s not always how it feels. No. Instead, I often feel like my own body isn’t big enough to contain all the emotional energy charging through it. It’s like an appliance that’s been plugged into an outlet with the wrong voltage capacity—everything short circuits and starts to go haywire. When I wake up in the morning with a knot already formed in my stomach and I have to run to the bathroom to throw up, when I’m plagued by bad dreams that have me getting only a couple of hours of sleep in a night, when a panic attack blots out my vision and my heart rate soars and my arms and legs literally go numb, it for sure doesn’t feel like it’s all in my control.

And while, believe it or not, I’m actually much better at handling my emotions than I used to be (!!!), and while I’ve gone to therapy and have participated in various activities designed to assist with healing and self-soothing and emotional processing, there’s still clearly a lot of work for me to do. But since that’s hard and painful, the desire to believe in some sort of magic balm, some sort of cheat code or hack that will erase all my troubles is pretty tempting. And even after all my experiences over the past three years, apparently there’s a part of me that still wants to believe that travel can be it, despite learning the same lesson—that it isn’t—over and over.

On balance, of course, my travels have been amazing, and I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything. I’ve seen and done things I once could only ever dream of, and I have expanded my world, both literally and figuratively, and I’ve proven to myself time and again that I’m stronger and more capable than I believed myself to be. I don’t want to sound like I’ve been suffering profound emotional disturbances 24-7 for the past almost three years. Reading back through this post, I feel some concern that it paints a misleading picture, that it may sound as though I’m saying that I have been wallowing around in a constant state of intense panic and despair throughout my time out of the United States. These moments of puddling—typically they last a day or two, sometimes less (though there was a period early in 2021 where things got pretty dark). It’s only in recent weeks where the puddling has been more constant, and there are many, many reasons for it, some of which I’ve discussed in previous posts, and some of which are new, and as I said, it’s a long story that I’ll tell over a series of future posts.

I don’t have some grand conclusion to this post, where I make some sort of sweeping pronouncement and impart some special wisdom. And I don’t want anyone reading this to get the idea that I’m disparaging travel. What I’m saying is that despite all the influencers and the slick travel mags and the Instagram photos and the live-laugh-love-good-vibes-only attitudes, the story that’s being told—and the image that’s being sold—is only half of the overall picture. Bali in particular can be a haven for people who indulge in magical thinking and are queuing up for a ride on the Spiritual Bypass Express, and there’s a lot of pretending (and pretenders) out there (and lest anyone think that I’m throwing stones from inside my glass house, I know that I am not some paragon of self-awareness and that I still have a lot of blind spots). 

Next time you see that perfectly filtered photo of someone Natarajasana-ing on a beautiful beach somewhere, or sipping from a cocktail while the sunset unspools flawlessly behind them, I invite you to consider that what you’re seeing is still only two-dimensional. There’s a lot more there that’s hidden, and no, that person did not just pack their bags one day and plane-hop or road trip their troubles away. There’s baggage you carry with you, and there’s baggage you carry within you, and the latter isn’t something you can just put down because it exceeded the weight limit.

I still believe in the power of travel. Hell, I still love The Beach, though for different reasons than I did as a teenager. (I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it; again, don’t let the movie, which bears almost no resemblance to the novel, put you off.) I just know that the power of travel isn’t in escape, no matter what anyone tries to tell you. It really does turn out that everywhere you go, you take yourself.