Lessons on self sabotaging
I'm back from eating, praying, and loving my way through Europe!
Hello dear friends!
I’m once again sitting at my red writers desk back home in California, nursing a cup of ginger herbal tea while I try to corral all the swirling chaos in my brain into somewhat cohesive sentences.
It’s been about 3 weeks since I returned from my European tour-de-France where I trekked my way through 12 cities and 7 countries over the span of two and a half-ish months. I’d never traveled to Europe before this, and to say that I had culture shock would be the understatement of the century.
No day was like the last and no city resembled the previous; at one point I was crushing through 2 new cities per week, booking every walking tour I could find and browsing through museum after museum, clumsily navigating through euro transit trying as I might to not look like every other clueless tourist (usually a massive fail).
Every day I put on a brave face and stepped into foreign territory, armed with my thrifted leather knapsack that held a paperback book for distraction and a mini travel journal for venting. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.
If I’m being honest, my travels went by in a blur. I was in Scotland, and then I was in Germany, and somehow I ended up in Spain running solely off a diet of sangria and tapas. If I hadn’t journaled every day out of loneliness and a clairvoyant hunch that I’d forget everything from my journeys due to my piss poor memory, I probably couldn’t even tell you what I did for my nearly three months across the Atlantic.
But if I’m being really honest, I hate myself for uprooting my life for those months of non-stop change. And while 2 and a half months isn’t a long time, especially when you’re speaking in summer terms, I have never felt more ungrounded and just overall distressed than I did during my travels.
Yes, dear reader, I know you’re groaning! Poor Denise, being subjected to the rich sights and cultures of Europe, how terrible! Eating delicious food and perusing beautiful museums, it all sounds just monstrous!
And while I did skip out on the dog days of summer in northern California where a cold July fog dominates the skies, I also missed the opportunity to celebrate birthdays and life events with my loved ones. I dodged the forest fires and low air quality, but my usual invites from friends to off-grid camping trips never reached my inbox. I bid adieu to my beat-up local gym that never had more than 2 working bathroom stalls, but how I longed for how crisp and level-headed I felt after a good workout session with my favorite gym pals.
Prior to my travels, I felt like I had finally found a good balance of life and a solid foundation of relationships after nurturing my newly grounded Californian roots for a year. So naturally it took only 2 months of exhausting travel—and a really, really lonely week in Spain—to make me realize that I had made a huge mistake in embarking on this extensive, nomadic voyage.
I sat alone on a beach in Barcelona, thousands of miles away from familiarity and my loved ones’ comfort, trying to figure out how I let myself wander this far.
Floating through so many different cultures and customs in Europe allowed me to absorb all the best parts of my destinations and question all the worst parts of myself.
Why do I always feel the need to leave when I start to feel comfortable? Why do I drag the dead weight of certain friendships and relationships? Why do I always take things to an extremely unsustainable level? It took almost three months of lugging myself through a foreign continent for all the answers to finally come to me in one euphoric dose.
And it was when those answers came that I realized I needed to cancel my trip early and return back home.