By now, most of my readers have figured out that I travel a lot, that I’m planning on continuing to travel a lot, and that more often than not, I travel alone.  I’m pretty experienced at traveling, and I’ve more or less got my rhythm down.  What would surprise most of you, I think, is that I suffer from fairly strong travel anxiety. Utterly pointless, illogical, irrational, but still very powerful. In my head, it’s kind of like this:

Gut: We’re gonna miss the train!
Brain: Relax. We have seven whole minutes to walk from platform four to platform eight. We could moonwalk  there and still make it.
Gut: But what if this train is EIGHT minutes late to the connecting station?
Brain: Then we take another train. There’s another train going to the same place twenty-five minutes later.
Gut: WE’RE GONNA MISS THE TRAIN!
Brain: ::sigh::

…and so on.

When I’m traveling, I get into a partial flight or fight mode.  My heart beats faster than normal even if I get to the train station or airport with hours to spare.  If I have imbibed more than a tablespoon of water, you can bet I’ll be in the bathroom repeatedly. (I joke that I’m just following Imperial protocol, dumping all of my garbage before I make the jump to light speed.)  I’m always worried that I’ve left something behind or forgotten to lock my apartment door.  I can’t fall asleep on planes or trains either; I’m usually too wired.

My brain knows that I can handle anything that might come up-  there’s always another way to get to where I’m going.  I’ve never been truly lost, or truly stranded.    Even when my flights got buggered up last March and I was stuck in Frankfurt for an extra night, I was able to find a hotel with Jenny’s assistance from her computer back in Regensburg.  I’m not even all that bothered by airplane turbulence.

Every problem I’ve ever encountered while traveling has been solvable and none of it was really all that bad.

…Gut: But we’re gonna miss the plane!

Do you suffer from (or enjoy) any travel anxiety?  How do you handle it?

I sleep better in hotel beds.

When I’m in my own apartment, my brain never quite shuts off.  It’s partly FOMO, I think.  Until a year ago, I’d never heard of FOMO-  Fear of Missing Out.  It’s a type of social anxiety, a compulsion and a fear that you might miss something cool happening.  Fear of missing out is why I never fall asleep before midnight, and rarely before one in the morning.    Part of my need to travel is FOMO, I suppose,  but it’s also a variety of some other things that I can’t quite put a name to.   When I’m at home, I never settle in.  I rarely sleep very deeply.  I never wake up refreshed.

In hotels, though, I sleep better.  I think it’s partly that when I’m traveling, my mind shuts off-  I see entire cities in a single day or a weekend.  I walk the breadth of a city,  traverse courtyards, climb up church spires.   I run until I’m exhausted.  I wear myself out, and then I can sleep.   Then I can breathe.

In my early twenties, a girl I dated saw this trait in me.  Even then, I had the wanderlust, the need to keep moving.  Even when I was stuck in South Florida with no passport and no money to speak of,  she saw that I was discontent.  When she called me out on it with her typically insightful way, she referenced a single line from an Alanis Morissette song:  “Why are you so petrified of silence?”

It was an excellent question then, and it’s an excellent question now.  I think that maybe I like Adventure Steven far more than I like the silent version of myself that visits whenever I’m at home for a long time.  Living on a continent that isn’t your own is a distinctively lonely experience.   Sure, I visit with my friends here-  we share meals, or go to the pub.  That covers a few hours, or an evening.  Then I go back home, play around on the computer, chat online, watch far too much Netflix, and fail utterly to fall asleep.  The loneliness and isolation sets up a lively card game with the discontented restlessness, while boredom puts some good tunes on the record player.  Mild insomnia tends bar.

I’m still lonely when I travel to new cities, but I feel it so, so much less when I’m in motion.

I can always breathe a little bit easier when I’m in motion.  I sleep better when I’m on the road.

That’s why I travel.  That’s why I run.

This post might offend a few people, but this has been grinding my gears for a while.

Whenever I talk to people back in the US about the stuff I’ve done here, the places I’ve gone, the things I’ve seen, and the train rides to nearby cities and countries, a lot of them say, “you’re so lucky!”

I immediately want to stab them in the ear with a ball point pen.  It’s not luck.

It’s not luck that got me to agree to sign two contracts, one in German and one in English, to stay here for three years. Luck had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision to pause my entire life back home for a then-uncertain time-frame while I came over here and did my company’s bidding. Luck didn’t get me to store my stuff, sell my car, and completely uproot my entire universe for a span of years.

Luck has nothing to do with missing three years of the lives of my family and friends.  My newest niece will be four years old a month after I return.  That’s 75% of her life so far.   My parents are both in their 70s, with various competing health issues.  My father has multiple myeloma in remission- he’s healthy right now, but there’s really no cure.  I wonder often how much time I really have left with him, and I worry that I’m squandering it by living over here.

My friends back in the States have found significant others, moved in with one another, changed jobs, changed homes, moved between cities-  time kicks along without me in it, and by the time I get back, the world I left will be irrevocably changed.

That ain’t luck, and it pisses me off immensely when people think it is.

I was talking recently with a local friend about all the travel that I do, and it became clear that she doesn’t travel. Not to the things that are just a few hours away, like Neuschwanstein or the Zugspitze. Not to slightly further places like London or Paris.

I asked if she wants to see those places, and she said “of course.” I asked why she hadn’t, and she was immediately full of rationalization- she always has boyfriends who don’t like to travel, for example.

My perspective is this: If you want to travel, you will travel. 

If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way to make it happen.

For years, I waited for the right combination of money, free time, and a good travel buddy. As I worked my way up in the company, my vacation time increased and time stopped being a problem. Then my salary got better, and suddenly I could afford to go places if I wanted to.  I just had the lingering problem of needing a travel partner. I got my passport in 2006, thinking that I would be able to go to London soon. I just needed someone to travel with.

I wanted to see the city of London with someone I loved.

2006 became 2008, and my girlfriend at the time wanted to go with me.  The timing was bad though.  She had just started a new job, and she couldn’t take that sort of time off.  She and I managed to take a few trips within the US, but we never left the country together.

If you look for a reason not to go, you will always find one.

Eventually, I figured out that if I wait around for a travel partner, I won’t ever go anywhere. I’m glad I realized that before I moved to Germany, because I’ve been to fourteen countries now, and I traveled to most of them entirely on my own.

If you really want to travel, you’ll travel.

Luck has nothing to do with it.

Do you want to travel?