My Mental Health Journey in Map Pins

I’m getting on an airplane tomorrow to go to Thailand. It’s my first time going to a destination wedding. I’m tremendously excited, but the act of undertaking a long journey makes me introspective.

A decade ago, when I was 21, I broke away from my enmeshed family. My father had a very clear vision for my life; stay under the watchful eye of his security cameras, never move out, never marry, and take care of him in his old age. My father’s desperation for control over me was so extreme that I was homeschooled for eleven years. The strangest part of this was that he insisted I lie to extended family members because “they wouldn’t understand.”

We’d rehearse the lies I’d say about grade school events in the car on the way to see my grandparents. The reminders of “don’t tell them you’re homeschooled” were an everyday thing.

And that’s not even getting into my father’s temper and proclivity for verbal abuse. It took years of therapy for me to even be able to utter the word abuse.

In a lot of ways, when I left Manahawkin, my life started.

Rending my existence from his wasn’t a painless process. The weekend I moved out, my father was so furious about my decision, he wouldn’t even hold a door open for me as I carried my boxes of clothes and books to my new car.

My upbringing was a dire one—we didn’t have stable health insurance for a lot of my childhood. But even though we were so low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, poverty-stricken, stockpiling canned foods to get through winter, I dreamed of seeing the world.

I thought that when I left my father’s house, all of the crippling depression and anxiety I was feeling would evaporate. One of my older online friends did express worry that I wouldn’t escape unscathed. It was such a herculean effort to put a down payment on a car and secretly lease an apartment. I didn’t have the space to consider that my friend might be right.

But despite my mental health struggles, I traded in my two part-time jobs for a single full-time job (yay health insurance!), moved into a nicer apartment, and a year later, started budget traveling.

I left shards of hypervigilant anxiety in Paris and London.

When I travel, I’m eager to be a courteous tourist. I think this is an important part of being a traveler, but I took it a little far in my first international trip in 2017. I walked into a boulangerie right off the Place de la Concorde with my boyfriend. I was so deeply terrified of offending the French. I’d been practicing my bonjour, je voudrais..., and other basic French phrases for weeks before the trip.

But when faced with my first real-life situation to speak French, I froze. A wave of anxiety and genuine social terror swept over me. I couldn’t make a coherent thought. I couldn’t spit out a word of polite English, never mind French.

And… I literally ran out of the boulangerie.

Looking back, it might’ve been a mild panic attack. I went outside and hyperventilated. My boyfriend, kindly, tried to tell me it was okay and that it really wouldn’t be that horrible even if I ordered half in English and half in French.

I left a broken piece of myself who runs away in Amsterdam.

You’d think that previous experience might’ve tipped me off that I had severe, clinical anxiety. It didn’t. I started trying to seek therapy in 2018, but couldn’t quite make it happen because of the hours of my job and some extra complexities of working in a hospital. I was also too mired in my anxiety and afraid my doctor colleagues would judge me for seeking therapy. In reality, I was my own worst enemy.

Managing my anxiety while traveling was a challenge. I kept so busy in my day-to-day life that I found a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with daily anxiety. But on the international stage, my usual fallbacks of hermiting up under a blanket weren’t always possible.

We stayed at the apartment of one of my boyfriend’s close college friends. Seven of us stretched out air mattresses in the apartment’s living room. Seven people sleeping in one room is a terrible idea, but sometimes that’s what budget travel looks like.

I was too hesitant to try Amsterdam’s infamous vices since my father smoked weed when I was a kid ,and I associated it with long winters of him not working but constantly complaining about money. I couldn’t look at a space cake without thinking about my father asking to borrow cash I got from my grandma at Christmas “for groceries” then stopping at his “friend’s house”… who was actually just his dealer.

Even when we travel across the world, we bring our baggage with us.

Two of the friends lost track of time in a mire of marijuana smoke and stayed up until 3am playing video games. I didn’t sleep at all. I was a wreck the next day. I slipped out of the apartment while everyone else was asleep and ran off to cry in various parks in Amsterdam. I wanted to move my flight up since I was so miserable.

My boyfriend (now husband) again, to his credit, sought me out and took me out for a romantic day, just the two of us. He persuaded me to stay for our planned duration and was incredibly understanding of the weight of all those past experiences.

And a side lesson from this trip; I save up for private lodging now.

I left the daughter who missed her mother behind in Venice.

Fast forward to 2022, spurred by the loss of my maternal grandfather and later fraternal grandmother, I finally started going to therapy. My only regret was not starting sooner. I began to understand my depressive tendencies and learned to see my feelings as valid. I always fought my anxiety with logic before this.

Here’s an example of how those early therapy sessions helped me soften my inner critic.

My self-talk of “What the f&$% is wrong with you, you can’t order a freakin’ baguette?” turned into “I was raised getting screamed and cursed at for making the slightest mistake. It’s understandable I’d have a lot of anxiety going into a situation someone else might manage effortlessly. It’s okay. Let’s see if we can move forward from that feeling.”

That summer, I went on a group poetry writing trip in Italy. The trip started in Rome, but I am obsessed with Venice, so I solo-traveled my way there early and spent several days exploring the city of my dreams. I’d read about Venice in books like Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series and had been fantasizing about going since I was a child.

At this point, my life was getting a lot more metropolitan. I was trying to meet up with my grad school advisor since she was going to, coincidentally, be in Venice that same week. I adored her. And I’ll admit it; I fell into that seeing-a-professor-as-a-standin-parent-figure phenomenon. But I didn’t realize that until her flight got delayed, and it seemed like we might not be able to meet up after all. This news devastated me. I felt like curling up and crying, even though I was in Venice.

As I sat at the southern edge of San Marco, I wrote poem after poem about the disproportionate amount of sadness I felt at not being able to meet up with my advisor as planned. I didn’t understand why I was getting so destabilized by this very reasonable change of plans. But I kept meditating on it and realized I was overwhelmed with sadness that was really about missing my own mother.

And that realization helped me connect the mental dots. The sadness was valid. And it was a painful reality I couldn’t change; it was one I had to accept. I wasn’t able to speak to my mother without my father getting involved. No matter when I called her, the call would end up on speaker, and my father would end up berating my life choices. He made it impossible to have a close relationship with my mother. And that was a reality I couldn’t change. I had to find a way to enjoy my life (specifically, in that moment, visiting the beautiful floating city) even if I couldn’t be close to my mom.

I left a girl desperate for public validation behind in Tokyo.

I dreamed of going to Japan since I was seven years old and watched Sailor Moon on Toonami. I finally made it happen in 2023.

But let’s rewind a bit first. My career and grad school plans were in flux in 2018. It brought my depression to a low I hadn’t felt since I still lived with my father. I felt like I couldn’t write anything. I felt like my words were worthless. Deciding I had nothing to lose, I started posting poetry on Instagram.

This became a pursuit I was obsessed with. I threw myself into content strategy, wrote poems almost every day, and tried to package them in visually pleasing ways.

I had some Rupi Kaur aspirational delusions, I’ll admit it. I grew a decent following, took part in some small monetization efforts. Even though the most I made was about $100 a month, for a girl who grew up in poverty, making that much with poetry felt huge.

Amid a lot of those trips I mentioned, I was churning out content like crazy. When I was at home, I was grinding daily content out too. I put hours and hours of effort into trying to do everything right.

The only thing that stopped me from quitting was the sunk cost fallacy.

When we landed in Tokyo in November 2023, I was at the peak of my Instagram-girlie-phase. But I’d been getting exhausted. Crossposting content between Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube was draining all the life out of creative expression.

I wanted to stop. I’d wanted to stop for months. But I put nearly six years into building this platform. How could I just quit?

As we explored Shibuya and I felt like I literally stepped twenty years into the future, I posted tons of stories. I tried to make time to sit down and articulate a long, thoughtful caption. I was usually maxing out the caption length with a thoughtful mini-essay because that was part of my content strategy at the time.

When we went to the beautiful mountains of Nikko, cell reception got spotty. Somewhere during a three-hour hike, as I tried to post beautiful stories and a cute selfie or two, that internal resistance grew. My resentment of going to all this trouble for a platform that didn’t bring me creative fulfillment came to a head.

And then it was like a switch in me flipped. It became clear to me that this endeavor that I’d been chasing for most of my 20s just wasn’t working for me. I called it an Instagram hiatus, but it’s been two years now. My relationship to social media has completely changed and I don’t miss my loose justification for hours of scrolling. I don’t miss the endless content production and video editing.

I spent the next two weeks in Japan in absolute, social-media-free bliss.

Travel puts us in a pressure cooker that can prompt us to grow in spontaneous but profound ways.

My earliest struggle with depression and anxiety was my denial of them. Even once I came to terms with the fact that I needed help, I needed therapy, I still get frustrated when I’m overwhelmed by my emotions.

While I’ve focused on the harder emotional realizations I’ve had, there have also been moments of purely blissful discoveries. I did a low-residency MFA in Paris over the past two years. I’d go to Paris twice a year. But I was also going there alone. And while that was stressful at first, being alone in Paris gave me all this time to realize what I do when I’m released from everyone’s expectations. I love starting a day in a foreign city by going to a coffee shop and just writing in my notebook for an hour or two. I love going to bookstores and browsing the shelves for as many hours as I please. I love visiting every stationery shop I can find and choosing the notebook of that city.

(I also got so good at ordering things in French that if I were asked follow-up questions on my coffee order, I could say oui, lait entier. Give me the cow in my cappuccino, thank you very much.)

The important thing is being open to the experience of being in a different place.

I’ve left little pieces of myself behind in cities across the world. Will I end up making any discoveries about myself in Chiang Mai and Bangkok? It’s hard to say. I’ve also had lots of trips where I didn’t make profound realizations. I’ve visited Berlin, Madrid, Porto, and others. I loved them, but I didn’t walk away with any of those revelations. And that’s okay.

Self-discovery isn’t going to magically happen every trip. But if the stars align, I try to make myself open to paying attention to what’s going on around me and what’s happening in my head. Then I take the time to write about it, detangle the emotional web. And I believe it’s the best thing I can do for my own well-being and for my loved ones who’ve stuck with me despite all these trials over the years.