Post-travel you and the emptiness that follows

I put my backpack on the floor. The birds are starting to chime in a new day, but I’m going to bed. I’m jet lagged, tired but wide awake. My hands feels bigger when I press the door handle and walks into my bedroom. It’s all so familiar. It should be. It’s been my home all my life.

I know where the floor creaks, where the light hits in the morning, what I will find in all the drawers, I know all the secrets of the room. How it feels to slide down the door, exhausted, how it feels sitting on the bed, laughing and chatting with friends visiting. There is a dent in the wall after I missed the nail with a hammer. Now a picture of me in first grade hangs there. I know all the hiding places for my diaries, alcohol and cigarettes where my parents wouldn’t find my stash. But a wall had been put up between me and my room. As I was just visiting a distant memory from my childhood. Looking at the first grade picture is like looking at a picture of a little sister, not a picture of myself. But no, it is me. My journey has ended. I’m home.

But am I really? The past year my home has been in my backpack. It’s been at the tired and cheap hostels, the Asian jungle and on overnight trains and buses. It’s been under the stars. My friends was the strangers on the road. The people going the same way I was. How was I supposed to get back to this? Can you really return home after going away?

I fall into bed and look out from the window I’ve been looking out from the past ten years. I put my bed under the window so many years ago so I could fall asleep watching the stars. I used to dream about the journeys. Getting out from this town, grow and collect memories and adventures like diamonds I could put on a thread. Stash away, frozen in time in pictures hanging on the walls. I had done that. I had truly experienced something that no one would get back home. My mind is now full of all the things I learnt, how I changed and what I experienced. So why did I feel so empty?

Welcome Back to the Rest of Your Life

Post-travel depression. Post-return sadness. The aftermath of the journey of your life. What now? You come home from a journey, changed in many ways. And your life before just doesn’t seem to fit. Because you’re not the same person that once live in this room. Not anymore. Your mind can't cope with you seemingly regressing backwards.

People look for ways to overcome this particular feeling. That restlessness as you sit at school or work when the world is calling your name. How can you take the same morning train when you have become used to wake up a new place every other day? The inner fight when a bus, plane or train to faraway places are passing by and you just want to jump on it. Maybe we should stop looking for ways to overcome it. Maybe we instead should try to look at why we're feeling it. I don’t think the easy answer is the right one. You’re just sad because you’re not experiencing cool adventures as beach life, scuba diving and sightseeing cities every day. It’s too simple. I think there is more.

It’s easy, going away. Running away from it all and reinvent yourself. To pack the bag and travel. The hard part is getting home again. Truly. The worst is that I can’t share my life anymore with the people I left behind. Even if people ask, I just can’t find the words.

“How was your travels? What did you do? What did you see?”

Simple questions, hard answers. I search through my mind. Memories flashing before my eyes. They are at the tip of my tongue. But they don’t travel further. They are enclosed in a time capsule I’m not able to open. To be able to answer those questions, my old friends must become friends with the new me.

“It was great. Did a lot. Saw many cool things.”

Then it dawns on me as they nod to my response, satisfied by my answer. They don’t need more, they’re not really interested. Not in the trivial stuff like selfies of me in front of ancient monuments, not to hear about the people I met. Who can blame them, it's not like you ask about what they've been up to since I left. They have not frozen in time, waiting for my return. They have moved on with there stuff, and so did I.

Going away is a thing I did for myself, even though I loved the people around me so much. There is no regret about it, although I have to accept the birthdays that I missed, the holidays and events I didn't attend. I sit alone in solitude with it, wondering, is this why I feel so empty. My being is spliced of who I was and have become, not able to connect the two completely?

The New Me is Not the Same

The habits of the past are replaced with the newly enforced independence. People suddenly wants to know where I am, when I’m coming home, to eat at a set time, expects me to get into a new routine or maybe even my old one. I can’t deal with that anymore. I hiked alone through the jungle without being obligated to call when I got home safely, surely I can walk five minutes back home? I can’t eat at the given times. Because my stomach is set on a new time. My time. They expect me to be the person I was, but I’m not. The realization of that is probably the hardest one. But also the most important one after a long journey.

I don’t think the post-travel depression is from missing a cool vacation. I think it is a time of mourning. I’m mourning the person I used to be. Looking at the picture from first grade makes me miss that person, but also knowing in my heart that person is dead. Resurrected as the person now standing in front of it. More alive and real than ever. I feel the restlessness hit me. A call from afar. It knows my name. And I want to answer.

So I stand in my old bedroom, looking at the posters of bands I don’t listen to anymore, the books I now don’t like, pictures of friends I have nothing in common with. Pictures of me being a person I no longer know. And the bed under my window is now a prison cell, not my getaway to the stars as it used to. My backpack is in a corner, dirty, worn out and well used. I let my fingers travel across it and feel like home. Every scratch, dent and stain are the diamonds i set out to collect. They are more me than my entire childhood bedroom.

So I start packing. A spark I haven’t felt since I came home ignites. For every item I choose to bring, I put something back. Stripping away my possessions, stripping away the parts of me I no longer need. When I fling the backpack on my back it’s like the empty feeling is filled. How ironic is it to feel the world on my shoulders makes me feel so free, so light?

Because I’m not the same person anymore, and I shouldn’t be. It’s growing pains. It hurts. But that is only to let me know that I’m growing. And calling me to walk out that door to find a home that fits the person I am now.