When love for travel hides something else.

You will read it in: 2 mins
You will learn about: motivation, self-exploration, loving yourself

Every time, I am on a new project at work, we are all encouraged to share a fun fact about ourselves. Guess, how many times, I have said or heard others saying that an interesting detail about them is that they like to.. travel. You guessed it right! While there is nothing sinful to like traveling, I am curious to explore the motivation behind traveling and traveling on a frequent basis. Can people have a fear of not-traveling?

I travel because I am bored

In a pre-pandemic world, we could hop on the plane, be somewhere completely different in less than 3 hours, then have a brilliant lunch with an endearing stranger, come back the next day and it would all cost us less than £100. Sounds crazy, right? Exiting. Spontaneous. Maybe even seductive a bit. Well, anything but boring.

I think that some of us (even me at times), would travel to escape the routine. If at any given moment I did not know how to bring excitement to my current daily mundane life, I would choose something that I wouldn’t need to think twice about and which would bring me join in a guaranteed fashion - traveling. New places, new people, new experiences, new me.. Me who is more interesting, different, full of life. You can see the allure.

However, there is a huge threat lurking in this remedy. Firstly, I would delay the moment when I need to face the real issue, when I need to face what is bothering me or my dull life (special thanks goes to my fears for that image), which is me.

Even if I go to the most beautiful beaches of Maldives or be among snowy tree tops in Lapland, I would still have this annoying companion with me - me with all this emotional baggage.

Now image delaying facing the issue of not living the fulfilling life on a daily basis and masking it with traveling. Imagine how big this emotional baggage would be and imagine the frequency of traveling that I would need to increase in order not to see it. This is really crazy. But not uncommon.

The treatment is easier said than done for this one. Facing yourself might be sometimes the most terrifying thing. But definitely the most liberating in the long run.

I travel because everyone else does it

Oh, the beauty of social pressure and unattainable standards. Don’t tell me more. Those toxic ideas are all around us, like plastic. Wherever you look, it is there. I must admit it, I am also guilty of googling: “best romantic holiday ideas” or “where to go for valentines day,” or “10 most instagramable holiday destinations.” At the times, I desperately wanted to have a photo of me enjoying a croissant next to the Eiffel Tower on one day for my Instagram feed and the next day to shoot an Insta Story of me driving a Jeep on the Amalfi Coast. Ugh, I cringe about it now, but I lived in this bubble of showcasing to the world that I made it. What I made and to whom, it is still an unknown for me.

So, I admit it, the media is not easy on its users. It is the world of a consumer and it is very easy to get lost. I used to browse through Insta stories of famous people or even my friends, who seemingly traveled all the time and looked so happy. So, unsurprisingly, I also wanted to be just like them. Who doesn’t want to be happy? I couldn’t figure it out. How does everyone, who travels, look so happy on their photos, but I feel nothing when I meticulously follow their example?

Little did I know that it was an illusion. The happiness does not come solely from traveling and being in a new place every other day.

After many trial and error tests, I made my most revolutionary discovery. I realised that even if I went to a new country every week and posted about it on social media, it wouldn’t make me happy at the end. Pretty simple? In order to really, truly understand this notion, it took me couple of years. Those ‘likes’ had to have the magic in them, but they didn’t. They were empty. The answer was: there is absolutely nothing behind it. It is an illusion of happiness. Smoke and mirrors.

Social media is one of the best manipulators of our emotions. It takes a real courage to say ‘no’ to it.

I travel because this is just who I am

For me this assumptions is a mega statement skilfully masking two issues in one. Even if it doesn’t look like that in the beginning. If we unpack it, we would see someone saying this: “I do not need to be accountable for anything or anyone around me when I travel. I just need to travel and that is it. If you don’t get it, well, we should break up. Because I am not going to change”

Pretty rough, isn’t it? When we look deeper, we can discover the person might be masking two emotions: (1) not being content with their current life and (2) blaming others for seemingly stopping them from being who they are. They tie their identity to traveling.

I personally struggled to understand the root cause for this exact statement for myself. I did all possible matrixes, pro/cons prioritizations and what not, in order to grasp whether I am a type of a person who just needs to travel, or whether something else is there that I am scared to see so I hide it behind constant traveling.

I have been looking religiously for an answer to this question for the past 5 years. The more time would pass, the more I was shifting to a specific answer. Guess which one! I believed that this is just who I am - I need to travel every other weekend. If someone didn’t agree with me or liked my style, I thought the problem was in them. It caused some challenges with the people who have been dear to me. But since my focus was on me and not on them, I wasn’t overly preoccupied with their feelings. I was ready to accept it as part of my truth and my identity.

And then.. the pandemic happened.

I thought that it will crush me. I was the travel-addict and now I had to be home without the end date. Anxiety should be over the roof. But did you know what happened? Nothing.

I was perfectly fine. This involuntarily experience showed me that maybe this equation, which was tattooed in my mind, ‘I = traveling’ is not entirely right. This discovery came from the most unexpected place during the unimaginable times.

So? What’s your point?

In order to answer this question, I would like to use the words of the most knowledgeable people aka grandmas of this world: ‘Everything in moderation.’ Traveling is fantastic, unless you might suspect that your love for it might be hiding something else. You will know exactly when it happens. Listen to your heart.