If You’re a Human Being, You Probably Experience Emotions

Now, we all experience emotions differently from empath-like people to sociopaths. Most of us are in-between. Let me take you through our emotional range of the average person with traveling.

Scenario 1: Sigh and think positively about traveling — think about taking a picture of yourself on a beach or something. Maybe that feeling is strong enough for you to take a one-week or two-week vacation in the future. That’s exciting and fun. There’s the budgeting stage, the planning stage, the paying for everything stage, and if you have a pet, you need to figure out how to handle that. You go on the trip and are elated, unless it’s a family vacation. If you’re me, you have more fun on family vacations, but those can be far more stressful for other people. Then, you return home and wish the trip was longer and remember it fondly.

Scenario 2: Take scenario 1 and times it by 50 if you plan on visiting someplace longer than a quick vacation. That’s the emotional turmoil you’ll experience when planning to live in another country. I like to think of myself as a planner, a researcher, and a perfectionist. So, naturally, I had preemptive emotions. Most normal people cry and become emotional when they said goodbye to me or afterwards when they thought about being so far away from me. Not me — nope. For two weeks prior to my departure, I had extreme depression, sadness, hopelessness, panic, anxiety, stress, and a bunch of others.

Why? Well, I knew there wouldn’t be time for crying in the shower when you’re too busy trying to figure out how to not die in a foreign country. Before I left, I was struggling to get out of bed in the morning, to pack up belongings, and to even eat. The worst was trying to smile for photos with friends, etc., when the core of my very spirit was in agony.

I was experiencing all these emotions due to extreme change. Every stable thing in my world was suddenly changing. And maybe I did press my hands to my face and ask, “What the hell am I doing?” I described this to my sister as a dystopian world where I’m on a space ship racing to an escape pod to jettison into the unknown. As soon as the trip was underway, I was too focused on getting to the next area to have time for emotions.

Memories were brought up as I packed and went through areas of my room I forgot about. Seeing my grandad and grandma’s funeral programs, seeing pictures of my sister and I, cards my parents wrote to me, my name printed on my first article, and different tokens from my friends all made me burst into tears. These things reminded me that I grew up and lived in the same place my whole life and it was all “ending.” I had to come to terms that things just weren’t the same from when I was younger whether I stayed in Dayton or not. I cried for my childhood, my teen years, and for a crushed dream that somehow I could hold onto all of my friends and family in one spot with me and I could live a Friends life.

That’s not reality, though. I love my yoga community, my school community, and my church community, but I wasn’t content. Everything felt on “pause” like I was waiting for my path to be revealed. When you plan a huge move like this, though, you can quickly become overwhelmed and talk yourself out of doing anything. It’s much easier and more comfortable to remain in what you know. Traveling and moving isn’t for everyone, but how would we know if we never try?

Currently, I’ve just been enjoying listening to people in Germany and observing them. We aren’t that different — we all experience the human perspective and we’re just trying to make it through life as best we can while trying to enjoy the moments along the way.

So, my advice is to march on and let the war drums beat to keep you motivated. Move forward one step at a time. Cling to your friends’ and family’s support because it’ll fuel you more than you can imagine. If you feel unhappy or unfulfilled in life, it might be time to search for a passion and follow it. That doesn’t mean that traveling is the right choice, but something else could be. Again, you’ll never know unless you take that leap.

Happy leaping, friends.