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You’re Back from A Year of Travel! Now What?
July 4, 2019
It seems almost unreal and selfish to write a column on the struggles of returning from long-term world travel after an extended break but the struggles are real, and they can consume you if you are not careful. What most people do not talk about is what happens after you return home. It generally follows that you are to follow one of two paths:
- Return home and go back to work
- Return home fundamentally transformed and become your boss
At least that is what you read on all those “travel forever” sites that are selling you something. But the truth for many freshly arrived travelers is that they have no idea what’s their next step.
Obviously, there are constraints to returning, which include paying bills, but there’s also the expectation that you don’t want your experience to “go to waste” as you return to “normal” life. You feel moved to do something — like all those smiling people on Instagram that inspired you in the first place –, but you don’t know what it is. This is especially true if you left a job you have no intention of returning to, or a field you were less interested in, or a city or town you dread coming back to. The truth is you are a free agent once you return and being a free agent can be simultaneously liberating and overwhelming anxiety-producing.
So here’s some of my advice on how to navigate returning home and deciding what to do next:
Take Time for Yourself
I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s what you need right now. Even if you have been traveling solo for a period of but especially if you were traveling with others. My last few months of travel ended up being especially stressful for me because I had invited our parents to join us on the final 3-week leg. Instead of it being a relaxing experience there was a lot of stress involved in managing six adults, including myself, for almost a month on the road. I came back happy the trip took place but utterly depleted. Then as soon as I returned my husband, in an attempt to be helpful, kept asking me about how job searching was going. Then I had to start work on the house to fix issues that had been there since before we left. Then, of course, there were obligations to see family, friends, and former co-workers and try to pick up where I had left off. Some would marvel that I returned “hitting the ground running” but inside I was falling apart. I had no time to process the past eight months, I was being forced into an immediate job search, I was contemplating leaving NYC, and I had to do this all on my own.
It was all too much, and I suffered emotionally from the strain. At some point, I was having a conversation with my friend who had also traveled and lived abroad before me when she asked me what I had been doing, and she exclaimed “Are you crazy?!” and then said “Give yourself time to process everything. You haven’t been home for even a week.”
Then, it hit me. I was being hard on myself. Starting your life over again after an extended break is stressful but full-time travel can be stressful too.
You owe it to yourself to give yourself an adjustment period where you are taking time for yourself. Job searching, moving, obligations to others are always going to be there. That’s what you left behind when you started traveling. But in the same way, it takes a while to adjust to a travel lifestyle you need time to adjust to back to normal life. Have a conversation with those closest to you and ask them for their understanding. They may not understand why but you deserve your space.
Write
When I returned I had a million blog posts unpublished in my head. I wanted to get them all down somewhere but I had started focusing all my energy on getting back into “normal” life. But what I didn’t realize was that writing about my journies even in the form of top-5/ top-10 hit must not miss pieces was a form of therapy. The truth is most of the people in your life aren’t going to understand what you’ve just gone through or want to hear about all the details. The first question everyone is going to ask you was “How was your world trip?!”
But they are looking for a paragraph answer. Usually, after you get done listing the countries, you visited they are ready to move onto the next subject. So you end up never really talking about it with those around you. I barely discussed our travels with my husband and he was there for some of it! So I took to writing my blog and just kept writing. I realized it was a therapeutic way to remember much of my journey and it was a way to gather back a lot of the gems I had learned along the way.
Write a list of Pros & Cons
There’s always this societal pressure that returning home after long-term travel has made you a wiser person with a more in-depth understanding of the world. That may well be the case for some of the experiences you had but for others, you have simply been a tourist, especially if you had gone from country to country in short periods of time. You may feel like less or more of yourself of you may feel transformed but you are not sure what it all means. These things take time to manifest themselves and so you’ll need to practice some of the patience you learned on the road. Along with that, you’ll need to get back to basics when it comes to decision making. Returning home is a highly emotional time and sometimes it’s difficult to separate the voices in your head from those that are helpful to those that cause anxiety. After my first week back I mentally moved to 3 countries and 2 cities and had about 5 different professions. So instead of trying to figure out my next steps I just simply wrote down each crazy idea and then listed them out as Pros & Cons. I listed the Pros & Cons of moving from NYC. I listed the Pros & Cons of retraining in a technical field. I listed them for job searching. I just made lists. They helped ease my mind but they also gave me some perspective. Maybe things were not as bad as they seemed. Maybe I could take time to just spend on my own until a certain date. All of these things helped me feel normal again.
Positive Affirmations
When I finally decided to start the search for a job again, I was full of anxiety. Especially when I heard radio silence from the first few companies I had applied to. I was wondering if that year off was really affecting my chances or if I had somehow feel behind on the latest skills. All of that worry became a self-fulling prophecy. Because let’s be honest, unless you are in a high demand field such as tech or you left a job with an amazing profile of work and you are in demand – job searching really sucks. It can be a complete ego buster and the choice to hire you or is out of your hands. I was lucky in that there was no immediate need for me to find a job but it did not stop my anxiety. I counted every month away from work as a checkmark against me. It was becoming overwhelming. Then I turned to positive affirmations. I just wrote to them everywhere and put them on my phone. I recorded my top five and played them to myself every morning and remembered I was worth it. After a few months of job searching and soul searching, I ended up getting my dream job in Wisconsin. But it was temporary. Then I got to work on an election. Then that temporary job became permanent. So after almost a year abroad, months of job searching, taking a chance, and moving somewhere new, I am in my dream job living in a beautiful city full of lakes. All that with a gap of a year on my resume. I’m now happy with my choices and happy I took the time I needed to figure out the next steps.
The bottom line is returning after traveling full-time is never easy. Especially if you left without an action plan and just took off traveling. Some people on their blogs make it look so easy but the truth is they are there from hard work, a business plan, and a lot of failures. But if you are not in the works for starting your own business or lacking the technical skills to be a digital nomad, then your return home looks different.
I would say, still go. Just know that the return will be an adjustment but with the time you will find your way. And you took a chance and often chances lead to more opportunities!
Some Positive Mantras to Get you Through:
- I am free of anything that weighs me down.
- I have everything I need for a happy life.
- I am recession-proof! I have the skills, talent, and abilities to compete in any economy!
- I am creating the career of my dreams. It appears in my mind and then in my world.
- Every NO for the wrong job gets me to closer to the YES that is perfect for me!
- I AM able to travel where I want, when I want, with whom I want & I have unlimited resources to do so!
- I am on the right path to achieving my goals and dreams.
- I am on the right path to achieving my goals and dreams.
- I love myself more and more each day.
- I am worthy of love.
- I am worthy of happiness.
- I am worthy of success.
- I deserve to be paid well for my skills.
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