Tag: Travel

Categories
Chronicle

Day 416 and Packing

I’m going to Europe for the month of March. After two years of isolation with my husband it felt like it was time to be on my own for a little bit. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And yes the trip will involve work so founders in Germany and France feel free to reach out.

Of course, a long trip means careful packing. I’m not traditionally been a fan of packing. In fact, packing is my most common recurring nightmare.

Packing brings back all my childhood memories of never feeling stable. Boxes and suitcases take me back. A common theme in my recurring nightmare is trying to find all the basics I will need for some trip. I’ll be searching for underwear or prescription medication. As the dream unfolds I’ll find a key item only to have it disappear. There is always a countdown.

Naturally I’m a bit concerned packing for a month long trip to another continent after literally years of not packing. But I’m letting some of of the fear go. Jo

I was at my first work conference since the pandemic this week. I had to pack up medication and supplements. Makeup and toiletries for casual and more formal events needed to be gathered and stowed. I needed to account for professional dressing along with a snowstorm and a 60 degree day. I brought a parka and boots along with heels and proper lingerie. It was not an easy packing job.

And to my surprise everything worked. I brought the right mix of attire. I only forgot a few medications that weren’t crucial. I looked perfectly fine and was able to be as casual or as polished as the circumstances required. And blessedly it mostly all fit into my trusty Muji suitcase.

While I feel out of practice, a dry run before I need to really have my act together for a big international trip went great. Maybe I’m actually ready to get back on the road.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 387 and Travel Routines

I hadn’t done any travel since the pandemic hit until last week. I’ve probably been in a comfortable at home routine for years (if you don’t count the cross country moves). But last week I went to Montana to do some house hunting. And I could tell I was out of practice traveling.

I used to be on the road pretty frequently. So frequently I started a travel cosmetics company. I was really dedicated to fixing the annoyances of being on the road with travel routines. They can be really simple routines. Always unpack immediately. Get yourself settled in with all your cords and charging stations. Bring your workout clothes. Have nutrition plans and exercise routines that can be adapted for airplane food and hotel rooms. Bring a water bottle. Pack supplements in daily baggies. Learn to fast during your flights.

I could go on and on about the routines that helped me prevent the recovery most travel requires. If you are gone for a week and don’t maintain your routines then you lose another week transitioning back.

I sadly didn’t bring enough of my routines with me to Montana. I underestimated how tired I’d be so I didn’t keep up with my workouts and physical therapy (I’m recovering from an injury which compounded the issue). I didn’t have a nutrition plan so I ended up eating whatever was readily available.

It wasn’t all bad to be clear. I remembered my supplements and vitamins. I went to sleep on a consistent schedule. Even if that meant being awake when it was pitch black outside. Montana is far enough north it doesn’t get light out till 8am.

But I think I could have done a better job not letting the excitement and change of environment ramp up my nervous system. One of the best parts of a routine is making sure you’ve maintained some amount of detachment so you aren’t always at the mercy of what is providing stimulus to your system. Remaining in a parasympathetic state can be a challenge in a new environment as everything reads as novelty to our nervous system.

Even though I’ve been back for 4-5 days I feel like I’m just finally settling back into a comfortable rhythm. It makes me realize just how out of practice I am with travel. What was once a routine event is now again something that requires time and effort. Journeys will once again be out of time and place. Our lives back home will be different than when we are in the road. Maybe that’s a good thing. But it’s not a reality is considered in decades. It makes me feel as if life is measurable worse.

Categories
Reading

Day 273 and The Newsstand

I used to travel a lot. It seems like another life, but before the pandemic airports were my most important liminal space. Even as a child this was true as my father loved taking us on trips. That emotional weight meant the airport have always had significance to me. This persistent exposure to airports lead to me to developing certain affinities and aversions in my routines around travel. But the one that I liked the most was buying something at the newsstand.

There was a period as a teenager where I thought carrying both the The Economist and Rolling Stone (neither of which I read anymore) was just the height of intellectual signaling. And no place was more crucial to signal than inside an airport. I could meet someone in passing that would change my life and they needed to see immediately that I was both smart and cultured. Yes it’s embarrassing now.

But this signaling was part of a wider ritual I felt was important to ground myself. Even if I felt the unsteadiness of traveling, I could bring routine and ritual into it. I knew no matter how much I anxiety or uncertainty I felt around a given trip I could always treat myself to buying something to read from the airport newsstand.

Generally I would pick up some kind of periodical. I’d leave myself time to browse the newsstands for at least ten minutes so I could adequately cover all the weird genres. Because I grew up in a small town and not a proper city, the only newsstand I ever encountered was at the airport. There was simply no place that held as many magazines covering as many topics.

And while I had the Internet very early in my life, the actual transition away from physical publishing wasn’t as far along. It’s not that I loved magazines so much as it was the only place I could find writing that wasn’t a novel was in newsstand. Now of course I read blogs, email newsletters, forums, Subreddits and my beloved Twitter. But the memories I have of finding new worlds came from newsstands. And while I may have literally been going someplace new, it was never quite as horizon broadening as picking out what I was going to read.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 228 and Recurring Nightmares

Chances are you have some kind of recurring nightmare that your subconscious tosses up for processing regularly. Some blend of math tests or being naked at a big meeting seems pretty popular. I used to regularly have a dream where I was told I wouldn’t graduate from university as I had forgotten to take some core requirement. But by far the most consistent and upsetting nightmare I have is packing.

I moved a lot as a child. A fun (sad) fact about me is I changed schools every two years for my entire tenure as a student. These moves were generally coupled with moving homes while some just were just me moving by myself. I did first and second grade in Orange County in California, 3rd and 4th in Sacramento, 5th and 6th in Niwot Colorado, 7th grade I was homeschooled (somewhere in there my parents got divorced so my mom and I moved out), 8th was a prep school outside of Boulder, 9th grade was boarding school in Connecticut, 10th was half at prep school and half in France, 11th grade I dropped out and took classes in Manhattan, then for 12th I was back to Colorado and remote classes and prep school. The first and only time I had a consistent schooling experience was at University of Chicago. I did it in three and a half years to save money.

Just writing it out makes me anxious and sad. I wish I could condense it for purposes of the narrative. It feels too long reading it over. It wasn’t just moving schools and houses. It’s actually worse than I’m letting on. My father loves travel. I was put on an airplane at six weeks old for a flight to Hawaii. Many of my childhood memories are of airplanes and cruise ships and motor homes. You name a form of traveling and we did it. We were always going somewhere. I fucking hated it.

Now as an an adult I loathe packing. It brings back all my childhood memories of never feeling stable. Boxes and suitcases take me back. And I don’t just dislike it, I loathe it so much I dedicated several years of my life to making it more convenient to carry your cosmetics with you. I called the line Stowaway. It was all travel sized. I hate packing so much I went to years of trouble to make one core routine easier to take with you. I wanted one thing about travel to be less scary. Less overwhelming. One less thing you leave behind. Childhood trauma sticks.

Maybe only people who love travel should try to improve the experience. Working from a place of childhood trauma is often the road to riches. I guess it worked out fine for me. But I don’t have the fondness for travel that many millennials of my generation have. I only have nightmares. Maybe if I had realized that before I started it would have gone better.

A common theme in my recurring nightmare is trying to find all the basics I will need for some trip. I’ll be searching for underwear or prescription medication. As the dream unfolds I’ll find a key item only to have it disappear. There is always a countdown. Some reminder that a flight is taking off soon. But it’s usually much more dramatic than that. It’s often some kind of unspoken crisis. I won’t remember it when I wake up. Maybe it’s apocalyptic. But it’s rarely a go bag or a bug out situation in my nightmares. It’s just a suitcase or a box or a bag never being filled up.

I never leave on the trip. The dream never lets me finish packing. I guess my unconscious hasn’t figured out how to proceed that it wasn’t the packing that scared me, it was leaving behind the life that I thought was safe. Maybe I’ll get there eventually. I don’t want to be stuck in a nightmare, packing up my life, being afraid of being dragged someplace I don’t want to go.