For the past 2 years I’ve been travelling pretty much every month someplace new. Unsurprisingly, I have been getting a lot of messages from friends, acquaintances or followers on social media regarding my lifestyle. All of them say pretty much the same thing: how jealous they are of my lifestyle and how they wish we traded places. Trust me, I would actually trade places on so many occasions if I could.
Why? Because my life has become pain. For more than 2 years now, I’ve been in constant physical pain. Every day I’m in pain. I wake up in pain. I go to work in pain. I train in pain. I go to bed in pain. I travel in pain. I even laugh in pain, and sometimes at it. I curse in pain and often at it. Sometimes it makes me a better person, sometimes a worse one. Sometimes I put myself in painful situations so I can replace the pain sensation with a different one. I don’t even remember what life used to be like before or what normality feels like. Painkillers don’t really work, but they do make it a bit more tolerable at times. Anti-depressants work when emotional pain kicks in as well or when the cocktail is too much to handle.
Having contemplated my pain for a while now, I reached a conclusion, at least for the moment: Life is simple. Simple, but not easy. Life is so simple that I could painlessly end my pain at any time I wanted, finally liberating myself from having to grind my teeth in desperation during my lowest points. Sometimes I don’t think I would even hesitate, considering there could be so many poetic ways to go. Now, although ending my life would be simple, that would not make it easy. Firstly, because I am conscious I would cause so much pain for the ones that really care about me and secondly, because there’s still a lot of things I actually want to do in this life before it ends.
Travel has always been one of these things. Travelling has been, for me the most eye opening and meaningful thing I’ve ever done. Hence, for the past two years, I started focusing and investing most of my energy and money in it. Travelling made me realise how little I know about this world, and how little I’ve seen. In turn it’s made me so much more curious about what’s out there. Travelling connected me to people I’ve never even thought of connecting with and most importantly it’s showed me that even though sometimes I think I’m alone, I am actually not. Through my travels I’ve met so many others in similar positions like myself or even worse. This eventually revealed my privilege of being able to do what gives meaning to life for me, despite the pain I have to endure. Travelling reduced my pain to being one of the least important things on the table for me. Travelling taught me to miss the most important people in my lives and to make efforts to stay connected to them. Travelling essentially showed me all the reasons why I should still choose to live.
So, here’s to travelling. Thanks for keeping me alive.
For me the only downside of travel is giving me back and body pain, but any good massages can take it away. I always bring low expectations so I won’t feel too disappointed just in case something happen along the way.
To be honest, traveling it’s a bit pricy but no regrets at all. I had so much fun and will come back with my ladies.
Thank you for sharing your honest thoughts and your vulnerable side (not all can do that). Some of us are in pain physically, but the worst I think is experiencing pain emotionally and spiritually. You found the way to ease the pain thru travel and that’s really good. Hope you will heal soon and keep inspiring the many.
Thank you for sharing your honest thoughts and your vulnerable side (not all can do that). Some of us are in pain physically, but the worst I think is experiencing pain emotionally and spiritually. You found the way to ease the pain thru travel and that’s really good. Hope you will heal soon and keep inspiring the many.