I Challenged Myself To Live In A New City Every Week For 6 Months
Last year I spent, on average, every week living in a new city/village around the world. It started when I gave my two week’s notice, packed a bag and bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona. From there, my journey organically evolved based on travel deals, volunteer opportunities and whimsical fancies.
I kept it up for six months until my body accumulated so much distress that it finally gave up on me. To be fair, I had lugged around a 15lb backpack every other day while surviving in constant exploration mode, blazing through each new place I set foot in with zero restraint. I suffered repeated bouts of food poisoning, bacteria infections, sinus infections, an injured tail bone and constant joint and muscular pains. Along with the hospital bills I’d racked up, at one point I even lost my wallet including all the cash and ID within it.
The Half Painted Picture
The myth that long term travelling is a glamorous and life changing opportunity is only half true. The real truth is that it’s hard. Seriously, it’s a horrid struggle. I say that as a self-proclaimed low-maintenance, easy-going vagabond. Some mornings I was so mentally and physically exhausted that the last thing I wanted to do was to even open my eyes. That said, 98% of the time, I never wanted it to end.
Maybe you identify with this next statement, or maybe you don’t, either way I found it to be true for me.
Any degree of struggle is bearable if it has the potential to drive future growth.
I didn’t enjoy rushing myself to the ER in Bangkok past midnight, but I knew that if I did, I’d be fine the next day (spoiler: I was). Developing resilience was the ultimate payoff. Resilience alongside patience was key to maintaining a tolerable level of sanity during trying times. Being aware that most situations are temporary and not devoting unnecessary mental energy to make a bad situation worse was something I always knew, but eventually grew to believe. Questioning the cause of bad luck by believing better planning could have changed the outcome is a poor use of energy. You will run mental laps with yourself and be no better off in the end.
The Unpredictable Struggle
Bad situations didn’t just mean suffering physically. Sure, I was sick a lot, missed a bunch of trains and planes and was lost a good quarter of the time. Still, I always viewed those problems as having clear solutions. The more challenging components of being away from home for so long was that eventually I became disengaged with my previous identity.
Before traveling, my sense of who I was depended heavily on consistent affirmations from friends, family and co-workers. As a social being, my personal identifiers were developed by the sum of perceptions of those around me. Due to the general opinions of those who knew me best, overtime I too had come to know myself as independent, adventurous and spontaneous.
But what happens when that close circle of peers stop hanging around?
What happens when their ideas of you stop being reinforced?
Who are you then?
For me, these questions left me feeling in limbo for a period of time. I existed in a somewhat uncomfortable space where simultaneously my social identity become unknown to me, and yet, it become one of the most liberating experiences. I began to re-write myself. I discovered a more reserved side to who I thought I was. I learned to appreciate balancing risk with caution beyond necessity. I wasn’t as gregarious as I would have liked to believe.
I didn’t feel a need to perform to one identity because I knew it seriously didn’t matter. Whatever life I was living in that moment would be completely rewritten the next day. Monday morning I would be running off a cliff in Ljubljana. Tuesday night, I’d be sleeping overnight in the Manila airport trying not to get kicked out. At 3PM, I’d be out partying with a new group of friends and by 7PM, alone reading in the corner of a cafe.
I was carefree, reckless, sensible, boisterous, earnest, confident, intimidated… all at once. Often, it didn’t make sense when I thought of myself as having such polarizing characteristics but overtime I stopped questioning it. I stopped consciously and maybe unconsciously seeking out validation to confirm who I thought I was and who I wanted to be. Honestly, I didn’t even know who I wanted to be because I started seeing the good in all the ways that I’d once found to be contrastive and therefore, inferior, to my own. In a nutshell, I stopped thinking my way was better. Breaking through that mental barrier allowed me to develop into someone new(ish).
If There’s a Takeaway, This Is It
I still like books more than people, I still like eating over my sink because I detest doing dishes, and I still choose freedom over stability any day of the week. Some things may never change. Then there are the things which have some wiggle room. The bad habits that wiggle their way out and into awareness so that you don’t have to continue doing things as you’ve always done them simply because of routine.
Travel allowed for many of those habits to emerge. Under the right (read: severely uncomfortable) conditions, I grew to adapt. Undeniably, you will face some of the lowest of lows while on the road for a half a year, but ultimately, the net of it is that each of those experiences will become a catalyst for transforming into a more rounded individual.
If I had to sum up all of the struggles and relive them one by one all over again, I’d wince hard and declare “challenge accepted” (with only a negligible amount of hesitation).
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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, show me some Clap love so I know to carve out more time to put pen to paper to these thoughts.
