The Year of the Wanderer
My good friend, Niraj, encapsulated Remote Year best when he said, “This has been both the best and the worst year of my life.”
He’s absolutely right.
Remote Year for me has been a year of incredible highs. I’ve met some of the most amazing people that I will, no doubt, be life-long friends with. I have swam with pink dolphins in the Bolivian Amazon, hiked to Machu Picchu, drank beer at Oktoberfest in Munich, scuba dived with a whale shark in Thailand, fallen in love in Malaysia.
It has also been a year of incredible lows. I have all but tanked my career, gotten into debt again, been sick more times than I can count, gotten an abortion, had my heart broken. Not to mention the fact that 2016 was a shit show that included Brexit and Trump.
That being said, would I do Remote Year all over again? You bet your ass I would.
I knew way back in September 2015 when I was accepted into Remote Year’s second program (Battuta) that it would change me as a person. Being a digital nomad is very important to me and I will do almost anything to maintain that lifestyle.
Traveling over the past year has been hard, but ultimately very rewarding. It has forced me to be ok with constant change and to be adaptable to just about any environment or situation I find myself in.
But now that I’m staring the last week of Remote Year in the face the dread and depression is starting to set in. I must make my way back to the states for a number of personal reasons. Thinking about not seeing the faces of the people that I’ve come to consider part of my family seems unthinkable. We have an almost codependent relationship with one another. We’ve been through hell and back together. I feel lost without these people.
I also feel like going back to Utah is a step backwards in my life. Even though I don’t plan to put down roots there again ever or to be there for too long before I hit the road, I can’t seem to shake this feeling. I love my family back in Utah – all my best friends and my mother, who has single-handedly saved my ass over the last year way more than once, are very important people to me, but I wonder if I’ve changed too much to be content with living in my old life, even temporarily.
