the dark side of solo travel: travelling with depression

*This may bother some people, so please skip if you think what I say about travelling with depression will make you feel a) uncomfortable, b) guilty, or c) angry. I have no desire am too tired to argue with you.

I cannot write this for the tears that are streaming down my face. I’ve spent the last nine hours alternating between tears and laughter because I am crying for stupid reasons. I’d been driving down the road listening to Ed Sheeran, content in my plans to head from Perth to Margaret River for a weekend of wine tasting and beach bumming. Ed’s Castle on the Hill song came on and for some reason, it strikes a chord with me every time I hear it.

“… made friends and lost them through the years, and I’ve not seen the roaring fields in so long, I know I’ve grown, but I can’t wait to go home… I’m on my way, driving at ninety down those country lanes, singing to “Tiny Dancer,” and I miss the way you make me feel, and it’s real, we watched the sunset over the castle on the hill…”

I teared up a bit. It shouldn’t remind me of home; there is no one there that remembers me as a chubby teenager, no one I drank cheap shit with while hiding from our parents. Those girls are no longer. They cast me out of their lives when I left to go work on a boat, never mind that I had phone service and internet daily; I wasn’t in a remote location. They didn’t answer my phone calls, reply to my messages, or comment on any Facebook photos. I gave up, much like I’ve given up on so many other people in my life for failing to act like they actually cared about me.

And then the dam broke. I bawled in the rental car while flying at 110km down the motorway. Ed just GETS me. He wants to go home. He has memories. And they all resonate with me, someone who sometimes struggles while travelling with depression.

**

Before you start freaking out, I’m not going home yet (not that anyone that reads this will be at Home). Home is a group of people, not a place anymore. Home moves between houses, wherever people choose to be – which I don’t generally know the schedule for. If I arrived at the house I grew up in, I would likely find that no one is there; they are Elsewhere. Likewise, if I went Elsewhere, I would find that they have chosen that week to be Home.

Several months ago, I penned this:

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“What I have since learned over these last four years of travelling, writing, exploring, working, and learning, is that I am ten times happier, ten times wiser, ten times more mature, and yet also ten times more adventurous, ten times more outgoing, ten times crazier, than I was back then.

My self-pity was strong. Oh man, it was strong.

I hated myself. I hated my life. I was beyond miserable: I was on anti-depressants that made me gain weight, I was working two jobs to make ends meet, I was in a failing relationship. I was listening to people who should have supported me tell me over and over that I was a failure, that I was going about everything all wrong. I firmly believe that if I had not left, I would have done something very disastrous to myself.

By the way, these are things that I have never written about. If you do not wish to read further, I understand.

I had to cut ties.

I left.

You might call it running away, but I will never describe it as such. I was saving myself. Running toward something, perhaps.”

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I share that with you not because I want you to feel sorry for me, but because I want you to see that then I was on a high. Euphoric with my travels. Ecstatic that I’d realised that my former life and relationship was what made me unhappy.

But…. it wasn’t.

No.

Travelling with Depression

Depression doesn’t pick and choose a time in your life to appear and then go, like an unwanted visitor. It doesn’t pop in like that weird auntie or uncle, just to “say hi” and then stay for a year. It is a part of you, a part that lies dormant. Who knows where it arrives from; in my case it cropped up over years of being unsatisfied with life. I was teased mercilessly through school: I was chubby, too skinny, a tomboy, overly made up. It didn’t matter, someone was always going to pick on me. Who was I? Anyone who has ever had someone question them, even if its a simple “you?”, begins to doubt themselves.

Depression reared its ugly head when I was a teenager but I didn’t know it until I was much older.

The title of this post is Travelling With Depression. Few other travel bloggers have touched on this sensitive topic because for so long, Depression has been taboo (in all walks of life, not just the one I have chosen).

Depression is a topic that people avoid. It is not “cool” to be depressed, it is not “normal” to be unhappy. Why on earth are travellers unhappy? We of all people should know sunshine, beaches, salt water – these are the cure to Depression as the Victorians saw it.

No one talks about Depression

We have therapists that shove it under the rug. I’ve been there. I have been In Therapy. She looked at me sympathetically all the while thinking what a brat I must be for having it all, yet feeling like shit. Therapy didn’t help me in the end, and I was out more money than I would have been had I just bought a ticket to a beach.

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Let’s be honest: you do not like this post. You don’t want to hear a long-term, solo traveller say “gee I had such a rough week last week” because you think they come across as whiny. Because – God forbid – anyone who has made the decision to travel full time or be nomadic can’t whine about how hard it can be??

It’s tough. It’s bloody hard.

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Travelling with Depression sucks. There are times I am high, so high. I am okay with being broke, with sleeping on terrible mattresses in dark, messy rooms with strangers. I’m fine with driving six hours a day to reach a new place, to explore something different. I don’t mind the crowds in a new city. Packing up each morning to move on is not a chore.

And then there are the low moments. The times that getting out of bed is near impossible, like this morning. The nights I don’t speak to a single person because I am afraid of bursting into tears, like tonight. When showering is a struggle, when a bottle of wine goes down like water. The times when someone texts me they are tempted to fly halfway across the country to see me for a day and a half, and I can only reply, “you wouldn’t want to see me like this, I’m a fucking wreck” and then delete it before I send it so they don’t think I’m crazy.

These are the times I have raging headaches, my neck and back are too stiff to move, I toss and turn in my sleep, I wake up feeling like I walked a thousand miles.

Do you want to know what? The next day is generally better.

Travelling with Depression requires that I know myself. That I learn when I am on the edge of the deep precipice that is Depression. Like tonight. I recognised in myself the heartache of being alone, the overwhelming desire to be with Someone. And yet, I don’t have Someone to be with; there is no one to hold me, to stroke my hair, to just let me cry against their shoulder. There never has been Someone to let me do that. And so, I am by myself in a room of people, all of whom are in groups, none of whom have spoken to me.

I do not speak to anyone else because if I do, I will cry. I don’t make eye contact for fear of betraying myself. I have a pounding headache. It’s Friday night, and I want desperately to meet people here, to enjoy a bit of social camaraderie before I crawl into my bed. But I cannot do it. I cannot open my mouth because words won’t come out. I can’t even make the effort to speak to someone that sits down next to me and starts talking. They get bored and walk away, because I cannot convey how exactly I feel, and how badly I want to speak to them, but can’t.

Travelling with Depression means feeling like people are judging you. To want to be included but not know how to include yourself. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes writing this, and I don’t even want to publish it, for fear that people will tell me I’m overreacting, that I am out of line to write something like this. Because to travel with Depression is to constantly overthink, constantly second guess, what I do. Write this, erase it. Write that, edit it. Post something, but delete it.

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow, everything will be different.

**

I wrote this post on Friday, 24 March, 2017. The entire next week I struggled with what I was doing. I contemplated buying a flight home, I pored over my finances to see if I could afford to keep going. And then, I got on a flight to Bali.

Depression, you can’t keep me down. I have my leonine tattoo for a reason: to remind me time and time again that I am strong, I am fearless, and I am courageous.

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