It’s a Saturday night, and I’m riddled with what ails me so often lately. I’ve put off talking in a more nuanced way about what things have been like for me since I came back to Laos. It hasn’t all been bad, and most of it has been good. A lot of that most has been wonderful, deeply enjoyable, and rewarding. But a not insignificant chunk has been like what is written below, which is a collection of random journal entries I’ve made for the past two months. Spoiler alert- things haven’t gotten universally better.
I have a good string of days, or a good week or two, but I relapse so hard that it knocks the wind out of me. I start getting nervous for it. This makes me feel shattered glass inside about myself, and you can imagine how inviting a pile of shattered glass is to others- not very.
I’m trying, but it’s so hard. It’s hard for me to freely admit how much I struggle with this, because I am paranoid that people will think my happiness, my brightness, my positive outlooks, are all just an act. They’re not. That’s part of me, too. But they are heavily balanced out- sometimes cancelled out- by all of this. I can be two very contradictory things at once. I’m tired of having to not talk about all of this in the interest of making myself palatable and non-threatening, easy and fun, but I feel like I must, because I’ve seen it in people’s eyes when this side of me shows up- what the fuck? Who is this difficult and sad person, and what has she done with that person who is usually dancing and laughing and leading the charge for wherever the fun is going next? That’s me, too, and it’s exhausting pretending it’s not.
The other reason I share this is because I guess since I live overseas and travel often this blog could be seen as a “travel blog”. I haven’t read many, and I don’t read any regularly, but when my internet searches yield random entries related to the place I am researching, travel blogs invariably tend to be saccharine and sweet and white washed versions of what a more transient life looks like. Life is hard anywhere. As I have said before, I would be feeling like this even if I wasn’t living in Laos. My brain would be with me wherever I go.
So here is an honest account of the low times, over the last two months, and a clear overview of the ricochet of emotions my brain has been cooking up for me. I present to you a trash heap of thoughts. Maybe you can relate.
On Friday, after a perfectly lovely and relatively (in the world of teaching high school students) stress free week, I came home, peeled off my clothes, lay on the floor, and cried for about two hours.
On Saturday, I went out with friends and danced all night long and felt love and belonging and euphoria.
On Sunday, I woke up happy and went to the gym. In the midst of a workout, I was overcome with a sense of dread and anger that made it hard for me to stand up and walk out of the gym without bursting, once more, into tears. I drove my motorbike home too fast, angry, and recklessly.
Last night I stayed up far too late listening to songs that were ridiculously sad, mentally reviewing all the ways I’ve fucked up my life and my relationships with other people, and coming to the conclusion that I’m not really connected to anyone as a result.
Today I had a fantastic day teaching and tutoring and coaching, I laughed all day long and felt gratitude and happiness, and then I came home and thought about how I’m wasting my life here in Laos and that nothing really matters anyway.
Since I’ve been back home in Laos, I’ve been really struggling. That sentence makes me laugh out loud when I read it for how pitifully weak it is at capturing how pitifully weak I feel. I’ve been a grab bag of feelings that vary from uncomfortable to unbearable. Some mornings it’s very hard to get out of bed and go to work. Some nights it’s very hard to not veg out on the computer for hours until I am able to wear myself down to a sharp, ragged thing and finally pass out from exhaustion. Some days I am irritable, sad, angry, and feel deeply, irrevocably, alone. I don’t mean alone like lonely. I mean I am alone. I am apart, a piece unto myself, and nothing touches me. Just when I start getting a bit worried, I’ll have a great week or two and feel okay- like nothing ever happened.
I have no idea what I’m doing lately. By lately I mean basically since returning to Laos. I mean no idea as in, some days, I actually stop in the middle of my life and shake my head and and look around at it and kind of think “Wait, wait, no but WAIT what in the actual fuck am I DOING WITH MY LIFE RIGHT NOW?” and then I search around as though someone will come out and explain something to me that I have clearly missed. I thought I knew what I was doing when I re-signed my contract and laid everything out so clearly- summer back home, another year in the now comfortable home base of Vientiane, finish my master’s degree, on to the next. Even looking at it here, again, typed out like that, it makes a lot of sense. But sometimes it doesn’t make sense to me at all. I am on another planet, like an alien dropped into my life. I sometimes feel like I’m watching someone else live my life. This is how I know things have gone off the rails- when I don’t know how to be a person.
Here’s my problem, and I know it, but I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to feel anger. Anger, when it shows up on the scene, always comes late. Anger rolls in after patience and understanding and insecurity and fear have already bulldozed the forests and poisoned the streams and killed all the animals while building an entire housing development of “It’s Your Fault, You Could be More Forgiving, or Maybe Just a Better Person in General” cookie cutter houses behind my eyes and all over my brain. Anger comes only when I have gotten to the end of my physical ability to continue to not be angry. It comes only when to not be angry is so absurd that even I, in my crippling fear of feeling anger, have to admit it.
But as soon as it shows up, guilt immediately rushes on the scene, apologizing that things got so out of hand, that anger showed up belligerent and selfish. Guilt is busy murmuring that it’s okay, we understand, sorry to be a bother, this was a mistake, and deftly scoots anger right back out again. And then guilt just hangs out for an awkward amount of time after, apologizing over and over for that gross and shameful and totally immature outburst.
Meanwhile anger is still wandering around looking to be felt, and I’m still in whatever situation prompted this entire mess anyway, so, finding the situation untenable, I just vacate my own brain for a while and wait for the dust to settle.
Can you have disassociation related to a fear of being angry and dealing with the repercussions of anger? I guess you can. I know I am.
2020 me is reading this after almost a decade of doing the work and feeling grateful that I can’t relate to this anymore.
Originally published November 30th, 2014 on Blogger. When I beg people to stop buying the curated lie of the perfect life of travel influencers or vacation pics or living abroad, this is why. I had a wonderful job with lovely students in a meaningful career, lived in a charming little town populated with supportive friends, and regularly bounced around SEA drinking shit out of coconuts and having madcap adventures on beaches and motorcycles. And in spite of all that wonder, I had all the brain troubles enumerated above. I could very easily have presented my life with a litany of filtered images (and words), cranking out aspirational content for #goals. But I always felt like that just added to the problem and stigma of mental health struggles, and it would have presented a false golden ring of salvation- the idea that life is more vibrant lived on the move, or in strange places with new and interesting people. I chose to live and work abroad, and I would choose it again, and I’m still doing it, and it’s the life for me- but I absolutely didn’t choose it because I thought it was a magical elixir to fix me. Life is hard wherever you are, and escapes don’t ultimately work- no matter what you are seeing on Instagram or a travel influencer’s website as they try to sell you something. Bottom line, if you have to choose between budgeting therapy and going on vacation, choose therapy every time. If you want to live overseas because life will ambiguously “be so much better”- eh, rethink that one before you make the leap. Becoming a “global citizen” or developing #wanderlust doesn’t mean your troubles won’t find your new address. I met countless haunted and deeply troubled people on the road, always looking for solutions on the horizon. It doesn’t work that way (thankfully). You can do the work right now, wherever you are. I hope you do, if that’s something you need.
