In: Travel, Well-Being

It’s Okay To Be Depressed While Traveling

It’s not all exciting, and that’s just fine

Sundown in Mexico

I arrived in Mexico City just a few days ago. I have been on the road for two months now, and Mexico City is a sort of midpoint for me on my journey through Mexico and Central America.

It is my last stop on the southern plateau before descending toward the ocean, and I have spent my time here engaging with history; yesterday I made my way to El Paseo de la Reforma and spent the better part of an hour gazing up at the golden wings of El Angel de la Independencia, a winged statue of the goddess Nike built to commemorate the Mexican revolution. The mausoleum at her base serves as the resting place of many of the country’s greatest heroes.

I’ve followed this pattern in all of the cities I have visited. I have a scholar’s temperament; my way of engaging with the world around me is primarily cerebral, so I have spent my time learning about the cities I have visited. Perhaps because most of my time is spent paying close attention to the places I visit, and the effects they have on me, I noticed a few short weeks ago that a new shadow has attached itself to me.

I am growing depressed again.

It is difficult to explain exactly what depression feels like, in terms of its raw physical sensations. If I had to put words to it I would say that it feels like a bloom of sensation that starts in your chest and rises upwards into your throat and your jaw and your eyes. It is a flower of melancholy — wherever its thin filaments stretch, small petals of numbness and sadness follow. Light and sound and physical sensations, like the wetness of water or the warmth of a sunbeam, all become a little less intense and, at the same time, take on a sharp edge.

It is not surprising that the depression has returned. I cycled off of my antidepressants over a year ago and lost whatever protection they offered. When I crossed the border I also lost the daily interactions with friends and family who were key supports in my life, trading them for a world where I felt perpetually unable to fit in.

During my first evening in San Miguel de Allende, I lay on my mattress in a drafty room listening to the festivities outside. The street thrummed to the sound of pop mariachi, punctuated by the shrill whistles of bottle rockets and the staccato peals of cherry bombs that local children were throwing into the sky in celebration. I spent a half-hour or so in tears from the sense of overwhelming loneliness that sets in when you have locked yourself away from a world in celebration.

However, despite the mild depression and the brief moments of intense sadness, I think that the past two months have been the best of my life. I also think my decision to travel is among the best I have ever made. Why? Well, it’s because the moments of sadness are just that; moments.

There are other moments too, and most of those other moments are good. And even if they weren’t, the quality of a life is more than just the content of its moments; it is also what we feel when we look back on the culmination of the events that made us.

Even the depression itself isn’t bad; while I would never wish major depression on anyone, minor depression is (for me) quite manageable. I have lived with it for a long time and I like the weary note it adds to my character. If I had a literary twin it would be Remus Lupin. What’s an old wolf to do without a few clouds to cover the moon?

The above is a bit personal, however, so it does beg a question. Why the confession? Is it for the catharsis? Or the clicks? Or is it in service of a greater point?

Well, maybe it’s a bit of all three. But let’s focus on the greater point. It’s about emotion, depression, and what feelings the world considers acceptable when you’re a traveler.

What should you feel while traveling?

Let me ask you a question. What emotions do you associate with traveling?

I asked the internet this question, typing ‘emotions you feel while traveling’ into the search box and reading the results. The top three articles were lists of emotions that one can expect to feel on the road, and they were mainly positive.

When the articles did list negative emotions, the emotions usually weren’t a response to the travel itself; they were related either to the fear you feel before starting travel, or the sense of sadness you feel at the prospect of stopping. The other negative emotions in the lists were boredom, frustration, and disgust (for those travelers who find themselves in poor living conditions).

For comparison, as a part of my preparation for traveling, my university requested that I take an online course that covered basic safety principles for students traveling abroad. It covered topics such as local laws and customs, pathogens, and avoiding dangerous people.

To my surprise, however, they also had a section that focused on mental health. At the core of it was a simple idea; when traveling you should expect to feel a complex cocktail of emotions, rather than just happiness and excitement. Sadness, anger, and depression are a natural part of the travel experience for some people, and that’s okay.

Why did the school feel they had to write an instructional module specifically to let students know that it was okay to feel sad? I commented on it to a nurse during one visit. She said they were trying to dispel myths. You know; the myths that form on travel blogs, YouTube, and television. The type of myths that propagate wherever there is a screen.

It turns out that pop culture overwhelmingly treats travel as something wonderful and edifying and exciting. It’s overpowering, to the point where mental health courses feel the need to caution impressionable students that the internet is not a reliable source of information. Who knew?

Of course, travel does leave a great deal of room for good feelings like liberation, elation, excitement, and joy. But these don’t comprise the whole of a person’s travel experience; there is also a lot of downtime between them that serves as fertile soil for other emotions such as loneliness, melancholy, and depression.

There are certainly some people online who talk about negative emotions. However, the few I have seen so far talk about them as challenges that a traveler needs to overcome to get back to that positive traveler’s rush. I will freely admit that I haven’t explored all of the articles on travel and emotion that are out there. But from what I’ve seen so far, my explorations are off to a bad start.

Can we maybe just say that sometimes you’re going to feel bad while traveling, and that’s okay?

Can we maybe say that feeling bad while traveling is no different than feeling bad in any other area of your life? Can we say that it’s okay to just sit down and feel it for a while?

I don’t think that the articles that celebrate the joy of travel are wrong. Like most honestly written pieces, they capture a portion of the truth. But in the favor of balancing the scale, for those of us whose experiences are not all sunshine and bunnies, I wanted to offer the following points.

1. Emotions are Complex

Traveling is not a single experience. It is composed of a hundred smaller experiences stretched over time. Your emotions are primarily a reaction to those smaller experiences. It is very likely that when you choose to travel you will wind up having more positive experiences than negative ones. However, that does not mean that those positive experiences will vaccinate you against the negative ones.

Positive and negative emotions are not exclusive; they unfold across time in unique ways, each according to their own pattern and story. You could be elated one moment and sobbing uncontrollably the next, and that wouldn’t mean that something is wrong with you; it would mean that those are the appropriate emotional reactions to the story you are living, at that time, and that place. You have no way of knowing what a particular story will be until you are in the middle of living it.

That’s the nature of travel, and life in general; I could name the places I have traveled in the last two months and they would mean little to you unless you have also been there and absorbed the reality of them through your eyes, and your ears, and the soles of your feet. Books and blogs don’t do much for informing you about what a place is like.

It is the same with emotion. It doesn’t make sense to assume too much about how you will feel (or should feel) when traveling because the assumptions will always be a pale shadow of what you feel once you get moving.

2. Some confusion is natural. Forgiveness helps.

Most people who think about travel don’t take the time to account for the complexity of emotions. Rather, they tend to stitch together a vague vision of what a trip is supposed to be like, taking cuttings from their opinions and biases, their prior experiences, and the things they have heard and read. They string these isolated experiences together into a tapestry that, in their mind, approximates what traveling must be like.

After they’ve got their idea of what travel is like, they begin to attach emotions to it. Unfortunately, whatever their imagination comes up with, it is likely to be too simple and it is also likely to be influenced by their biases. Perhaps, in their vision, travel is supposed to be novel, and they assume that travelers will spend a lot of time feeling excited, amazed, and surprised. Or perhaps they envision travel as a form of freedom and assume that travelers will feel liberated and elated.

Whatever they assume, often their expectations won’t line up with the reality of your own emotions. If you wind up in that sort of conflict, it is probably better to ignore their expectations than it is to ignore your own experience.

But also, don’t be too quick to hold a grudge. Psychological research shows that people are generally bad at predicting how they will feel in the hazy, complicated future.¹ People tend to imagine simplified emotions and simplified scenarios. If they can’t even predict their own emotions, why get frustrated if they can’t predict or understand yours?

Because it’s natural, then, don’t be too quick to assume that people are being dismissive if they assume too much about how you should be feeling. If your emotions are misunderstood by someone you care about, and they are a reasonably empathic person, they will be able to update their beliefs quickly to account for the reality of your experience. Try telling them what you feel.

You should probably also forgive yourself if you are struggling while traveling. There is nothing magical about travel that frees you from the psychological mechanics that govern your emotions, so you shouldn’t be surprised or ashamed to find that you still tend to feel sad, or worried, or angry, or depressed. It’s okay for you to let your emotions do what they do, for a while.

It’s natural to feel bad often. One of the most irrational things that we can do when feeling negative emotions is to punish ourselves for feeling them. Doing so takes negative emotions that might otherwise be transient and amplifies them by adding an irrational layer of self-condemnation on top of the negative things we are already feeling. Given a choice, try to give up the self-condemnation.

3. There’s a different way to think about emotions during travel

There is another way to treat emotion while traveling that I think is far healthier. It is also very simple. All you have to do is drop the question of expectations altogether.

Think of it this way. It seems that many people who write about emotions while traveling are asking one of two questions. One of them is “What can I expect to feel while traveling?” A second one, closely connected, is “What should I feel while traveling?”

Both questions start with the assumption that our emotions are passive echoes of what is happening to us, rather than things that we create by selecting the situations that bring out our feelings. Also, both questions are, by their very design, the type of questions that you answer at a distance. They are before-the-flight questions, answered at a time when any possible answer we could give would be occluded by uncertainty and bias.

Here’s a different question you can try: “What can I feel while traveling?”

I like this question. It is different. It is an open invitation to capitalize on the opportunity that travel offers you. When you travel, you are free to direct your journey in whatever way you want. Every new city brings with it a brand new set of opportunities. You can choose among them and see how you react in a new situation. This constant stream of novel opportunities forms the perfect laboratory for you to use to explore the contours of your soul.

If you use that laboratory right, you have a host of questions that you can explore. What can you do while traveling to make yourself feel excited, or elated, or humbled? What parts of your old life bring you joy in the new parts of the world you are exploring? What parts of your old life make you feel frustrated because they are holding you back? When traveling, what makes you feel afraid, or alone, or hurt? Why? What can ease those emotions, or distract you from them?

What cocktail of emotions does your body shake up when you say goodbye to new lifelong friends that you just met four days ago in a hostel near the city center? What chemical romance can you form with the summit of the first mountain you climb? How does it feel to try a new type of dance to a new type of song? What does it feel like to sit by the window at sunset, writing your thoughts on paper while looking at the castle across the street?

These questions have answers, and you can find them if you reach for them. The negative feelings may come as a surprise but unless they are truly overpowering they can’t stop you from stretching out your light to explore the next undiscovered corner of your soul. Why would you worry even for a moment about what to expect, when you could have that instead?

After all, it’s your journey.

References

¹ Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current directions in psychological science, 14(3), 131–134.